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IE Market Share Drops Below 70%
Mike writes "Microsoft's market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. It's too early to tell for sure, but if Net Applications' numbers are correct, then Microsoft's Internet Explorer will end 2008 with a historic market share loss in a software segment Microsoft believes is key to its business."
So....heard that Microsoft might be laying off 15% of its workforce?
Well.....this might compound that.
Let me be the first (?) to say "Yay"!!
IE has been dominating and destroying the Web for far too long. The lower market share will indicate increased platform diversity and consumer choice.
This data is a month old. It was discussed on slashdot before (but I don't remember if it got its own article). Why not wait a day or so and post year-end statistics?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Admittedly, I only use Opera while doing browser compatibility testing for my client-side web apps, but I've always been pretty impressed by it. It's fast and compliant. I think it's a bit of a shame that it is holding such a low share.
In a band? Use WheresTheGig for free.
It's been renamed several times, somewhat refactored, had a few parts replaced and a lot more added, but that code base was once the most popular browser on the planet.
--Markus
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
This is really not a surprise. IE is an inferior product. It always has been. The market share it has received is solely attributable to the bundling with the Microsoft operating systems.
When people become savvy enough to realize there is a choice and be able to find and implement that choice.... they do. I have been trying to get all the offices, clients, etc. that I have worked with to switch to Firefox since.. well forever. It's more secure.
Now, I realize that there might be some MS fanboys out there to argue that point, but you have a lot of work to do. IE is horrible at security. It is almost as if they just don't care. I am willing to admit that IE is a bigger target, but that does not excuse Microsoft's behavior with it.
The greatest setback that Firefox, and others have is that Microsoft does not play nice with the world community. Until recently there have been a huge number of websites that will only work with IE. That is slowly changing now too. No longer are consumers and business customers chained to IE because Firefox cannot work with their website that they need.
The only direction IE ever could go was down. If Microsoft wants to change that then they need to do some serious work and start cooperating with the rest of world. Build a better product is the simplest way to put it.
In the end it will Microsoft's hubris that pushes IE into the minority.
I think just about everyone in tech, outside of Microsoft, saw this coming. Instead of adopting inclusive standards, MS opted for exclusive, proprietary technology and then implemented it poorly. ActiveX, VBScript, .NET...all require Windows and IE to work right. They tried to tie their OS to the development environment, the server environment and did everything they could to try and force the client as well.
IE was a stagnant, monolithic bug farm that lacked imagination and, perhaps most desperately, innovation. How many Firefox add-ons would be hard to live without? NoScript, FlashBlock, FireFTP there are dozens of applets that let you customize your browsing experience to your preference.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I continue to use IE on a daily basis. Although I was forced to upgrade to 7 at work, I still continue to use 6 on my home Windows PC's. I still need to put it on my Mac and Linux boxes, but I'm lazy.
How about NOT pointing out that more than two thirds of users on this planet are still browsing the net with IE -
I imaging that just about 2/3rds of people fall into those categories. Those that are scared of their computer probably think that Firefox is a virus because it wasn't pre-installed at the factory, these people also are the type to still have the Dell wallpaper still as their desktop background because changing it might somehow break their computer. These are the older people or people who don't really understand that the worst they can do to their $1000 is delete all their data.
Those that use their computers very little usually think of their computers only as tools to write e-mails, check blogs, and get on iTunes. They don't care about their browsers, they don't care about most anything on their computer. They might know how to play FreeCell but thats about it. This is a lot of students and working people.
And it is self-explanatory about those who have other people manage their computers, they just lack the access to change the browser or are afraid of getting yelled at by their computer-illiterate CEO because they installed Firefox even though it would be better than the IE6 currently installed on the company's desktop.
So really, 1/3rd of computer users know how to actually *use* a computer and have root access on their boxes. Or they just use Mac/Linux and wouldn't use IE.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Get over yourself already.
Used to be web *was* IE and people were reduced to fool web pages with bogus client ID to get working IE web code instead of terrible buggy netscape 4.x code or just simple "get IE" -banner.
2/3rd is still a lot but it was 90% a little while ago and it could be perfectly justified to develop a new site IE only.
With these figures, in 2009 new sites designed have even stronger reason to cater for the "other" demographic.
Too bad there's no credible alternative to vista or vista 2nd release in sight for your average gaming-oriented PC. I wouldn't use linux for general desktop stuff either, too much pain if there's no ideological reason to go there. And the other notable requires joining a cult with the membership fee charged in overpriced hardware.
Somehow I must question those surveys. While quite a number of people I know use Windows, almost no-one I know actually uses IE as their default browser. Unfortunately severely insecure features of IE, like ActiveX, are needed to upgrade Windows. I'm sure Mozilla is capable of making its own 'ActiveX', but I guess they'd be sued as we are talking essentially American businesses. As we all know, it is rather difficult to remove IE from Windows. Clearly, the best option is the trend: Abandon Windows!
Any hacker can make their Firefox (or Opera) look like IE or any other browser. For instance, I don't use "Flash", but while I use FreeBSD, the scripts say its "Flash-10" on "IE-7" on Windows. Perhaps I should have some pride and tell the truth? I'm using Firefox, but I'm not sure that Firefox is what I have set in my proxy. Let me explain. Ikea, in Holland, gives you a 5% discount if you order with IE. Of course I'm not going to fire up Windows to order from Ikea! So, I simply "lie" and take 5% off.
If IE has up to 70% market share, its simply because Windows doesn't allow you to choose your browser like any other system does. If they did, they could just as well throw in the towel on IE. The percentage that use Windows is suspect too. Maybe some have it on hand just for an application or two? I know for a fact that many Windows desktops are running in Linux. (Doesn't an Xterm look great on a Windows desktop? ;)
Finally: (Taco) How many more people say they use Firefox on Slashdot than your logs indicate? I think you see what I mean.
BillSF
It's control. If the majority use IE, then MS can push out their proprietary standards that will force everyone else to buy their development products, and maybe use their server platform.
Safari on Windows just... fails compared to Firefox. No extensions, the strange Aqua GUI which no doubt increases the amount of memory and libraries to load that is un-themeable, and just about 0 customization makes Safari hard to recommend. Granted, its better than IE, but compared to Firefox just about everything minus the WebKit rendering engine (which, isn't much faster or slower then Gecko) can be done on Firefox and much, much, more.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Okay let's start with the obvious
1> IE being popular means it makes sense to run a windows server to maximize compatibility for businesses.
2> Search traffic gets sent to MSN by IE.
3> Microsoft can dictate coding standards forcing other browsers and coders to have trouble competing.
Then of course the fact some websites won't work with anything but IE (because they can't be bothered to tweak for other browsers too) and of course the homepage of IE will be msn. Add on top of that Microsoft will make other coding software- which of course will easily be the best in line with its browser.
Of course you can just take the line that Microsoft, Apple and Google are all putting serious money into this market- so it HAS to be hugely valuable for some reason.
It's called a "trend." Snapshot statistics are not important. Trends are very important. This has been going on since 2002. If you lose 5% browser-share share every year consistently, eventually you go away. It happened to Netscape, and now we know it can happen to IE.
Controlling the way that people access computing is a big, big deal.
If you control the channel you get to call the shots in a ton of (even tangentially related) ways.
Safari does not, if you notice the marketshare for various versions of safari 96%+ of safari users are using Mac versions.
Firefox has been just about the most successful open source project in history, it has broken beyond the geek domain to the general public. It addressed a need for a reasonably secure easy to use web browser. It runs mostly the same on mac or windows or linux so so people can let their friends use it and they comfortable and familiar with it.
People who would never touch linux see firefox and they will say "Hey can I use your internet" they dont know its linux and they dont care.
Mac's market share went up more last month alone, than there are people using Linux as a desktop OS altogether (no time frame).
Just like Opera, which has been stuck at ~0.7% since pretty much forever.
When you can't somehow manage to give away your main and only product, and most people would seemingly rather pay a lot of money for the alternative (like Macs), you know you have a serious problem.
Something must suck with your product, when people would rather pay a lot for the alternative than use yours for free.
Microsoft will not take this lying down. When Java started eating into VB, Microsoft plunged tens of billions into dot-net, and for the most part stopped the bleeding.
A focused MS can produce like nothing else. Prepare to see gobs of features added to IE. It will be comparable to making Emacs look like Notepad when the dust settles.
IE has stayed mostly the same for most of the decade. This is probably about to change. They'll probably add music and video managers, spell-checkers, text-box history savers, better widgets such as editable data grids, email/Outlook integration, history searching, Google-like hard-drive searching, kitchen sink, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
More and more people are buying iPhones (and other handhelds) and using them to surf the web.
Not to replace their normal browsing, just to browse the web more.
This report is very slim on details (it doesn't even say where the metrics came from), but I'm going on a hunch here that it's not so much Firefox is gaining in popularity, but that overall usage of the web is increasing and moreso with devices that IE is not on.
Some simplified math: If 8 people use IE and 2 use Firefox, IE has an 80% share. Now add 2 more people to the party, both on iPhone/Safari, and IE's market share drops to 66%.
I honestly don't think Firefox is making a dent in IE for the desktop, when you compare it to the beating it's taking elsewhere. It's clear that Microsoft, if it wants to retain dominance in the browser market, needs to do something with the handheld sector and quickly. PocketIE is great for sites that are mobile-ready, but for everything else it lacks and is driving people away.
-David
This is really not a surprise. IE is an inferior product. It always has been. The market share it has received is solely attributable to the bundling with the Microsoft operating systems
This is not true at all. IE 1, 2 & 3 were not as good as Netscape Navigator and they suffered, but IE 4 was hands down better than other browsers. It mainstreamed a fully programmable DOM, where Netscape Navigator had what, document.write, and a bunch of junk about layers.
And, while we lament the death of Netscape, you do have to remember that while free IE may have killed Netscape on the client side, I'd be willing to bet that Apache utterly crushed Netscape on the server side. Does anyone remember Netscape web servers? Ah, that's a big negative. I remember even in the late 1990s our Sun admin was looking to replace Netscape web server with Apache... him and others like him really finished that company off.
The only direction IE ever could go was down. If Microsoft wants to change that then they need to do some serious work and start cooperating with the rest of world. Build a better product is the simplest way to put it.
This is very true. But you have to understand that the counterpoint to Microsoft's strategy is to get people to think about rich clients again and they are actually being rather successful with VSTO and Excel integration. I see lots of contract work with Excel front ends, instead of web front ends, these days. It's a crappy technology, but businesses pay for it.
This is my sig.
"I've never understood all the broohaha over browsers."
The browser is the gateway to all modern on-line consumer activity. If Microsoft controlled the browser, web sites would be forced to run Microsoft's IIS web server (because Internet Explorer would not behave, at all, with anything else). That would give Microsoft total control over all online commerce. Web sites would then have to pay Microsoft whatever it wanted, or cease doing business.
Microsoft would then tie it's browser and/or server into its other products. If you want to stay in business online, you have to run IIS. IIS, by the way, requires a Microsoft Office license pack. This is because Internet Explorer uses Microsoft Word to interact with IIS, but Microsoft only sells the Office License Pack For IIS in bundles of 100, and each remote connection uses one license. The Office License Pack For IIS also requires a functional X-Box Live account for each visitor to your web site. Next year, Microsoft will raise the bundle floor to 200. Why? Because they can.
Netscape tried this... see where they landed.
Please get a clue. Stop drinking the Microsoft Koolaid and learn the history. You can start with Mosaic.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Everyone trashes Active X as a security problem while Mozilla plugins get a pass and this is rather silly. The essence of both is that you download a DLL and it runs arbitary code in the process space of the browser (and then hence, often the user). Active X is just a different way of talking to the DLL, nothing more.
If you can run flash plugins, java plugins, and other plugins, inside of a browser, they can and will have the same security problems that plague Active X. It's random binary code that a user gets off of the internet.
SERIOUSLY, ANYONE BITCHING ABOUT ACTIVE X SHOULD JUST READ THIS GODDAMNED LINK.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/
IT'S THE SAME FRICKING TECHNOLOGY... UNIDENTIFIED BINARY CODE RUNNING IN THE SAME ADDRESS SPACE AS THE BROWSER.
DUH.
This is my sig.
I don't mean to be mean but that makes no sense.
By de-facto standard you mean ubiquity.
Lets look at the history of ubiquity in the IT world. From the MS perspective.
MS office. ( expensive, copied, Google Apps, Open Office )
Windows. ( expensive, copied, OSX, Linux, Both UNIX varients )
IE. ( buggy, secutiry nightmare, Loosing ground fast to alternatives. )
ActiveX ( Attempt at ubiquity, buggy, security nightmare. Not copied )
A de-facto, ubiquitous standard has to maintain certain properties in order to stay in that postition.
1. Cost little to nothing
2. Be reliable
3. Be safe
4. Stay ahead of the competition in form and function
All of these points are in direct odds with MS style of doing business. Cash flow from any and all sources.
1. MS is learning that charging huge sums of cash for something is not working.
2. Reliability has always been a teer two priority for MS. Cash is first. Case in point IE, Vista.
3. Because of the market dominance it has always been the target of attack simply because of the huge install base thus high return on attack. And again for too long MS put money first then security and it's been regretting that ever since.
4. Why invest money in something to make it better when we have the market share. Case in point IE 4-5. But effectively stopping development they left the barn doors open.
It's all about the money. This has been the MS mantra for decades. Unfortunately they have completely missed so many opportunities for new cash flow streams. As they sat on the piles of money in their offices. Web search and advertising is the prime example.
Have they had any successes lately. Arguably the Xbox was a decent one. But that was a copy of competitors, so not their idea. Zune, copy again and a bad one. Who puts in a Jan 2009 bug? How the hell does something that dumb find it's way into the code base. IE 8, well this is a Firefox rip off. I don't think this will live long. IE 9 will be out shortly after. In the same way that Windows 7 is out shortly after Vista.
So MS is miles behind in the new de-facto, ubiquity race. It's not that FOSS is copying it's now leading in the standards front. Even Apple is using FOSS, (webkit).
since Windows 7 is getting rave reviews, once it comes out, IE marketshare will go back up, I'm guessing. *shrug*
You are on crack! "most people" don't have a clue what a user agent is.
I've got a coworker that is an IE fanatic. He keeps pointing out that IE uses less memory than FF, he's right. He also tallies up whenever I complain of a crash vs when he complains of one... and he's winning (as in fewer crashes).
I love being anti-m$, but you can't just dismiss their product as second-rate because you want it to be.
If firefox supported as little as IE, it would likely use much less memory. Is it not more appropriate to measure a browser by how well it supports the web standards that browsers are built to read? MS can't even be bothered to implement all of the standard html tags. IE 8 will finally support the frickin' <q> tag from HTML 4. That's a hard one too... replace the <q> tags with quote characters. It's rocket science really. No wonder it has taken MS more than a decade to support it. Next, run IE through a CSS support test page. Maybe give Acid3 a shot with it. Things aren't looking so pretty for IE, are they? Now try opening an XHTML page with it. Oh, sorry... IE is unable to read xhtml. It just downloads it to disk. It also doesn't support SVG, or MathML, or ruby. Firefox on the other hand, does.
Of course IE isn't second rate. It's not even good enough to qualify as third rate. I'm sure that's the primary reason MS is bleeding browser share at an accelerating rate.
I've just posted December and 2008 total stats for all of the browsers along with a bit of analysis. IE lost another point and a half of share in December and will finish the year down almost 8 points from where it started the year. That's not just bad, that's awful, horrible, really really bad. It's especially bad considering that 2008 was a record year for new PC sales, with ~300,000,000 new PCs shipping with IE7 as the default browser!! They shipped 300 million copies of IE as the default and still lost 8 points of share during the year. More at my blog (it really is worth reading if you're interested in this topic. i promise.) Browser Market Share for December and 2008 - A
if you're calling MS Office overpriced, buggy, and full of security flaws, you must've glossed over the fact that OpenOffice is a POS.
for the last year. But it was in a ford prototype that runs XP, and then Vista. Sadly, it kept getting BSOD before hitting Idaho. Heard that on the last attempt, they made it to Illinois last night, but then the car locked up in high speed, doing nothing but wasting energy. Who knows, they may actually make it to congress before they have had a chance to give away our great great grand children's money (reagan gave away mine while W has given away my children's, grandkids and great grandkids).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Are you sure *MARKET*share means what you think it does? Microsoft only "sells" IE as packaged with XP, Vista and Windows Mobile. Few customers license the Trident layout engine. It's no wonder IE has shit for marketshare.
The Mozilla foundation does pretty well for themselves. Not a huge moneymaker but they're afloat and doing ok.
Opera is also doing great licensing their browser and its components all over the place.
Internet Explorer simply isn't a moneymaker for Microsoft. Microsoft probably spends more money maintaining IE than they do selling/licensing it.
At the end of the day, both IE Active X controls and Mozilla plugins have the same fundamental problem. They are native code DLLs, and so, cannot be verified so easily by the browser when downloaded and so a user could always install a plug in, when running as administrator, that could call DeleteFile or any other Windows API.
The most interesting promise in plugins is Google Chrome, which allows for verifiable native code and thus sandboxing of plugins. However, as you already pointed out, this only really matters because, you can't set ACLs to functions under Windows, only to users.
The ideal mechanism for DLLs, that is internet safe, would be to be able to say that a caller could specify the permissions of the DLL when it was running. So, if I were writing a FireFox or an IE, or some sort of internet loadable thing, I could say, yeah sure, go ahead and let me load up this DLL, and I'll just tag it so that it can only call a certain set of Windows OS functions, and for that matter, only a set of Windows OS functions with a particular set of handles. Like, the DLL's functions could only call GDI functions with the DC I supplied. I would also like to say that the DLL could only access certain pages of memory. For that matter, I would like to be able to do that to my own application, so that, a buffer overrun or some other malicious code couldn't do anything... other than hose me myself, and even then, my own internal states and document would be protected.
I would bet that you could hack some of this into Windows, basically by modifying the way GetProcAddress and LoadLibrary worked. To LoadLibrary you could add a permissions mask that would, for that HINSTANCE, modify how that library's GetProcAddress worked. So, if loaded up a library, I could set it up so that when it called GetProcAddress, to say, find out where DeleteFile was, it would instead redirect itself to my sandbox chumpy saying that this was a no-no.
This would improve matters, but it would not be perfect. Ultimately, I think, the whole mechanism of a function call would need to have an associated "allowed" set of function calls be associated with it. IF there was maybe some chumpy in the kernel that would say, "just block all these syscalls", but even then, that would only address the file system type of stuff, which is good, but you also want to use that mechanism to cover everything else. It may well turn out that everything has to be a file in order to make this sort of safe and securable sandboxing actually work.
I guess my question to Linux people would be, doesn't Red Hat have something like this in its enhanced security? Like, you can at least tag applications with permissions but could it work with function calls?
This is my sig.
Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?
Yes. Lotus Domino / Notes.
And no, I'm not joking. Lotus has come a *long way* with their new version 8.x stuff.
It works very well, is reliable, and even looks very good with an all-new user interface. IBM has been remarkably active in Lotus development the past few years and has made Lotus into a highly capable enterprise messaging and groupware system for the 21st century.
Yes, there have been many years of Lotus nightmare stories, and Lotus still does have a fairly steep learning curve, and its architecture is vastly different from Exchange.
It's as different from MS Exchange as Linux is different from Windows.
I have to question how these survey companies get their results. Most of the people I know who use Firefox, also have IE on standby for fussy MS-centric sites (or updates). I use both because I have to test my work on IE, and because I'm tied to Outlook Webmail for certain things. Do I count as a Firefox user, an IE user or both ? Do they factor total pageviews, or do they narrow it down to "sessions" (IPs per time window) ?
If I consider just my own usage, I would count as both a Firefox and an IE user, but by pageviews it's probably 1000:1 for Firefox, as I only use IE when absolutely necessary. If I were to self-identify, I'd say I'm a Firefox user since I wouldn't touch IE at all were it not for my job.
The reality of things is these articles always quote a number from nowhere. They don't ever explain their methodology, nor their sources. The fact is, you can't really get an accurate tally because browsers don't offer you enough information to identify unique users, and more importantly your results are skewed by the nature of whichever sites' logs you're mining. Any result is, at best, a rough guess based on some convenient subset of the data.
Is it true that IE is losing out to other browsers ? Hell yes, I'm an eyewitness. Do we have tangible numbers to quantify that battle ? No, and we never will.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If anything, the stats are more skewed by the more-technically-inclined FF users changing their UA so that crappy websites don't break just because they fail to see the magic "IE / Windows" keywords.
They can't grow. That makes their stock a poor investment for the long term.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?
Yes, for that see DVL. Seriously, though you have to define what activities you need to do before you can ask for a replacement. MS Exchange is marketed in many niches and fails (on the surface) in most. The most spectacular is its failure as a mail server replacement, if you look at it as such. If you look at the wonderful cover of plausible deniability it gives executives by randomly losing and delaying mail, then that is a success.
Anyway, try looking these. Keep in mind that, unlike with M$ products, you can combine pieces of several packages.
If you are simply looking to improve reliability of e-mail they a plain Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) will do. Before it became too embarrassing for M$, it used to be recommended practice to put one of these in front of MS Exchange to improve reliability and security. Also look up ClamAV, Spamassassin and how to do greylisting.
However, before you can think about "replacing" MS Exchange, you will have to get rid of the staff that selected and deployed it in the first place. They ignored all the licensing shortcomings, the bad reviews, high price and ongoing technical failure to instead push ideology over technology. People making decisions based on ideology are not going to accept any technical or economic arguments...
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.