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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."
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.
God, this article must be one of the crappiest in a long, long time. The december figures are already up!
Browser trends
MSIE 68.15%
Firefox 21.34%
Safari 7.93%
Chrome 1.04%
Opera 0.71%
Operating system trends
Windows 88.68%
Macs 9.63%
Linux 0.85%
iPhone 0.44%
The two line summary:
Firefox and Safari both take lots of market share from MSIE which is now way below 70%.
Macs have a huge one-month (0.8%) and two-month (1.4%) rise while Linux is flatline.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, I am surprised that even Chrome has a higher usage share, considering Opera is actually a very good and useable browser and has been around for a long time. It would actually be a great all-in-one solution for many since it is a great browser, email client and torrent downloading in one application.
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.
Disappearance of microsoft will not be a happy event for nerds
Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Let's review which market segments they are involved in:
* Productivity Software (Office) that is (for better or worse) almost universally used.
* Workstating Operating System Software that is (for better or worse) almost universally used.
* Video game consoles.
* Server operating systems
* Database software
* Exchange (e-mail software? Whatever the hell you wanna call it)
* MSNBC
Those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure others can add those that I've missed. Microsoft isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future. They've diversified quite well and have a foothold in so many different markets it's not funny. Wait long enough and you'll see them borrow a page from GE's play book and start their own financing division.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The number of programmers employed to write shrink-wrap software aimed at consumers is a tiny fraction of the number of programmers writing software for use inside their own company.
Disappearance of microsoft will not be a happy event for nerds : it will be a disaster.
Hopefully consumers remain accustomed to paying for software even when microsoft dies, or the market that pays our salaries shrinks by 90% or so. Even if companies continue to pay it will still be a large portion that dies.
Look at Red Hat and look at the future when MS dies. Red Hat isn't exactly struggling and yet all their software is pure OSS not even "freeware".
The demise of MS will only lead to better software, more competition, lower prices, and no more annoying unpaid tech support calls from your parents/grandparents/brother/etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
Total moronic nonsense.
That's shameless historical revisionism.
It was browsers like Netscape that were enabling what you
describe. They were doing this before it occured to Microsoft
to bundle a web browser with their OS. Infact the browser they
decided to bundle (spyglass) was just one of these browsers
that GOT THERE FIRST.
This is supposed to be "Windows" where just putting in a CD
and installing some software shouldn't be rocket science.
Try this crap on people that didn't live through it all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I agree with everything but the last sentence, "no more annoying unpaid tech support calls from your parents/grandparents/brother/etc". Although Windows is very somewhat faulty, 80% of the calls I get from my parents/friends are caused by ineptitude on their behalf, and that's not going to change so soon.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
Just a quote from my favorite movie :) Just joshing you a little. Seriously though, your examples are not good ones.
** Productivity Software - It's overpriced, buggy, and full of security flaws. It faces open source competition on two fronts. I am personally aware of several businesses that flat out switched to other solutions when they realized they could save a ton of money and not lose any real features they actually used. Now the "higher end" stuff like project management, visio, etc. are pretty neat, but they are not without competition either.
** Workstation Operating Systems - Well unless you are talking about NT 4.0, Microsoft has not really been distinguishing between it's flavors of operating systems very well. The same OS that is used on a "workstation" is used everywhere else. People realized fairly quickly that XP Home was utter crap. If you wanted reliability at all you had to go to XP professional. Even Media Center was based off it. So from small office, to power users it was XP pro or Windows 2000 professional. Of course recently MS has gone pokemon with all the flavors of Vista.
So to say it is used on "workstations" does not really mean anything. It's not an intrinsic workstation product. It is just used on workstations since those people chose a Microsoft solution. Once again, serious competition is creeping up everywhere. I myself have largely migrated to various flavors of Linux and if I need a pure MS operating system (WINE won't do it) I just go virtual. The only times you can't go virtual (without difficulty) is gaming, and that is not what you are talking about.
Furthermore, there is a widespread (and yet unreported) rebellion against MS in the Terminal Server market. In the past you had to use a CAL, TS-CAL, and XP Pro license to create a single workstation capable of becoming a Terminal Server client. That cost at least 200-300 USD depending on your licensing deal. With 3rd party solutions you can COMPLETELY get rid of ALL of the licenses on the client. Basically a small Linux thin-client. The cost? Less than 300 USD per client and you get a 20" screen, built-in sound, and a "computer" that looks exactly like a XP workstation. That is serious competition in the workstation market.
** Video Game Consoles - REALLY bad example here. XBOX may have done well this Christmas season compared to PS3, but what about the BILLION DOLLAR loss on the infamous quality control problems? They have lost a lot of credibility in the market. Kids don't care too much since they can just scream till the parents get one, but there are LEGIONS of PARENTS that are -* *- this close to raiding MS with pitch forks and torches. I know plenty of parents who asked me my opinion in the last 3 years and I flat out told them to buy any other console. It had a better chance of actually surviving six months. Don't get me wrong, I love the XBOX 360 and the games on it. I just know how likely it was that I would be using the phone to get an RMA. That's frustrating and bad for Microsoft.
** Server Operating Systems - Server 2008 is not all that great. Neither was 2003. Most people never had a reason to go past Advanced Server. It's a LOT of money. If you were using it in a data center you have a lot of other options these days and all of them are cheaper than MS. The total cost of ownership with MS is a lot higher. I know they have a large marketing program trying to convince businesses otherwise, but their numbers don't add up. Mine do. There is serious competition right now and EVERYTHING is going to a virtualized platform. It has too. Virtualization offers so many benefits it's the new way of life. I don't think MS is doing it as well as VMWare or Virtualbox, or some open source solutions. Convincing some one to use a MS solution for virtualization of their servers is expensive. If you are talking about simple webhosting you can create a fully vir
People realized fairly quickly that XP Home was utter crap. If you wanted reliability at all you had to go to XP professional.
Come on, if you're going to be a fanboy, try and hide the blind hate with nonsense that could be at least a little credible.
Amnesty International
Yeah but the only reason they are able to get such revenues for such products is because of the strong footholds that I have in other markets. People want Microsoft SQL and Exchange only because it's Microsoft--the same as their office software and operating system. Once one market starts to fall, they all are going to start to fall.
I work for one of the top 5 insurance companies in the U.S. and SQL Server utilized as the back end for at least 50% of the apps currently running. The rest use DB2 Mainframe as the back end, and many of those are being re-written using both J2EE and .NET with SQL Server as the back-end.
SQL Server is used in many of the shops I've worked for, and as more companies do the J2EE vs .NET juggle, SQL Server is fairly common.
I gave up religion for Lent.
Oh what the hell, it's Slashdot - I'll bite.
Bill, is that you?
Yes. Lotus Domino / Notes.
That's like saying that suicide is always an option.
..."Firefox really has a much higher share because of all the users who (do what you said)"...
If mozilla would pull their heads out of their asses and do what I said, they'd take over another 15% easily.
Notice how the graph in TFA dips on the weekend--and also how the article comments "IE6 loses a lot of share on the weekend"?
Most people are at home on the weekend. They install Firefox on their local PC and surf the net.
But at work, people are still stuck with Microsoft shit. Why? Mozilla still hasn't released an MSI of Firefox.
I admin servers for several companies. If I could simply push out a copy of Firefox using Group Policy, I would give firefox about 250 additional users first thing tomorrow morning.
The moment Mozilla makes it easy for corporations using Windows and Active Directory to deploy their software--plus add the ability to control things like the home page via Group Policy, they'll be set.
But until they do, I'm not going around to 200 computers every few weeks to install or update Firefox.
There's no place like