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IE Losing 10% Market Share Every Two Years
mjasay writes "Mozilla's Asa Dotzler points to some interesting long-term trends in browser market share, noting that 'browser releases aren't having any major impact on the macro trends,' which suggests that a better IE will likely have little impact on its sliding market share. The most intriguing conclusion from the data, however, is that Firefox could surpass IE market share as early as January 2013 if Firefox continues to gain 5 percent every year, even as IE drops 5 percent each year. In the past, Microsoft might have fought back by tying IE to other products to block competition, but with the EU keeping a close antitrust eye on Microsoft and the US Obama administration keen to make an example of an antitrust bully, Microsoft may have few good options beyond good old fashioned competition, which doesn't seem to be working very well for the Redmond giant, as the market share data suggests. Microsoft's loss of IE market power, in turn, could have serious consequences for the company's efforts to compete with Google on the Web."
Too bad the world will end at 2012 ;)
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
These people will always keep IE's share above some percentage (I'd take a stab of about 66.6%). Also, and I appreciate Asa's non-profit work but I must question his for-profit source that he cited. Where and how was this data collected? It's a very difficult problem and everyone of these browser-share or operating system-share reports that hits Slashdot are ripped apart by readers as being statistically flawed. No transparency causes me to instantly dismiss these findings.
My work here is dung.
It seems this conversation might benefit from a link to the original source data:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1
As they refine their data they'll find Firefox's uptake will slowly increase and overtake IE market share on December 12th 2012.
If the same kind trend applies for Windows there will likely be a large percentage of people using it in 2099
and no one cares anymore
MS pushed IE because they were afraid another browser would kill Windows as an app platform. it's already happening anyway and MS is content to license ActiveSync to Apple and Google, FAT32 to GPS makers, Virtual Earth and other cloud/SaaS services they have that don't rely on browser or OS
Except that inasmuch that it used to help sell Windows, which I doubt has little value any more as a marketing tool as pretty much every consumer knows every machine can get on the net, what's the value in MS dumping lots of cash into a browser war when they have to give the browser away for free? The only advantage I can think of is the value of the default home page for advertising dollars, which has never been their primary market anyway.
... then in 14 years IE will have NEGATIVE market share! Statistics don't lie! Especially when interpreted by people who don't understand them.
Reminds me about the people looking at the rate of change in male vs female athletes' performance and projecting it 5 years into the future to claim that female athletes will outperform men. Um, yeah, and if that continues, they will break the sound barrier in 15 years.
Razors will have 100 blades by 2050 according to current growth rates.
This is welcome news for today, but lets wait until Microsoft's army of lobbyists have swarmed Washington to see that quietly dropped in favour of hitting Google even harder. The woman dealing with anti-trust stuff that Obamma hired said (I'm paraphrasing) "Microsoft are last century, we need to look at current offenders like Google."
Bottom line: Politicians lie all the time, this is not news, this is normal operations. Look for the actions to back up any words. Given Microsoft's encamped army in Washington I doubt that sentiment will amount to much.
Someone will have to still deal with MS bundling their crapware version of virtualization aka "xp mode" (notable lack of openGL/D3D support) into the OS - this will be antitrust - IE style, round two.
Informed people don't use IE because MS's attempt to tie it into windows resulted in it becoming the least secure browser for Windows. In the old days when IE crashed Windows crashed, everyone started hating it then, and they've preferred to use anything but IE ever since.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
While at school (kindergarten) I overheard a teaching assistant say, "When I opened my Firefox, it still could not work..."
"I then called my sister who told me to install a new extension..."
I did not expect to hear this from the assistant more especially because it's IE all through at school and it's been since time in memorial.
In the past 6 months, firefox users have already surpassed IE users on my own sites, up to 45% now (32% IE).
I admit though, I probably attract a more liberal crowd...
Four more years! Four more years!
I like Firefox, I think IE sucks. But this whole "market share" thing is silly and fueled by nothing more than people obsessed with hating Microsoft. Guess what. If everyone dumps IE and switches to another browser, Microsoft's loss of revenue is exactly zero.
Right now Firefox consume nearly 400MBs ram of my system
I call BS unless your tab count is in the 3 figure range.
Right now, with 23 tabs open, I'm getting around 134MB.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Is that when people realise there IS another option as a web browser, it does not take them long to install it and try it, or have someone install it for them. More otfen than not, when people try a different browser they like it better than IE after they get used to the fact that it's different.
Often they will feel more for their new browser because they CHOSE it and make it their default, so when an updated IE comes in as part of an automatic update they may not even know it, as they will already be using a different browser. For many people, their memories of IE are loads of pop ups crashing the fucker, toolbars installing themselves and their home pages being changed without their permission. This is NOT a warm and fuzzy feeling to give any "new and improved" IE a second chance.
People who are already awakened to the fact that other browsers exist and almost all of them are better than IE will happily jump between different browsers, perhaps start with Firefox then try out Opera etc but they are not likely to go back to IE. IE is a one-way exodus and there's nothing Microsoft can do to stop it, all they can do is try to slow the flood by actually making a good product people WANT to use.....for once.
Don't you just love karma? This is what happens when you let your product stagnate and your users suffer for years because they have nowhere to go. As soon as they do have an escape vessel they rush for it and you're left trying to lock the doors to keep them onboard.
First off I love Firefox and I enjoyed it when it was Phoenix and then Firebird but interpolation is bad enough with trends; but extrapolation? There is a certain percentage of people who care about their computer experience, the rest just "do computer stuff."
From Life On The Mississippi:
One of the Mississippi's oddest peculiarities is that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two-hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much.
The water cuts the alluvial banks of the `lower' river into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank.
Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and `let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor `development of species', either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague--vague. Please observe. In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi 173-6 (1883)
It's utterly ignorant to believe trends will continue indefinitely in a linear manner. We're in a global recession caused in large part by this destructive thinking. People saw a couple years of double digit returns and assumed they'd continue indefinitely.
Firefox will rise at a linear rate until it captures its natural market share. After that point, it'll quickly level out. It's a basic first order process.
Firefox is a quality product, but acting as if the current meteoric rise is sustainable is to join the ignorati who have forgotten history, time and time again.
It's been a long time.
and its hideous UI (that changed in IE7)
not to mention the built in spywa~~cough "suggested sites" "feature" combined with the IE8 Safersite check and your browser will be spending more time uploading more data to Microsoft than downloading
Obama administration keen to make an example of an antitrust bully
It'd be nice to see them take on Apple and their bullshit use of the DMCA to shut down people trying to get iTunes to work on Linux.
"Microsoft's loss of IE market power, in turn, could have serious consequences for the company's efforts to compete with Google on the Web."
Um, Internet Explorer loads google.com just fine. Chrome loads microsoft.com just fine.
It doesn't matter what their market share is, Microsoft already lost. The web is now firmly based on open standards, not proprietary technology tied to a specific operating system.
What we should be more concerned with is the fact that everything depends on Javascript.
I tell you ... I remember back in the day when IE was the browser of choice for developers. Netscape was the nightmare. This was the age of table based layouts and one missed closed table tag stopped the entire page from rendering in Netscape. I don't know when that changed, but now, IE is monkey on my back. At my current gig (huge web shop) we do everything in firefox, and then work out all the kinks in the various IE browser. I absolutely loathe MS for not allowing customers have multiple versions of IE on the machines without jumping through some nasty hoops. And the debugging situation on IE is just abysmal. You'd figure if they improved the development situation on the browser, market share would improve from user experience and developer evangelization.
They really need to step it up on all fronts to maintain their position not that I want them to. I think it will be a good thing to have browsers in competition with each other. I certainly don't want Firefox to become the big guy on the block. The only good thing about firefox is the extensions It's the only reason I use the damn thing. 3.0 was supposed to be lean and mean when in reality, it still eats memory like a fat guy at an all-you-can-eat buffet which kills my system. I have hopes for Chrome, but when I'm not in development mode (which is rare since I find myself using firebug all the time to remove annoying pictures from articles or alter inline js), I think Opera is the winner. This is coming from a guy who has been using Mozilla products since the .70 mozilla suite.
Given that installing anything other than IE on a windows machine will require effort on the users' part, there has to be some floor on IE's market share, and a ceiling on Firefox's. At some point, everyone who is capable of installing a browser on their machine at all will have switched to firefox/chrome/opera. That doesn't mean firefox can't someday pass IE on Windows, but IE's share probably could never fall below 25% -- the proportion of windows users utterly incapable or unwilling to install software on their machine.
I am calling bullshit on this. I love firefox but it's definitely a memory hog.7 tabs open and it's at 400mb. Granted I have 9GB of RAM but still.
I'm pretty sure that happens with the RSS feed too...
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Its too bad that all of the browsers on the market are crap though. IE with security holes, Firefox with its memory leaks that STILL exist. Safari that is buggy with many websites and the evil Google Chrome. Not one browser that is completely written to standards exists today. Each vendor always seems to make some unique tweaks and make the rendering act different on the same website.
Does anyone else miss how quickly ie4 was? I booted an old, unupdated system, connected to the internet (doubtless aquiring several nasty things) and ie4 was just.. there. Instantly. I know it had been preloaded into memory by the system, but it wasn't that. Every page was instantaneous, there was no wait time, even on an old P2. Then I updated, got firefox, and it all slowed to a crawl.
I'd like something good for old systems - so I could use it on my new one and have it run that quickly. Maybe I should use Dillo..
"Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... AAY!"
I am calling bullshit on this. I love firefox but it's definitely a memory hog.7 tabs open and it's at 400mb. Granted I have 9GB of RAM but still.
Then who cares about 400 MB, when you have that kind of RAM to spare. The more data you have stored in RAM => the less you have to page to/from disk => better performance.
Why did the parent get marked "off topic"??
I have the exact same experience. All you have to do is wait an hour and indeed IE7 or FF3 gobbles up all your ram. I see why he/she hopes for chrome on Linux, as I'm using Chrome right now and I have not had browser memory hog problems since.
I'd probably give IE8 a spin, but the IE7 experience was awful ... and FF3 just barely beats it for second place on the windows platform. On my Linux box FF3 sucks up 400 to 600 mb as soon as I start doing anything like watch YouTube videos.
Tamran
FF's memory usage patterns seem to be very dependent on the user and his luck.
I'm running FF 3.0.10 on Linux, and this is what top says:
(I'm so glad slashcode collapses spaces like that. Point being, FF is taking multiple hundreds of megs. This is with 20 tabs open. (Part of this could be flash's fault). Also, FF has been behaving very poor lately in general, so I'm often restarting it.)
Im being sent emails with story links while they are still only accessible to subscribers.
I can think of two possibilities:
It appears Slashdot has been giving me a free sub to thank me for my positive contribution to the comments. On the right side of my Slashdot homepage, I get this:
Perhaps you need to log in when you post, and make insightful posts early enough that moderators see them. Then your karma should shoot up well into the Excellent region (which I seem to remember is about 25 deep).
Might it have something to do with the spell checker built into Firefox 3?
While this is certainly true, there is also the problem of moderately tech saavy
end users becoming tired of cleaning up after Microsoft. They are likely to take
the machines of these n00bs and lock them down so that they cause minimal trouble.
It doesn't even take a "geek".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
IE4 was a piece of garbage. It was slow, it was bloated, it crashed regularly, it had odd rendering bugs, it tried to take over the desktop with a metric load of ActiveDesktop crud, and its usability was fairly poor.
IE5 was faster, smaller, and generally a very good browser for its time. Which is why it was finally able to dethrone Netscape. All Microsoft did after that was fix a few bugs, add features nobody wanted, called it IE6, then sat on their fat arses for a decade.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Firefox is able to masquerade as IE. For some sites this has been necessary to view them. This results in Firefox being undercounted and IE being overcounted. (I haven't read TFA to see what, if any, mechanism they used to correct for that. Presuming they didn't...)
What this says to me is most of the interesting web sites have migrated to designs that don't reject Firefox (and perhaps other "standards compliant" browsers) and as a result more Firefox users are browsing without the masquerade.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Clearly, people don't feel the price Microsoft asks for IE is reasonable. They should lower it a bit.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I am calling bullshit on this. I love firefox but it's definitely a memory hog.7 tabs open and it's at 400mb. Granted I have 9GB of RAM but still.
I have 7 tabs open (7 different /. stories) and am using 90.1 MB. Maybe you should get FF 3.
Now I have 12 tabs open. 7 /. tabs, 2 gmail tabs, and 3 Yahoo News pages. 95.7 MB used. Honestly, your FF is the problem, not FF in general.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
"Microsoft's loss of IE market power, in turn, could have serious consequences for the company's efforts to compete with Google on the Web."
Is it just me, or does this comment seem totally off the wall?
The blog entry is quite misleading (or maybe just assimilated). The market share of MSIE has only gone down as much as the market share of MS Windows has gone down. It can be that Windows has disappeared at a rate of 5% - 10% per year recently, but Microsoft is fighting back by tying IE to other products to block competition. That other product is MS Windows.
MSIE must be removed from MS Windows. Or better yet, just ditch MS Windows and save your economy.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Why? - to avoid monopoly charges. My dad used to work for UPS, and they would routinely encourage people to use their competitor (FedEx) so that UPS would avoid monopoly charges.
There's only perception of a barrier. IE rocketed to the top because it was better. Everyone wrote for it as it had a working (as in fully scriptable) DOM and supporting Netscape was a huge PITA. But there was not near the content on the web in the late 1990s, when this all happened, as there is today. So there's inertia, but inertia is not a barrier. If alternative browsers continue to execute well, and IE continues to stagnate, then, IE will naturally lose and we will reach a time when people will only support FireFox...just like they ditched Netscape.
This is my sig.
There is a significant Bellwether for the future in the tech industry - find out what the Nerds are recommending! True of any industry, find out what the pros in the industry are happiest with, and you'll find the up-and-comings if they aren't already on top.
People come to the "computer nerds" in order to get advice. Sure, many sales happen at the local Best Buy with whatever's on the shelf, but the trends start with nerds who identify new technologies, use them, and then recommend them to friends.
Microsoft has had a pretty tarnished name among the nerd community for a long time. Is it any wonder that their products are losing market share? It's really only inertia that's propping them up now. ALL of the following are gaining market share at the expense of Microsoft:
* MacOS
* Ubuntu
* OpenOffice
* PostgreSQL
* Fedora
* Zimbra
* Firefox
* Chrome
* Safari
Any I missed?
What's more, these technologies represent *core* technologies for Microsoft. Windows + Office are the cash cows for Microsoft, and they are what's most under attack by the Open Source crowd.
Listen to the nerds. They are the quiet whisper that define the future of the industry!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It doesn't matter what their market share is, Microsoft already lost. The web is now firmly based on open standards, not proprietary technology tied to a specific operating system.
If someone could make a browser that did something that was not part of the standards, that appealed strongly to content producers, then, you could get a proprietary based internet. It's that CSS / HTML does the job that people perceive they want Browsers to do.
This is my sig.
I've always taken "market share" stats with a grain of salt.. or three. IMHO, it's akin to comparing Windows market share to Linux. The far majority of x86 compatible pc's delivered are sold with a Windows license.. and subsequently, IE. If and when the customer removes windows and installs Linux (or as I suspect most do, installs a dual-boot configuration), how is it counted that the user is likely using Linux at least half the time, if not the far majority of the time? Does that Windows license get removed from the "market share?" No, it doesn't. Windows comes with IE. Who's counting whether or not IE or Firefox is being used more on said PC? http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp/ tells a rather different story. So, who's counting, and who do we believe?
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
Those who have pointed out that many companies still use earlier versions of IE and will resist change should know that Microsoft has stated that the Office 2010 Web bits, SharePoint, and the browser enabled client applications like Word, will support FireFox.
Office 2010 will not support the older versions of IE. I'm not sure if older includes IE 7, but it does include IE 6.
It doesn't look like Microsoft cares very much about trying to maintain IE's market share, and there is lots of speculation that IE 8 is the end of the line for the current rendering engine. This makes sense as it is clearly as unwieldy for them as it is for everyone else. That's why the competition gets features out so much more quickly. The IE code base is almost 15 years old.
Agreed. Evidently not all moderators bother to RTFC.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Maybe I was thinking of IE5, then. Whichever, the point still stands that I miss that speed! I haven't seen a new system run quickly in a long time.
Firefox is using 410mb atm on my box, with 9 tabs and a flash video window. ;)
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
Seems like every month we get a post like this, citing the same source, and I post the same comment - that the only thing this measures is the statistics of Net Applications clients use their HitsLink software. No methodology is ever given or available via an easy to find link on their site. In my book that invalidates any hard conclusions. Perhaps this time my comment will actually get modded up enough for others to see and question....but I doubt it.
I've noticed that too. Somehow IE4/5/6 went from blazing fast on old hardware to IE8 being doggy on new hardware.
A big part of that is that there's now dozens of first and third party "Add-Ons" that get installed into IE.
Also the IE rendering engine was really optimized for old-school table-driven sites. Their CSS/DOM performance has never been up to snuff recently.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I think you're right. The point about IE enthusiasts strikes me as correct, and also jarring at the same time. I suppose somewhere in our world there must be fervent gatherings of IE enthusiasts, afficionadoes of starched woolen condoms, and so on. I hope those gatherings are far from here.
Microsoft should be able to bundle whatever software it wants with its own OS. These anti-trust arguments are stupid.
If you don't like their business tactics or their software, don't give them your money.
Looking purely at trends will give you some pretty odd ideas. It's a habit that managers get in to, which drives the rest of us up a wall.
Corporate uptake of alternative browsers will be hampered because of the lack of manageability inherent in IE. This will block firefox in many locations, but chrome too, to a lesser extent. And as firefox is the largest contender, it has a bigger impact on them overall.
If firefox wants to make inroads here, they need to revamp their profile system. It's horrible, and has been since the early days, but because of some misguided bias by some key developers ( or outright laziness ), it remains to cause issues.
They need to abstract user settings to an external module that can change depending on the platform; this would allow developers to store settings in windows registry giving us easier manageability of the beast. An ADM module would be appreciated too.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Ya, but IE4 had that cool little easter egg in it!
TODO: Insert witty sig
Perhaps this will get labelled as flamebait, but I'll share this observation. I use IE7 as my primary browser (for reasons I won't get into). The occasional site loads oddly, and I often check it out in Firefox to see the difference -- although this problem is much less common than sites loading oddly or simply not working in Firefox back when I used that primarily.
What I find odd, however, is that the worst offender (of the sites I regularly visit) is Slashdot. I find that Slashdot often looks terrible in IE7. Perhaps this is purposeful on the developers' part, but I find it more likely that it will turn users off to the site than to the browser.
Well, I think Microsoft has a much better shot at winning people over if they weren't so intent on constantly deffying the W3. No, W3 isn't perfect, but Microsoft should be more willing to come to the table and be a team player. The reason that the W3 tends to side with Mozzilla is that they seem to have a very good working relationship, where-as Microsoft continually acts like an angry child. They've been getting better... MUCH better, but they still have a long way to go. Now, I will agree that the W3 has gone too far as of late to give Moz the benifit of the doubt (allowing them to create the "-moz-" CSS set was just rediculous), but it wouldn't be this way if Microsoft wasn't so incredibly impossible to talk to at the table. On the flipside, IE does have the most workable solution for the webfont problem, even if it is kind of broken. If Mozzilla continues to steamroll through allowing full Open Type and True Type fonts, I guarentee, heads will roll, and in the end, we won't get anything.
Obviously, this is one of the many things that IE has to work on. But currently, webdesigners unanimously HATE microsoft because of their obstinate rejection of the W3. It leads to many pages (including slashdot, for instance) not being optimized for IE, but that translates to users thinking that IE just looks bad (which isn't technically the case). It's all a subliminal thing. Firefox just renders pages better, because their structure is easier for webdevelopers to follow, IE is kind of a moving target. Safari (Konqueror) plays nice with the W3 and doesn't loose its competativeness with Firefox because of it, so why can't IE?
- A continuously disgruntled webdesigner
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
...unless, as IE's use continues to slip, OEMs begin loading - and making default - an alternative browser like Firefox on new machines.
IE dominated the browser market because Netscape blew monkey balls.
The reason firefox took off wasn't because of anti-competitive behavior it was because users found a competitive product and decided to replace what they viewed as an inferior product.
Why the panic. They don't make money off of IE anyway. *confused*
There's two sites that I manage, one is my own porn site, the second one is independent media site, where I only maintain their servers.
According to stats, Firefox is winning big already.
Don't have the exact figures here right now but 60 % of users are comming from firefox, on both sites. One is in Serbian, the other is American, stationed in NY.
Next is IE then Opera, then Safari.
The reason IE is slipping, or at least not making any inroads, is that it does not offer 2 or more significant/major new features/advances at each release. If it did, many would jump on the big release. But what it is doing is no big change at all. Look and feel are samo-samo all over again. So customers do not get all starry-eyed over it. No big marketing hype available, just BS. Clearly insufficient reason for anyone to care, except MS dweebs, of course. Even MS fanboys would be hard put to come up with anything to talk about. IE certainly has plenty of defects, bugs, and errors, though.
wake up and hold your nose
2 tabs open, this tab and /. main page.
100 MB. FF3 with ABP and a woot tracker.
Ridiculous memory hog.
How can you call it market share when there isn't any market in buying web browsers?
When the day comes and FF finally get its crown, the developers will reveal themselves and re:rename FF to Netscape and cry out loud... WERE BACK MS!!
The stigma surrounding using IE with a windows machine is that it is too tied within the OS. I remember reading and hearing comments like these awhile back. I use Firefox exclusively at home and around 50% at work. Firefox is better designed and with the add-ons make the browser superior and more import you can tailor it to your needs. Until IE comes out with something that will make people want to use it over the competition it will be a losing proposition and their market share will drop every year. This along with people migrating to Linux or Mac OS as well and they have no interest in creating Internet Exploder (LOL) for Linux or other operating systems.
Restarted FF with plugins disabled, 60 MB, and climbing as I sat and read.
Restarted FF with plugins enabled, 67 MB, and climbing as I sit and read and type this.
Went up to 70 MB as I typed this.
Ultimately people just want something that works.
I've found that the last few builds of Firefox seem less stable - And IE is definitely not as crap as it once was, so If I have one more crash in the middle of a large non-resumable download I might seriously consider switching back to IE after many years...
I hope its just me, although a few of my colleagues seem to be finding the same.
You should try to see how many of your favorite websites still work at all in IE5. A big part of why things seem slower today is that your software (even the web apps) do a whole lot more than they used to.
I see a burgeoning meme, "the browser wars don't matter". Can we nip this in the bud, please?
The idea can only be put forth by someone who fails to understand how important control over the computing platforms is. The idea, folks, is to even the playing field, to promote interoperability and efficient resource usage in development, to remove any dictator or single controlling force. I can't stress how important this is.
"The browser wars don't matter -- they're over."
Just about, it's true. With 1/3+ of the market using non-IE, developers have to build to standards. But it's like balancing a wine glass on a tray, pretty easy when the tray isn't badly tilted, and then while you put some attention to it, but the balancing act is never over. This will be true for the next platform, too.
"The browser wars don't matter -- it's just about hating Microsoft."
Again, it's about control. Netscape was aiming for the same kind of position, but they lost out. If they had become the single driving and defining entity behind the web platform, thwarting interoperability whenever it profited them, they would have been the force to fight. If Java had gotten somewhere, we'd have Sun to worry about. The anti-anti-Microsoft crowd needs to pull their heads out.
How long will it be before Microsoft's shills appeal to the EU to allow them to bundle IE with Windows again because they are the minority browser and therefor at a disadvantage with the browsers they tried (and failed) to crush? If they are forced to stop bundling IE in the EU, or have to offer rivals like Firefox that spot, their market share will slip faster.
Microsoft are great at making themselves out to be the victim....."(online advertising and search) monopolies are bad for the consumer (but not office and OS ones......basically monopolies are bad unless we control them)".
I didn't pay for the downloads, but my guess is they'll count me as an IE user - even though I only use it to download WinXP patches ...
Never trust metrics provided by a monopoly.
Just ask Intel. Or the EU.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Then who cares about 400 MB, when you have that kind of RAM to spare. The more data you have stored in RAM => the less you have to page to/from disk => better performance.
But there are drawbacks of more RAM:
...and it will continue to fall until IE can get its act together. Browsers have evolved far past where they just need to render pretty CSS pages properly.
IE 8's Javascript may be faster, but it's still broken. When coupled with its garbage-quality garbage collector, this just means modern sites that use things like jQuery and Prototype crash sooner. IE has had trouble with their garbage for years now: JScript Memory Leaks, QuirksBlog: IE 7 and Javascript
Now this may all seem trivial to those who visit traditional sites and regularly restart their IE, but sites such as BattleCell can cause memory starvation issues within 30 minutes or less on IE.
Some people are initially surprised when we tell them to use any browser other than IE. Though, after a few months, their own conclusions of what this all means creates an effort barrier that Microsoft must overcome in order to bring people back...
Maybe Microsoft's best strategy to beat Google is actually to let them win. Google is already pressing towards becoming a monopoly, so if Microsoft "gives in," so to speak, only Yahoo would stand in their way, and it wouldn't take long for Yahoo to be pushed completely aside. At that point, something would have to be done to limit, or take away, Google's power. I'm sure that Microsoft's "army of lobbyists" would help that process along.
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They need an "IE Lite". One with no ActiveX support, no "comet cursor" support, and so one... one that only allows helper applications and URL handlers to be explicit plugins that explicitly register with IE as "secure". THe API for running an application would have more in common with the fork/exec in the POSIX subsystem than the Win32 ShellExecute API that requires the application to reverse-engineer quoting. It would call the HTML control (and preferably a new "secure" HTML control) using a new API that calls back to the IE shell for anything beyond rendering content and running hard-sandboxed scripts. Yes, that includes following URLs and downloading embedded images and calling plugins.
This would not have all the features of the "legacy IE", particularly at first as few applications use the secure new APIs. But that's OK, you'd be able to fall back to full IE for pages that really needed it.
With some work they could make it even more inherently secure than Firefox and Safari, with no need for a leaky "reduced privilege" sandbox. Plus, with a new secure HTML control you'd get people writing Firefox extensions to call the Microsoft HTML control without people like me going "YOU CRAZY FOOL, WHY YOU DO A STUPID THING LIKE THAT?", and be able to get more effective browser share even with people who use the Firefox shell.
But... this is a pipe dream, isn't it?
You do remember that mr. President promised to throw lobbyists out of Washington ?
Pretty remarkable how Firefox was able to do this in just a few short years.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
I.E. isn't going anywhere as long as idiots like HP design their site explicitly for I.E.
Why can't people make a web page without flash and javascript, when all people want is to download a driver. DAMN that really makes me mad!
Because even if Microsoft keeps the market share, they have to do it trough innovation.
Well, if they really can make a browser that is so great, that can win back users from Firefox, then I applaud them.
I just don't think it will happen. ^^ :)
One can only dream.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Um, Internet Explorer loads google.com just fine. Chrome loads microsoft.com just fine.
Internet Explorer doesn't load a wide variety of sites using Canvas or SVG or other modern features. Heck, IE8 barely credibly implements features that were modern 5-10 years ago. And Chrome won't play with Silverlight and a variety of other MS specific client technologies. What either google.com or microsoft.com might look like without having to target a lowest common client denominator is an interesting question.
It doesn't matter what their market share is, Microsoft already lost. The web is now firmly based on open standards, not proprietary technology tied to a specific operating system.
The trend has certainly been that direction, but it's far from irreversible, and Microsoft still has control over default technologies for Windows PCs, and a lot of market clout. If they can succeed in getting Silverlight in the right places while dragging their feet in other areas, that'd make IE some advantages over other clients again...
There are some big obstacles. Web developers quite rightly don't trust them at all after their five year lazy coastfest with IE6 where they pushed all the work of dealing with that browser's bugs out onto the backs of developers themselves, and I hope this in itself is enough to make sensible devs spit on any Microsoft offering for a decade or so. But MS is getting increasingly good at producing some slick developer technology...
Tweet, tweet.
Why does it state "IE Losing 10% Market Share Every Two Years!" Why not 40% every 8 years or just do the math and say IE losing at a rate of 5% a year?
I've moved to Google Chrome now. It is awesome and far superior to both IE and FireFox. IE is just a giant memory hug and FireFox crashes a lot while videos don't play in screen, ... . FireFox recovers well after a crash but it's always annoying.
Chrome is lightweight and works perfect. Now if people would quit developing with activex, I could be completely independent of IE.
A Linux version of Chrome would be nice too.
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The geek told me to buy into the Linux netbook.
The Linux netbook has gone the way of the dodo, so what am I to make of that?
In the Net Application webstats, Linux, all flavors, has a 1% market share. MS Vista 24%. Win 7 0.38%.
1/3 of "everything Linux."
Usage Share Trend for 'Windows 7' [May 12]
The geek may argue the numbers. But it is going to sting if Win 7 overtakes Linux while it is still an RC.
It could happen as early as the Fourth of July.
The Net Applications webstats are essentially mass market. That makes them all the more intriguing and all the more damning.
Almost everyone in this sector shops HP or Dell once every four or five years for the attractive OEM bundle and that is the end of it.
They don't upgrade hardware. They are never comfortable cracking open the hood to take a look inside.
No way in god's green earth are they ripping out Vista to install the Win 7 RC on their WalMart Pavilion.
No dual boot. No VM, either.
That means the upward push behind Win 7 has to be coming from the technical elite, the enthusiast, the geek.
There is simply no other realistic possibility.
Can you imagine that someone probably once claimed Google will never crack 50% market share because there's competition, because Yahoo and Altavista (does anyone remember Altavista) and all those other search sites were there first?
Firefox will crack IE just like Google cracked Yahoo - because Firefox is better, and a non-Microsoft business policy will save businesses money in the long run. As each business looks at the cost of upgrading their software, and someone proposes a lower cost alternative, and the bean counters see that it saves them money, this is a crack in Microsoft's dam. Even when Microsoft offers schools and governments M$ software for free, many realize it's still to costly to be locked into the M$ platform and they go with open source software instead.
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Salesman: Would you like to purchase a robot razor?
Customer: But I have a razor already.
Salesman: A robot razor is more convenient to use and much faster. Let me show you.
The salesman shows a demonstration video.
Customer (impressed): That's a really close shave. I don't understand how this works. Doesn't every person have a different face?
Salesman: Only at the first time.
By this rate of depreciation, I thought it (no. of users) would have gone negative years ago :-D
So, half-life of around seven and half years?
So a Mozilla fanzine website sees a growing trend of users of Firefox ... well who'd of thunk it ?
I wonder if we can also infer Safari usage is at 100% by using the stats from www.apple.com ?
We know that a lot of large scale organizations have IE6 ONLY intranets so they struggle to even move their users up to IE7 or 8, let alone switch to another browser. When these sites were built, the IT departments and upper management were no doubt promised the earth in advantages to their organizations to make it locked in to IE6. Any responsible board will have been plagued by reports from any responsible IT department for years now that IE6 is redundant and that they need to find a way to move users to a modern secure browser (even if they still think it's the latest Microsoft offering). They will be well aware that they are locked in, and will have to spend a LOT of time and money to reinvent the wheel to make that happen, not to mention the upheaval involved in switching the organization over with as little disruption as possible.
Given that they are in this situation because they willingly built themselves into a box, what are the chances that they will escape that box by building themselves into a new box? Especially a new box owned by the same company who supplied that one they're spending a lot of money escaping from? Only a dipshit would jump from one box to another, regardless of the threats or slick words from a Microsoft rep. This would be a no-brainer decision at board room level to say "we can't afford to be locked in, we need to be flexible, so we build to proper standards." Having said that, looking at many large scale organizations you'd be hard pushed not to class many of the elite as "greedy corrupted dipshits in suits" so you never know.
Many intranets were built using proprietary programming built for that company alone and bosses know that rewriting that for a new system will be expensive. Luckily this is where plenty of FOSS software options come in, like Drupal or Joomla. There is plenty of free options with plenty flexibility to do a LOT of stuff already available. That can save a fortune that would have been paid to write another round of proprietary solutions which would fit the new box. Many FOSS solutions are getting very mature and very stable for large deployments now, with the development / updates / features being submitted from people all over the world.
The sooner this ripples through more and more organizations, IE's user share falls even faster.
What is a market share of zero dollar product compared to another zero dollar product? What market?
IE already lost the war in Poland -> http://www.en.ranking.pl/index.php?page=Ranks:RanksPage&stat=22|OW
This is one of those media sound bites that I would love to hold up 5 years from now to highlight the sort of ridiculous thinking that surfaced.
This prediction was made before three (possibly four) major browser overhauls have seasoned properly... before FF 3.5 has even been released. The updates to these browsers are unprecedented.
How can anyone make unchanged extrapolations of past performance through a major change like this and expect them to hold true?
If IE8 opens the door to consumer created plug-ins, firefox will be toast.
There are too many sites today that work just fine in IE, and work just fine in Firefox (and so, one would assume, they're perfectly standards-compliant)...and then they break in Opera, which is my personal browser of choice.
For example, Amazon's "search inside this book" feature explicitly posts a message saying my browser isn't supported. I have to open up IE or Firefox to peek at books I'm considering. What's up with that?
All browsers should support the same standards; all sites should follow those same standards; and the idea should not be "Firefox: The IE Alternative," but "Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Konqueror, Epiphany, Lynx, and Internet Explorer: Your Choice."
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There's little need for infighting within Firefox, as all the numerous Gecko-based projects fill their niches anyway. The F/OSS nature of software allows developers to part their ways and continue doing the own thing anyway.
A more important denominator in the future might become application resource usage and feature set versus security.
An example consideration for a computer with 128M RAM, a viable CPU and an older operating system:
The latest K-Meleon (1.5.3) has a slightly newer Gecko engine than Firefox 2.0.0.20 (1.8.1.21 vs. 1.8.1.20). K-Meleon is evidently faster, but may lack important extensions, so it's good for old PC's (64M RAM and weak CPU) and sports its own set of extensions.
Enter SeaMonkey 1.1.16 (Gecko 1.9.0.9). Assuming its framework has not changed too much since Mozilla Application Suite was first released, its system requirements should pretty much be the same that Mozilla 1.0.x used to need to run properly. Add extensions and choice versions of plugins that should not force a big dent in resource usage (watch out for security with older plugins).
10-15 years ago and then some, the mantra was: "Resistance is futile!"
Netscape 3.5 has never existed, because the last version of Netscape 3.0x was 3.04. The next major release with a .5 version was 4.5, which was not particularly stable. The Gold release applied to the 3.0x version and included what can now be understood as a very primitive HTML editor.
What Netscape was good at, was that it was a great tool to debug websites with bad code, because its rendering engine was so sensitive: if a page worked in Netscape 4, it worked everywhere else, too. The last 4.x version of Netscape was 4.8.
Moving up from IE 6 to 7 is one thing, but moving from a proprietary Intranet solution to something based on FOSS may prove to be tricky, especially if you are using proprietary databases to maintain the site. That is why moving to FOSS solutions is so much harder.
Oh well, IE4... Let's assume IE4 was running in Windows 98 and the computer had something like 64M of RAM (if you're lucky). Yes, IE4 will run rather quickly. But beware of Firefox 2 in such a computer. Firefox 1.0.x will run decently (beware of too new major versions of Flash plugins). K-Meleon 1.1.x, which has a fresh Gecko rendering engine on par with Firefox 2, will run decently (YMMV, depending on website and plugins).
My beef with IE4 was because it showed JavaScript errors too many times, which meant that Netscape 4.08 (up to 4.8), although inferior in rendering, was much more convenient and usable, with CSS switched off.
Well, I was thinking of a company or any other organisation, for which mirgating to FOSS would be too cost-prohibitive, for example, as this is possibly the first thing that the suits land their eyes on:
* What are the effects of migration in terms of operations and how would the migration itself affect on-going operations, whether it slows the company down or even halts it?
* Such questions could by answered by very effective planning -- Where have those people gone? The jobless pool should have a number of quality employees available...
* What is the cost? Like what's the current [dreaded] total cost of ownership and what would it be in the future, post-migration?
* Support contracts. What about these? Large companies want them and need them.
* Are there any consultancies in the market that can faciliate migration from a number of complex proprietary deployments to FOSS deployments that deliver the same (or even better) functionality, but which is hopefully less complex and which also offers better value? What is the outgoing cost towards these?
* What to do with existing hardware and software? -- No matter if the software is proprietary -- An organization has heavily invested in those and expects to gain a useful return from its investment(s), via training and such stuff. Anecdotal evidence: I've begun using the Start Menu > Recent Documents feature in Windows after about 13 years after being exposed to it.
* Maybe there should be a step-by-step solution implemented to facilitate hybrid deployments to protect existing investments.
* The results would be that large organisations (companies and such) are more likely to upgrade when they are about to upgrade after existing support contracts have run out. There should possibly a multiple-phase plan to weed product lock-in out of the whole structure.
I understand where you're coming from, but what this financial crisis has shown this far, is that clueless businesspeople have failed to see the long-term perspective (at all, or just with the topic of migrating to FOSS) and concentrate their attention on short-term effects, especially if they don't know whether they're going to stay in the same company or not -- with the rationale being that their concentration on shorter-term effects is motivated by their wish to keep their job, effectively creating a situation similar to living from one paycheck to the next.
So the above is my half-informed evaluation of the situation.