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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
It was to sell Windows and development tools and IIS
If you developed for Windows/IE/IIS then you use those, and people you sell to use them etc ...
You make Windows cheap to companies, make IE free, so they will pay to use MSSQL/IIS/Sharepoint and not use alternatives
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
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.)
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.
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.
They did not say that IE competed with Google; they said that Microsoft competed with Google.
Quick, which company am I describing?
- Has an IM network
- Has a large webmail application
- Has a search engine
- Has a browser
- Has an office suite
- Has a mobile platform
- Has billions of dollars
- Wants to be on every desktop
- Is on most of them
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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.
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 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! --