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Is IE Usage Share Collapsing?
je ne sais quoi writes "Net Applications normally releases its statistics for browser and operating system usage share on the first of every month. This month, however, the data has not shown up — only a cryptic message stating they are reviewing the data for inexplicable statistical variations and that it will be available soon. Larry Dignan at ZDNet has a blog post that might explain what is happening: Statcounter has released some data that shows a precipitous drop in IE browser use in North America, to the benefit of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. At the end of May, StatCounter shows IE usage share (for versions 6, 7, and 8 combined) at around 64%; at the beginning of June it is now about 56% — an astounding 8% drop in one month. We should keep in mind the difficulties in estimating browser usage share: this could very well be a change in how browsers report themselves, or some other statistical anomaly. So it will probably be healthy to remain skeptical until trend this is confirmed by other organizations. Have any of you seen drops in IE usage share for Web-sites you administer?"
Hi there, submitter here. I left a typographical error in the summary. "in the beginning of June" should read "in the beginning of July". Oops, sorry about that.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
It always takes a while to educate the whole population with regards to technical stuff, after a while, it becomes public knowledge although ;-)))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
More interestingly, you can really see that the new key markets strategy the Spread Firefox campaign has kicked off is really paying off.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
...could explain this, at least partially. All things combined and considered I am not suprised that IE is accounting for only 56% of browsers reported. Were we limited to desktop only, that might be different.
australian project gutenberg is better than the original.
cos IE doesn't run on iPhone!
Mozilla has grabbed a large portion of the market share and the explosion in Mac purchases has increased the use of Safari. The third browser which is taking many of the users away is Google's Chrome which is probably the most innovative of all of the browsers with many neat features which include interaction between windows, the most customization of any of the browsers in terms of placement of objects as well as bringing users unmatched speed.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Is it dying? Has netcraft confirmed it? Did it loose 73% of its core developer?
I run a somewhat largish non-technology site, and I saw yesterday:
.1%. So that's 81% MSIE, 14.6% Mozilla, and everything else in the remaining 4.4%.
40.91% MSIE 7.0
27.11% MSIE 6.0
14.60% Mozilla/5.0
12.98% MSIE 8.0
Everything else below
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
We've seen no major drop off, just a steady and slow decline. We track over 15 million users a day across the sites we manage here in the UK (mainly council properties).
Couldn't it just be that all the geeks are running firefox/opera/chrome and everyone else is outside in the nice weather?
On some small pages I have to maintain the rates of IE dropped below 50%. The highest IE-rate I got on a page for a hotel with 46% and the lowest with 28% on the one for my soaring club.
There are a few sites where IE 6.0 displays things badly because the web master stopped kludging for it.
Slashdot.org
some parts of Google.
(Help me here!)
Joe-six paks noticed this and has found out that he has options...
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I'm betting there is an issue with the user agent reporting with IE8, or the stats are focused on IE7.
MS pushed IE8 out as a security update this month, and I bet most non-business computers got auto-updated.
Either that, or they didn't like IE8 with compatibility mode (hey, there's an idea, let's re-break the sites so they display the way the webs designers had to code it to get around our own bugs), so they went to FF 3.5.
Or, everyone could have just given up and gone to Mac and Linx/Unix derivative. But I think that is too much to hope for.
If you look at the longterm trends reported by Net Applcations, something that StatCounter doesn't offer, it's hard to conclude that anything dramatic has just happened.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/historical_view.html
These longer trends are steady and smooth and there's nothing that's happened in the last couple of months that would cause IE to fall off the cliff.
That being said, there is a lot of churn in the various browser versions. IE is really a collection of browsers with measurable share, IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8. Looking at these versions, it's clear that a lot is happening.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/07/a_browser_prediction.html
It's likely that IE 7 and IE 6 will fall to under 10% global share by the end of this year and that IE 8 will grow to approximately 40%. That would give IE 60% overall, Firefox about 25%, Safari about 10%, and "other" would hold the remaining 5%.
So it will probably be healthy to remain skeptical until trend this is confirmed by other organizations.
Especially after all the breathless "Firefox is taking over" stories on Slashdot, submitted by fanboys every time there's a spike in downloads (like after a release!) or the browser's market share gains a tiny fraction of a percent.
Mind you, I'm really glad to see that we're finally getting some serious competition in the browser marketplace. But before you congratulate yourselves too much, send a psychic "Thanks for Shooting Yourselves in the Foot!" to Steve and Bill. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera all have real advantages, but none of these would have overcome IE's big advantage: being the default browser on the desktop OS that owns 90% of its market. The only thing that could have overcome that advantage is not the advantages of the competition, but the extreme crappiness of IE itself.
On the two sites I have access to for this info IE dropped about 1% for May vs June. One site (~19M visitors a month) it was 57.91% vs 56.64%. The other (~132M visitors) it was 60.17% vs 59.40%. I always question these sort of numbers because browser usage is very closely tied with demographics, and I wonder just what sites are they using to get them...
Kaspersky reports that links to a virus
Considering that the unemployment numbers continue to rise, less business users running IE + more consumers running iphones might account for part of the change.
Yeah, this is a set of viruses that does a lot of popups and more. Skip this link, if you can. Think we'll see more of it in the future as well.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
The link goes to on nimp, don't click it.
Would be a breakdown of browser share by type of user/system.
Different users and systems have, by their browser choices, effects on different aspects of the web. For instance, Big Serious Corporate setups are likely a bastion of IE6, maybe some 7 among the adventurous ones. This has an enormously strong influence on developers of corporate intranet stuff, and portal sites; but probably has relatively little effect on your trendy web 2.0 entertainment/social networking outfits. Most places that are still using IE6 probably have IT staff blocking friendTube and Twitbook and whatnot.
The situation with, say, college students is pretty much exactly the opposite. Aggregate numbers are interesting, and it is always fun to watch IE's share sink; but they don't really tell you what you actually want to know; which is "What mixes of browsers are particular sites or categories of sites running into, what browsers are different groups of people using(and how willing are they to switch)?"
don't click parent's link
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
Q: Whats all that churning and bubbling in there? A: That's Mr. Inexplicable Statistical Variations
Not only would this change be welcome, but it would force Microsoft to "play ball" with the standards for HTML rather than roll their own and mark all the bug reports "will not fix".
Take a look at the history:
1) Microsoft is all about selling stuff on CD-ROM with the marketing vision "Information at your fingertips".
2) The Internet happens, and overnight, Netscape is a raving success because it actually PUT information at your fingertips.
3) Billy boy issues a memo to the whole company to turn as fast as possible to support the Internetz.
4) IE comes out - first a sucktacular mess, and finally almost livable around IE 5 or so.
5) IE 6 comes out, Netscape crumbles.
6) Netscape goes underground at AOL who throws a few developers at it while using it to negotiate a link on the Desktop. IE Dominates so tremendously that it's the platform of choice simply because it's installed everywhere.
7) Microsoft stops doing anything for half a decade. (whistle whistle)
8) Navigator continuously improves, finally re-emerging as Phoenix/Firefox. Suddenly, Microsoft's browser looks like a 5-year-old pile of cruft that's difficult to program for.
Suddenly, Microsoft will give a shiat. They might finally fix the things that developers!developers!developers! have been whining, bitching, complaining, and screaming about all these years.
Irony: "Free Internet Exporer 8" ad at the top while I type this message!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Artificial Intelligence created expressly for MicroSoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) will save the day (but not save the Planet Earth from rapacious HomoSapiens forebears of Machine Intelligence).
JavaScript for artificial intelligence lets the True AI Mind come alive in the IE browser.
Artificial intelligence in Forth and JavaScript encourages a continuing high market share for Internet Explorer (IE).
First, the MJ factor - these stats my be low, but I bet they will rise again once all the web-surfing born-again Michael Jackson fans are reflected in the stats for July.
Also, the summer factor is huge - at $WORK (Public school district) we have over 1,000 windows boxes that are now sitting idle through August, their IE 7 and IE 8 browsers aren't flipping through the most popular websites anymore. There are likely MILLIONS and MILLIONS of idle Windows machines at Universities and public schools skewing the stats down for IE 6, 7, and 8.
Ken
Window just isn't ready for the intelligent yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you blonds use to distribute your porous subroutines across the world wide web, but the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check their mail with because they don't have to with Linux, especially not when they already have a Windows machine that is so security flawed and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few million developers verses a few hundred droids. The last thing I want is a level 5 windows dwarf providing me my secure-less OS.
There I fixed that for you.
While my various sites (blogs) are all relatively low-traffic, I consistently run at about 56% IE with the rest dominated by Firefox and Safari (although some sites have a lot more Firefox traffic than IE traffic).
Could this be in part attributed to the time of year? There is less surfing at schools and universities that run IE and more usage at home with the alternative browsers.
Ok, I've just checked my stats for my site, which is reasonably high-traffic but a geology/earth-sciences site so it may be skewed with a large percentage of university campus access - so please don't read too much into the figures, but it still makes interesting reading:
7/09 is of course July 2009 and the earliest stats I have is March 2005. Note that earlier stats also had a few % for Mozilla which I haven't added to the Firefox total, so it's simply Firefox v IE v Safari v Chrome.
7/09 1/09 7/08 1/08 7/07 3/05
IE 65.9% 68.5% 73.7% 74.2% 75.4% --- - 83.4%
Firefox 22.6% 21.2% 19.2% 15.3% 14.6% 6.1%
Safari 4.6% 4.8% 2.9% 2.5% 2.2% 0.8%
Chrome 2.3% 0.1% - -
So, not exactly a dramatic falloff, but certainly a trend that's continuing to give bad news to Microsoft.
That's for a major Polish website devoted to a popular, long-running game series. The userbase is indeed a little more tech-conscious than the average Internet user around here, but not by much - just a few power gamers and techies, lots of "casuals". Nevertheless, IE was at ~70% in 2004, ~50% in 2005 and so on down to ~25% in the late 2008 and ~20% now. Right now it's kind of stabilizing (but still falling) and I don't forsee it falling below 15% anytime soon, but I'm starting to suspect that by the end of the year, Opera might overtake it (16% and rising, mostly ex-Firefox users right now).
We're not actively doing anything anti-IE or pro-FF/Opera (well, maybe except that IE is getting all the CSS/JS bugfixes lats, but that's *because* it's so low in the stats - we can afford letting the IE support lag behind), so it's mostly an outside trend, I think.
All the statistics I'm basing this post on were generated by Google Analytics, by the way.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
I'm not on MS payroll, but honestly, is this article worth any attention?
I hope FF gets 99% of the market soon, but this type of baseless speculation certainly does not help.
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
I tell everyone I know, along with everyone I work with, that surfing anything but internal corporate sites with Internet Exploder is the same thing as saying "take my machine, please!" to the world at large. Since I'm in charge of security infrastructure for a nationwide company with over 10K employees, I get listened to a bit more than your average geek. I'm single-handedly responsible for at least 30-40 people, if not more, switching to Firefox over the last 6 months, I'm quite sure.
The current ActiveX video 0-day, plus the constantly-updated list of sites that are actively exploiting it, is perfect proof that you're a fool to surf with IE.
You're also a fool to run Windows XP on a daily basis, but that's another topic.
Or maybe NetApps just came up with a creative way to earn more money from ads by delaying the release and having people come back every day for one week to check if the data is already there...
Well, why not. It's ok. But let's not misinterpret that.
W3 Schools which has an admitted alternate-browser bias does not show any sort of abrupt drop-off for IE, and if anywhere were going to, I would think it would be this site. In fact, it shows Firefox dropping for the first time since September of last year (when Chrome was initially released), but only half a percentage point. IE7 is losing ground to IE8 rather quickly, but IE6 actually gained a half a percentage point since May. Chrome is also up another half a point, and nothing else really had enough movement to be worth mentioning (Safari up a tenth, Opera down a tenth).
which is to avoid using IE and use Firefox, I suspect this trend will continue.
Every tech knows that most spyware comes in via ActiveX controls on IE (or stupid users clicking on crap, which is probably more responsible than IE itself). Regardless of what improvements Microsoft has made in IE7 and IE8, my advice - and likely that of every other tech in the industry - will be for organizations and home users to avoid using IE and only use Firefox. That and not clicking on crap are the two main things users can do to avoid spyware.
This drop in IE usage, if confirmed, is almost certainly due to the penetration into "common wisdom" that IE is insecure. Even home users I get as clients these days are usually using Firefox.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The stats for MagPortal.com (should be fairly unbiased) are not showing a drop in MSIE of that magnitude. Here is a comparison going from the last week in May to the first week in July:
MSIE: 66.10% -> 64.34%
Firefox: 25.71% -> 27.41%
Safari: 5.90% -> 5.61%
Chrome: 2.29% -> 2.65%
The percentage is irrelevant. We need a certain absolute critical mass for open source to work. I don't care if 50 thousand or 50 billion people use other systems, as long as we have enough people to keep the core systems supported and improved.
My stats (from google analytics) show a monthly ~2% drop in IE since the beginning of the year. June was below 48%. Used to be much higher...
Ugh ugh ugh UGH! STOP IT PEOPLE! Stop it!
Seriously stop basing a SINGLE SITE that is NOT well known to the GENERAL PUBLIC as a meter of how many people use IE or not.
Infact I just looked at my stats for June. Guess what browser was #1 and was probably ATLEAST 50% of the hits (also including bots)? IE 5!
Not 6, not even 7. 5. 70,000 hits marked as IE5. Next inline was Firefox 3 w/ 5600 hits.
Let's take what is considered the "top 10" or "top 100" sites of the internet and use THEIR stats to figure things out.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
My personal gardening site (smallish, roughly 1000+ visitors a day) shows IE usage has dropped a huge amount - it's down to 43% of visitors. It's been a long time since I've looked at browser splits, so I don't know how the trend has tracked.
Since it's a gardening site, I'd assume it's less likely to be a big target for work-based browsing. That, I'd guess, would still be dominated by IE.
#DeleteChrome
I'd argue that point... you're ignorant or a fool if you run XP unsecured on a daily basis.
It is possible to configure the OS to be fairly secure. Unfortunately it takes a hell of a lot of effort to make it as secure as it should be out of the box.
I really wish this was true, but StatCounter's numbers seem a bit dodgy, with big swings in market share for no apparent reason. Example: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-daily-20090307-20090506 NetApplications number are more stable; yesterdays market share for all IE versions was 63.47%, which is still a drop, but less dramatic.
The StatOwl.com guys have their reports updated for this month. I know one of the guys who runs it and he mentioned they have been working on a bunch of mobile reports to handle just the mobile data.
What I really would like to see is the browser share of the Slashdot logs.
As soon as Microsoft's check clears the bank.
June: .14
IE:68%
FF24%
Safari: 5.47
Chrome: 1
May:
IE:68%
FF: 21%
Safari: 7%
Chrome: 1.2%
So, for me, a very NON technical site... IE is the same while FF stole a little from Sarari.
Chrome is the same... And that's probably all me.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
...for my blog. 100% of all hits are Chrome, but that may be because I am the only person who reads it. I'm still doing analysis before I release a full report on the statistics....check my blog for more details.
Sorry about the mess.
averages 18,500 hits per day
my stats say:
Robots 27 %
Unknown 6 %
Firefox 8 %
MSIE 3 %
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Program your site standards compliant.
That's all.
Be a leader, not a follower. Because if everyone is a follower, nobody leads but randomness and evilness.
Others will follow you the sooner, the more you are sure of yourself and the bigger/more you are.
If Microsoft then complies to the standards again, we can gladly welcome them.
Seriously. See Google drop IE support because of some fight with MS, and the IE will be done.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Is this a shift from WIndows to Mac as well? Microsoft hasn't made a version of IE for the Mac in many years. A lot more Macs have been sold and IE 4 is too old and insecure to use on a Mac.
The site I run is attractive to older crowds so I expect it to move with the speed of frozen molassas. Here are some numbers with a sum total of all versions for each:
May 2009
MSIE: 70%
Firefox: 23%
Safari: 6%
Chrome: Just shy of 1%
Opera: 8 users.
Lynx: 1 - Who the heck is that?
June 2009
MSIE: 69%
Firefox: 24%
Rest unchanged.
I think it's a matter of "when" rather than "if" that the IE share will tumble further down due to the EU requirement that MS's OS give a browser choice to customers. It's inevitable that the playing field will be level soon. (I am counting on the fact that such a law exists in our US too)
to the benefit of Firerox
What the hell is Firerox?
In fairness, Slashdot displays things badly in Firefox 3.0. And Safari. And Opera. And Chrome. And probably Mosaic if you gave it a spin.
Please, just give me back the old site.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I just went to the statcounter.com page and looked at Germany. I always knew Germans liked Firefox, but look at these shocking numbers: #1 Firefox 3 (52%), #2 IE7 (22%), #3 IE6 (8%), #4 Firefox 2 (5%)!
wait, I just thought of something: has Microsoft released a version of IE for the iPhone through the Apple App Store? That would be funny...
"Have any of you seen drops in IE usage share for Web-sites you administer?"
IE users never manage to load my site, for some reason. Of course, no one would be stupid enough to actually BREAK their own site for IE users, would they? That little script that redirects any browser identifying itself as IE to my "YOU'RE AN IDIOT! GET A REAL BROWSER STOOPID!" page wouldn't influence anyone, would it? It certainly wouldn't bias my statistics!
So, my figures are at least as fair, balanced, and unbiased as Fox News.
IE usage has been below 1% for a long, long, long time.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
...if the rest of the web developers who rely on "Silverlight" or Cracktive-X or some other M$-centric technology and worry more about making the web truly platform agnostic we can get on with it and get some business done. I really dislike having to switch from Lynx or Firefox to IE becuase the e-commerce site relies on some stupid feature of IE that no one's been able to translate to the OSS browsers. Happens once in a while, still annoying.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I can believe in problems in the measuring process, or maybe a botnet changed its faked user agent string to firefox. Or maybe IE genuinely lost so many users.
But "statistical anomaly"? are you kidding me?
Without even reading TFA I'm sure they measure at least 1 million visitors per month, probably at least one order of magnitude more. For such a large sample size statistical anomalies can be neglected.
There are Joe Sixpacks on my Slashdot?
Ewww! Kill 'em with fire!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I still haven't discovered a way to protect XP from the user. People who's computers I've tried to secure have:
1. Found IE after I deleted all but one IE shortcut and moved the last one into Windows/System32 so he wouldn't find it.
2. Disabled NoScript so the web would "work".
3. Canceled SpyBot every time the scan started (at 2:00 AM!) because it was taking too long.
4. Bypassed the router because he thought it was causing problems with his Internet access.
5. Disabled the firewall because it kept notifying him that various applications were trying to contact the Internet.
6. Turned off WOT because it was preventing him from getting to sites marked as "Unsafe".
WTF? Short of installing a proxy server in my house and routing all of their traffic through it, there's nothing I can do except rebuild the box every six weeks. When the only REAL solution is to educate people and make them care, you can't possibly win.
(Linux FTW)
...can we get live browser stats in /. ?
Fixed it for you... now we just need to wait and a link to browser stats will appear.
Maybe he's talking about the NSA backdoors and the kind of stuff you can't secure by any means in the OS because is hiding in the closed source.
:D
I'm still waiting for the ubberanal FOSS firewall that don't spread the legs every time Windows calls home. Is there any?
What about all of those people using porn mode in IE....I mean InPrivate browsing?
IE: 68.5% Firefox: 17.2% Safari: 6.0% Chrome: 1.5% Other: 5.9% Netscape: 0.1% Opera: 0.1%
Pffft. That doesn't mean the stats for IE are *really* that low. People are probably forging their IE User-Agent string to "Mozilla/5.0 ....etc." to get greater compatibility from web sites that are Firefox-only. :-)
You leave your computer on, in the workplace, for 3 days, and you are waiting to find it as You leave it? Oooook. Maybe the pages were auto updating so cache was being made, maybe they have rotating Ads, Maybe it signed up to a Botnet by itself. Maybe the maid was lurking 4chan in your PC for a while on Sunday, maybe that guy from marketing was downloading CP from your PC.
I'd be more worried by checking what happened to my PC in 3 days than worring by the memory leaks on FF. Because, you know, shit happens.
Interesting usage statistics from the union website of a technical university: Students are required to buy a school-issued Thinkpad. For the last 3 years the Thinkpad has had a 1680 by 1050 screen. Among users of the union website who are on the the school's ISP and using a 1680 by 1050 screen, 53% use Chrome, 38% use Firefox, and 6% use IE. The share of firefox users declines even more when the results are filtered to Windows only. Data for non-1680 by 1050 screens is as follows: Firefox 54%, Chrome 33%, IE 11% This shows that college age kids are much more receptive to Google's browser, while professors, staff, and lab users favor Firefox.
I own a computer service/repair business mostly for residential customers... like geek squad, for lack of a better national example. There's lots of small businesses like me all over the US and I'm sure abroad...you get the point... Anyway... One thing I can say for sure, is that IE8 has really changed things for Microsoft in the browser wars. It's horrible! It seriously crashes more than it gets closed normally, it is REDICULOUSLY slow, even compared to IE7! Hell... I long for the days of IE7 and when that came out it it was hard to explain to my non-technical residential customers what this new browser was...It takes SOOOO long to load, pages render slow, its just unusable. I've never seen seen anything as bad as IE8... while FF, Opera, Chrome are all competing to make the fastest, most compliant browsers, Microsoft is STILL(?WTF?) doing it's own thing releasing a bigger, fatter, slower browser that have features that even technical people aren't asking for... I think they've finally made the people who have no idea what a browser is to become so fed up as to say "This thing is going so slow, maybe I should try that firefox thing I heard about..." I bet the numbers are right. I believe IE8 is THAT BAD
There are several places around facebook that tell you to upgrade your browser if you visit with IE 6.
We're big fans of that around the office.
I appreciate the improvement in standards support (though it still lags the competition considerably). For some reason, when I try to visit certain sites from my work PC, IE 8 will crash in urlmon.dll unless I have those sites in my Trusted Sites list. I'm only using it on that PC because I'm validating several applications against it -- I otherwise use FireFox or Chrome.
I looked at reports for three sites for which I have analytics access.
Here're the results. IE: 53%, 58%, 71%, Firefox: 29%, 27%, 19%, Safari: 13%, 9%, 4%
One of the sites is for commercial vehicles. One is for motorcycle gear. The other is an alternative wedding site.
I see a lot of likely demographic differences. All of this is supposition, with no studies to back it up, so take it with a small mountain of rock salt.
There's likely an age difference among those sites. I'd guess that two of the sites skew older than the other. There is also a likely difference in income: one being primarily people with disposable income, one for people with less disposable income, and one being primarily small to medium business owners. There's likely a gender gap among visitors to these sites: one of the sites is probably 75% women, the other two sites probably have 85+% men.
Given those assumptions, I'd argue that young, affluent women are more likely to upgrade their browsers than older small-business owners.
In other news, I'm beginning to think water tends to be wet at room temperature, and ice is not very warm relative to fresh waffles.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
If you ignore the five screens of Javascript at the top of each page, Slashdot is actually more usable in Mosaic than it is in other browsers.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
56% of people use IE? My God, that's amazing. Who the hell are these people? I can barely remember the last time I saw somebody using IE.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Kids these days. Looks just fine in lynx.
Let's see, did all the lusers using MSIE suddenly get a lot smarter? Probably not.
IE is only down about 2% for us over last year. It represents about 62% of our visitors.
Firefox is up to about 26% now, and Safari is nearly 9%.
But it sure looks great in Links.
Sorry, all we use are Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
Is this some kind of fake browser that provides security holes free of charge?
I am the webmaster of the webpage for the band Billy Pilgrim, http://www.billypilgrim.net/
June6-July6:
IE: 51%
FFx: 30%
Saf: 10%
Chr: 04%
Moz: 03%
Average visitor is probably well educated & in mid-30s as this band was popular in colleges in the late 90s but is no longer active.
It is *MUCH BETTER* on a clean install or upgrade of Windows 7 (i was shocked at the performance difference, on vista it was a pig, same machine), but there aren't a hell of a lot of windows 7 users out there yet.
Also, the mac is gaining market share, and Safari is actually good on PC with version 4 (for the first time).
Hence, my daily browser of choice is currently Safari 4, as its basically the same between both platforms I regularly use for desktop use, gets 100% in acid 3, is pretty quick, and i'm addicted to coverflow bookmark browsing (thought it was a gimmick until i used it, finding a page by looking at it is SOOO much easier than remembering the title that no one looks at while reading it).
If i'm on a free nix box its generally Firefox...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
the past year has been pretty stable on my website stats, all 3 browsers were registered and one of them was a googlebot.
It is driving me up the wall that an article page looks different if you go to it from the front page vs. hitting the headline embedded in the display controls. One goes to http://foo.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=yy/mm/dd/idnumber and the other goes to http://foo.slashdot.org/story/yy/mm/dd/idnumber/Hyphenated-Article-Title . And the latter sucks.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Yes, I have been seeing a steady decline in the percentace of IE compared to other browsers. Astonishing as most of these sites are inside our network where our corporate desktop image is XP and IE is our officially supported browser 8)
Same or similar stats however on our public sites, again mostly visted by corporates, but many are allowing multiple broser platforms now, and many users choosing to use an alternative browser where they can.
Also seeing a large upturn in iPhone Safari over in mobile IE. Ie, Win Mobile, almost nothing, but mobile safari getting up close to a full 1%
No? Then you haven't tried all ways of trying to secure the box. XP (or any windows really) can be configured to be pretty sure, you just need to know shit from chocolate, pull your finger out and actually DO IT.
Do I like doing that? No. Do I do that? No. But if i was desperate to secure a windows box from idiots, this is the path i'd be going down...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Pretty SECURE, i meant, not pretty sure. Its early and i'm halfway through my coffee... :-\
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
People are browsing from work less as they get laid off/worry about getting layed off. IE usage has always been higher thanks to its dominance in the workplace.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
My http://www.chess-boutique.com/ retail site reports over the last seven days:
51% IE
40% FF
5% Chrome
3% Opera
2% Unknown.
Odd thing is, I haven't gotten a single Safari hit in the last seven days. Usually it's higher than Opera and sometimes higher than Chrome. Though Chrome appears to be picking up steam of late.
I think he'll be OK. There are a lot of stupid people out there...
There is no shortage of them here either ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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Netcraft has confirmed: Internet Explorer is dying.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Facebook used to show a warning to IE6 users, don't know if they still do
Microsoft doesn't need a "browser" for the sake of the internet, but rather for the sake of driving the deployment of .Net and Silverlight applications to the desktop in the corporate world. The fact that you can VPN-client those applications is crucial to a world where remote support and wandering workers are now a fact of life.
I don't think they really care about web standards, because the "standards" supported by their own tools are all that matters to the corporate world. I've recently (2 weeks) started doing some code in C#.Net instead of Java, and I must say it's one seductively integrated toolkit/framework compared to Java land. I'm actually productive after only a couple of weeks, where Java and J2EE took me a couple of years to learn to any useful degree.
Nor am I finding that C#.Net is anything remotely like Java. It's more reminiscent of VB to me than Java.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I think the statistical anomaly was more about Linux's share dropping from 1% to 0.50 (a 50% drop!). But no, we couldn't possibly bring THAT up on Slashdot, could we?
The drop in IE use is probably inversely proportional to the rise in unemployment.
With millions of people being laid off work, they are surfing at home and using sensible browsers.
Only people surfing at work get stuck using IE. My current gig is still using IE6!
IE is bad with Ajax sites for example Citadel email.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
We stopped supporting it on our site - www.ausgamers.com. If you go to it in IE6 you get a big fat warning at the top advising you to upgrade along with a link to Firefox.
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Why should we suffer for your sins, AC?
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
Disabled NoScript so the web would "work".
That sounds completely reasonable, disabling scripting does in fact make sites "not work".
Why are you foisting an extension for hardcore goatporn browsers onto regular corporate users?
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
http://static.worldsoft-cms.info/doc/agent-trends.html (trend from around 25K domains)
seems msie is losing some share but not as dramatic.
I had to stop using IE because it is running slow on Google Apps. And I keep getting JS errors. Switched to chrome and it's like the browser was designed for those apps. Wait, was it?
Perhaps Firefox' greatest contribution to the web will not be it's own coronation, but as the entity that provided the elbow room for true competition to develop. This is consistent with the spirit and intent of the modern WWW as a great equalizer, distributing freedoms, voices, and choices throughout the world. The free market is cool when it works...
Their original strategic reason is still there - they don't want internet applications to replace Windows as the application platform of choice, and to the extent that internet-based applications do take over, they want to control the software platform (ie. IE). That's why they went to such lengths to drive Netscape out of business, and that's why they keep pouring money into IE development and fighting related antitrust case in the EU, Korea and Japan. If they gave up and let Firefox take over the browser market, Firefox-only web applications would become viable... and since Firefox is available on multiple operating systems, it would only weaken the Windows monopoly.
I've been working on a custom LAMP application for about 4 years now. I stopped worrying about IE a year ago. That is to say, no IE testing what so ever. I just don't care how bad it looks in IE. If the users don't like it in IE, they need to find someone who cares. And I mean in any version IE 5, IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, IE 9, IE 10, IE11...
...but on a month by month basis: http://www.paullee.com/computers
My web domain.
Try this site that I found on some /. sig:
http://what-is-what.com/
It displays all wrong in IE, and has some broken ad at the bottom for Firefox. A _broken_ add, even broken in Firefox.
Thank for reading to the sig. You may stop reading now. It is safe. There is no more content. Why are you still reading?
I've setup an apache server on my box to share some photo's and data with my friends. Only one of them was using IE. The rest of them mostly chrome, one safari, and about two firefox users.
Even my dad is switching ;)
a 12.5% drop
I run the website MapmyIndia.com (http://maps.mapmyindia.com). Reading this post I did a quick check on the browser usage. Here are the current stats:
IE (all variants): 58%
Moz (all variants): 28%
Webkit based (Chrome/Safari): 13%
Based on the trend of about one year, both IE and Mozilla shares have dropped! Webkit based browsers have increased from about 1-2% to 13%. Opera usage is still negligible.
On the site I am currently working on we push for an upgrade to ie7 or some other browser that isn't ie6. Since it is a fairly popular site, I suspect ie6 usage will drop off soon.
Even the most adamant IE users here are starting to switch to firefox because it's too much of a pain in the ass to use IE. FIrst they changed things in IE7 - and now again in IE8 - and the browser complains with stupid dialogs all the time asking this or that. Many sites just don't work in IE8 with default settings ...
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Am close to the hosting of a wide range of official musical artiste sites and am not seeing any particular variation in IE's share over the past six months. The breakdown varies according to the artist's demographic (with a few international artist sites down to ~60% MSIE), but in terms of certain artists, where the audience is largely the average tech-unsavvy Joe / young family home (think: soap opera / reality TV enthusiasts), if anything IE is up a percentage point or two in the past few months. Then again am looking at awstats so anything is possible
working fine for me in Chrome :)
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Probably, though it still will be large. woots test.
I have access to Google Analytics data for several sites:
US site non IT subject matter - 65/25 IE/Firefox for about 80,000 unique visitors/month
Global site (US+Canada 50% of visits) similar subject matter to above - 54/33 IE/Firefox for about 9,000 visitors
The 5-6 French sites I have access to are also in the 5x/3x range - subject matter is agriculture. IE is banned in many public services in France which is one of the reasons.
realkiwi
You can get the old site back. Help and Preferences > Classic Index > General > tick "Use Classic Index". Pow, begone, shitty JavaScript.
I did this a couple of months ago and haven't looked back. It makes /. tolerable again.
I write bullshit
If lots of school computers use IE, and lots of kids use other browsers at home, then this could explain the sudden shift.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
i just checked 3 sites i look after (admittedly with Google Analytics)
1. Uk wide site - for designers/advertising so more Macs used and business, less likely to change browsers
- May: IE 58%
- June IE 59%
2. Hi Fi Shop Glasgow - more home visitors
- May: IE 65%
- June IE 60%
3. Pub/Venue London - more home visitors and more tech aware than Glasgow??
- May: IE 53%
- June IE 50%
Reinstalling your entire computer seems easy... just carry it out of the room, then set put it back???
Looks fine in lynx. Have you tried that?
You can negotiate for more vacation unless you are at an entry level.
I've successfully negotiated an extra week of vacation for the first 6 months of work. I took that week 2 months after arriving on the job.
As a contractor, vacation is easy. I don't work, I don't get paid. Getting a nice paycheck means you can afford to take more time off.
Finally, most of America wastes a week of vacation over Xmas. That usually leaves just 1 more week. 2 days taken Thanksgiving week and now you're left with a few long weekends. That's it.
Not exactly the most reliable statistics. How can a browser have a higher market share than another browser with 3x as many users? Yeah, Net Applications reported that.
My site kayakfun.info (dutch-language site about whitewater kayaking, so no tech-bias) runs Webalizer stats so I only see the top 15 agents, amid lots of bots, but here is the summary from feb 2009 to jun 2009:
So "collapsing" ? No, IE total is just slowly degrading for evolutionary reasons, most likely asymptotically approaching zero after a long time. I sincerely hope IE6 and 7 drop out of the top15 really soon, IE8 is not that bad.
I run three web sites, including a company's site. All of them have shown significat drops in IE usage, including (Thank goodness) IE6. The faster we get rid of that stain the better for Lady McBeth's mind.
- Kc
-- Kevin C. Redden kcredden@ gmail 392992
Our high traffic sites in Europe have seen a VERY large month on month rise in Opera usage, mostly taken from Firefox which has stagnated and even dropped slightly in the last couple of months. Safari or Chrome barely registers on the list at all.
It's something like.
65% IE
20% Firefox
8% Opera
Then everything else.
Why are these "statistics" reported here every freaking month, despite the fact that they are suspect in their validity and that their collection methods are not open for review or comment? The statistics that Net Applications collects are based solely on their customer base, and yet despite my pointing this out every time it is posted - the posts continue each month.
I work for a large Credit Union; our site gets about 23,000 visits per day, and is obviously not a "tech" site. 2nd quarter 2009 stats:
IE: 76.98%
FF: 18.39%
Safari: 3.24%
So maybe we have farther to go that people suspect. But given our completely non-tech-savvy visitors, FF at almost 20% is amazing.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
"People are browsing from work less as they get laid off/worry about getting layed off. IE usage has always been higher thanks to its dominance in the workplace"
That and it being impossible to use anything else but IE in the workplace and IE beign tied to Bling as its default search engine.
He isn't a corporate user. It's a friend of mine, and his wife asked me to lock down the box as much as possible because she needs it for work and her husband and kids had blown it up twice in a two-month period. I told her that NoScript was a PITA, but she was willing to try it to protect her PC from her family.
:-)
So while I agree with you in a general sense (that NoScript is not for novices), this was a special request. But I was sure to emphasize how important it was, and to try to pre-whitelist the sites they used frequently, and to encourage them to try unlocking one domain at a time, and I defaulted it to "temporarily allow target domain".
AND I told them to lay off the goat porn, but she has a husband and three adolescent boys.
Perhaps someone already brought this up - IE 8 may have a user agent string that is not being grokked properly. IE 8 has been a recommended update for about the last month and a half and that coincides nicely with the anomalous statistics.
1. Kids yes, hubby no. (Although last week his wife got fed up and so he lost admin privs, too.)
:-)
2. a. It's XP Home
b. I'm a programmer, not a sys admin
c. I use Linux, so Windows isn't my strength
d. It never occurred to me
3. Over my head. Isn't that domain-related stuff? Can it apply to XP Home?
4. I told them to stop using IE and use Firefox, instead.
And although I'm tempted to retaliate for the "shit for chocolate" remark, I'll be a gentleman and assume you weren't being malicious.
Is that you Hexslinger? You are the only guy I know perverse enough to create a FORTH in javascript.
Hi Tom,
I read your journal about hating the home page. Allow me to suggest the Lite mode preferences: "Use Classic Index, Simple Design, Low Bandwidth, No Icons".
It looks a little boring but loads quickly.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
More people being out of work means they are doing all their surfing from home.
Conclusion: Fewer corporate computers on the net means less IE on the net.
I dropped support for IE 6 a long time ago.
That said, I have had reports of some older web sites recently that are very broken in IE 7 and 8 all of a sudden.
Living in Chile
I checked December 2008 and June 2009. I only looked at pages, not at requests, and I did not factor out robots. I have roughly 235k page views in both months. In 12/2008 17% were from all versions of IE. In 6/2009 only 3% were from all versions of IE. In 6/2009 IE 8 was on the list of browsers.
My site appeals to game programmers so the viewers are mostly geeks like me and it has always been light on IE visitors. But, wow, only 3%?
Stonewolf
I run a web-based online football manager game, and for July, I see: :)
40.19% Firefox 3
30.05% Internet Explorer 7.0
8.01% Internet Explorer 6.0
6.37% Opera 9
5.95% Chrome
4.49% Internet Explorer 8.0
1.95% Safari
1.65% Firefox 2
98,66% of my traffic consisted of these browsers
42,55 of the traffic was coming from IE
----------
In june, the numbers read:
40.75% Firefox 3
30.06% Internet Explorer 7.0
8.20% Internet Explorer 6.0
6.09% Chrome
6.04% Opera 9
3.39% Internet Explorer 8.0
1.99% Firefox 2
1.86% Safari
98,38% of my traffic consisted of these browsers
41,65 of the traffic was coming from IE
----------
Way back in January, the numbers looked like this:
36.51% Internet Explorer 7.0
35.49% Firefox 3
13.70% Internet Explorer 6.0
4.95% Opera 9
3.92% Firefox 2
1.95% Chrome
1.54% Safari
0.58% Firefox 1
0.40% Internet Explorer 8.0
99,04% of my traffic consisted of these browsers
50,61 of the traffic was coming from IE
----------
Whether anyone feels like making any conclusions based on these numbers, I don't know
But from my end, it seems I had the biggest changes in IE/Non-IE ratio in the months November last yer until April this year...
- Here's to everyone with no signature!
No, you read that right. One of our clients had their IE6 usage climb from about 20% to about 23%.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Google analytics for our community college website. I do see IE trending down over time, but no large jump from last month to this month.
Jun 7th through July 7th 2009
1. Internet Explorer--459,138 --59.99%
2. Firefox--226,804--29.64%
3. Safari--60,745 --7.94%
4. Chrome--13,584--1.77%
May 7th through Jun 7th 2009
1. Internet Explorer--572,732--60.80%
2. Firefox--293,206--31.13%
3. Safari--57,168--6.07%
4. Chrome--12,858--1.36%
May 7th through Jun 7th 2008
1. Internet Explorer--577,544--70.07%
2. Firefox--199,085--24.15%
3. Safari--41,548--5.04%
4. Mozilla--3,766--0.46%
re: shit from chocolate, just a saying I'm fond of. no not malicious, but just saying... there are ways and means of doing things. Changing OS and throwing away all your apps is a bit of a drastic move.
XP home is a bit brain damaged though I'll admit that... didn't think anyone bothered with it.
Just had a look, xp home can't run administrative templates out of the box. However, you can do the same thing by registry editing: http://www.j79zlr.com/gphome.php
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti linux, anti-mac or whatever. Just annoys me that people blame the OS for being so insecure when largely its a configuration issue...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It looks like an excellent website. Thanks for the tips!
I'm not blaming XP for being insecure. I'm blaming all the jackasses in the world who try to hoodwink the unsophisticated. XP is merely the victim of its own popularity in this regard.
The other pisser is that I have sixteen years' experience as a programmer. I've been paid real US dollars to program in COBOL, C++, VB, bash, and Apple Script (ugh). I'm comfortable with TSO, Windows, OS X, Linux, OS/2, and Solaris. I can do CLI or GUI. I have a heterogeneous home network (XP, OS X, and 2 Linux boxen) that's usually mostly working (even with two precocious boys who like to test it).
And I STILL sometimes struggle with the administrative tasks. How is Joe Six-Pack expected to cope?