Slashdot Mirror
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?"
...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.
It always takes a while to educate the whole population with regards to technical stuff, after a while, it becomes public knowledge although ;-)))
The tough part isn't making it public knowledge, the difficulty is in making it common knowledge.
To compare this to more sinister things: Notice of your house being demolished on Tuesday can be put up in a dark cellar with no stairs at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory of the planning office guarded by a Leopard. This is public knowledge.
Making a news cast on the fact a new road is being run through your neighbourhood and personally notifying everyone whose house will be demolished is much more difficult. This is common knowlege.
At the risk of being slightly controversial .. how much of the difference between commercial and OSS really is technical?
Don't get me wrong, I'm rabidly pro-F/L/OSS, and nudge "ordinary" people towards it wherever I can, but I think it's a bit of a simplification to describe it as purely technically superior. When it does push the envelope, it normally drives the commercial world to react and improve, so they're usually roughly level-pegging at the feature level.
Where it really shines, I think, is in harder-to-define areas. Ethics, for one. Architectural taste, for another (debian got package management right 10 - 15 years ago - has windows caught up yet?) Social/organizational factors - the maintenance and repository models used by open OS distributions works so well that the commercial world is mimicking it with "app stores." Lastly, of course, there's motivation - I trust Ubuntu and Mozilla to fix security holes because it's the Right Thing and because they want to do a good job, and not just because they're scared of getting caught out, which I always feel is the mindset in the commercial world.
I understand these things are probably harder to explain to the general public, but can we at least be a bit more honest / precise amongst ourselves?
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!