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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!
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.
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?
Did it loose 73% of its core developer?
I dunno, but what I'm interested in is what they did with the other 27% of him.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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 agree, the main reason I don't use Chrome is because of all the plugins I use with Firefox. Also I've notice more Macs in my server logs over the past few years. And definitely more people using Firefox. I've noticed a lot more Wii's and PS3's in the logs as well. Not sure if I'm just noticing it more though.
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...
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.
What I noticed is a dramatic shift in the listening to your IT guy lately.
People actually listen now instead of blowing me off and going right back to their porn surfing with IE.
The bad economy makes people actually listen when the IT guy says "I'll be back in 30 days to collect another $250.00 if you dont change your internet habits."
I love a bad economy, it forces people to be less stupid.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
iPhone/iPod browsing makes up about half of one percent of Web usage. Desktop Safari makes up about 10% of Web usage. Firefox makes up about 25% of Web usage. I don't think the iPhone is having quite the impact you think the iPhone is having.
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.
I love a bad economy, it forces people to be less stupid.
But apparently a large portion of your business was relying on the fact people are stupid. Now what?
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?
I think he'll be OK. There are a lot of stupid people out there...
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.
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).
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%
What I really would like to see is the browser share of the Slashdot logs.
...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.
There's an inexhaustible supply of work thinking for people who can't or won't. (Sort of like there will always be work for sysadmins, because even here in the future nothing works.) The problem is that the work itself resembles being paid lots of money to dredge through sewage by hand.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
There's no difference. None of them come while you are awake.
Zing!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
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
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!
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.
> how much of the difference between commercial and OSS really is technical
If regular people are leaving IE for Safari or Chrome or Firefox in large numbers it is for technical reasons not political because even I don't understand WTF you are talking about. A recent poll showed only 8% of the public know what a "Web Browser" is. The fact that WebKit is BSD licensed and Firefox GPL probably has no meaningful impact on IE market share.
Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all 2x-8x faster than the latest IE, and you can run the latest Safari and Chrome on mobiles also. You can run Firefox completely for free on almost any PC hardware because you just have to install Ubuntu and there you go. At the same time, IE is a disaster. An epic technical failure. The current mobile version is based on the 1998 PC version.
You don't need to look any further than technical as the IE users peel off. The contrast is extremely stark.
I'm consulting in an all-Microsoft shop right now and they have all 2003 stuff and what they want is to move to Web apps, so they are thinking of standardizing company-wide on Chrome, at first on Windows and then later on Linux or a Google client OS. Nobody talks about moving to whatever is coming out of Microsoft tomorrow or ever. Their conversation around Microsoft for years has been how to keep it all running without upgrading it any further, basically an I-T freeze. Now they can see Web apps and cheap PC clients and of course smart phones for all as the next steps, and Microsoft is 0/3 in those categories. Also, they are moving away from paper faster than ever and Word does not have a "Publish to Web" command, there is no enthusiasm for a new version of Office, which is why they're still using 2003.
Microsoft's technical problems surely come at least in part from their inability to accept that some software projects, like browser engines and operating system cores, are better done in a community way through open source and standardization. But at the end of the day if your stuff works, nobody cares how you made the sausage. IE is falling under its own weight right now, and just when Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are really shining. The new typography in Firefox 3.5 really impressed me, and I was happy to see good typography from someone other than Apple and Adobe. Safari is so easy to use and so fast, what a joy. Chrome is a great business browser that will replace IE in a lot of corporate environments over the next few years and everyone will be better for it.