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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.
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
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%.
Does your web site not work on Safari or are you reading your statistics wrong?
my blog
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.
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.
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?
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).
What I really would like to see is the browser share of the Slashdot logs.
As others said, forget spoofing.
However, ad blockers break the data collection for most analytics system. So it is likely that Firefox is being underreported, just because the of the popularity of ABP, NoScript, various cookie blockers, and so on.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
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!
Hmm. You do realize that Safari reports itself as Mozilla/5.0, right?
Here's mine:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.1 Safari/530.18
They do this because various websites sniff for various browsers, and they want to show up as much like Mozilla/Gecko as possible. If your user agent parser isn't very smart, it might miss the Safari/530.18 part of that user agent string.
Of course, another possible explanation is that you work for a dental insurance company, for whom the most common users of the website are likely dental receptionists (for submitting claims), followed by people in HR (for signing up for services and looking up services on behalf of employees), both of which groups likely use only Windows machines.