Firefox Passes IE6 In Browser Share

Jared sends word of Ars Technica coverage of Net Applications' monthly browser share numbers. What's significant this time is that Firefox has finally passed IE6 in worldwide share. "Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser. ... In October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth. Between October and September, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.07 percentage points (from 65.71 percent to 64.64 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.32 percentage points (from 23.75 percent to 24.07 percent). ... Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions have more share than the newer ones (we can only hope that as Windows 7 gains popularity, this trend will reverse)." Ars presents a graph with their own site's browser share picture, and as you might expect it's very different from the general population's.

Comments

StatCounter etc

[sopssa]

Just remember that StatCounter and other stat counting sites tend to be very US and English language generic - completely ignoring Russia and China and such.

What's interesting is that Opera actually has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE (and not just a single version).

But good that people are finally starting to move off from IE6.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Dartz-IRL]

The thing is, most people see Internet Explorer as 'The Internet', in much the same way that they see Ms Windows as 'The computer'. I mean, I installed Firefox on a parents laptop, and they're first worry was that they wouldn't be able to find their favourite website 'because it was a different internet'. People who don't grasp this concept will never see a reason to upgrade, and unfortunately, this means a silent majority of PC users probably never will.

Re:StatCounter etc

[AliasMarlowe]

Opera is also listed as #3 for Europe, ahead of Safari and Chrome. The gap between Firefox (all versions) and IE (all versions) is also rather narrower for Europe than for North America.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-200902-200902-bar
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-monthly-200902-200902-bar

Re:StatCounter etc

[MichaelSmith]

The thing is, most Americans see Internet Explorer as 'The Internet'

Fixed that for you.

No my mum is an Australian and she is exactly the same. Fortunately she has three offspring to install software for her.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Forthac4]

What are you talking about? StatCounter has information an russia and china.

Re:StatCounter etc

[shadowknot]

I don't like to feed trolls normally but I do wonder that if T. Rolland McFlamebait over here had posted something akin to "The thing is, most Chinese see Internet Explorer as 'The Internet'" people would find it less acceptable. It seems, at least to me and maybe I _am_ biased, that it's often fine to beat-up on Americans or use the convenient stereotype without the racist connotations that would be associated were you talking about another culture or people.

Re:StatCounter etc

[aodhan]

Hi,

I work at StatCounter and I would just like to point out that we have a very diverse sample size from around the world.

As per http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#sample-size for July 2009 here was the breakdown of our sample pageviews for the month.

        * 1.3 billion United States
        * 570 million Brazil
        * 280 million Turkey
        * 260 million Germany
        * 250 million Thailand
        * 240 million China
        * 240 million United Kingdom
        * 180 million Indonesia
        * 160 million Canada
        * 140 million India
        * 109 million Russia

Re:StatCounter etc

[Eivind]

True. And it generalizes. The general rule is, you're 'allowed' to say things about majority-groups who are in power, that you can't say about others.

So, if you're adult, male, white, middle-class, christian, heterosexual, well-educated, you're fair game.

Whereas if you're a lesbian, jewish, old, female from Ghana, you can hardly be *described* without it being perceived as racism.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Rockoon]

You call it a flame because you are an American?

The fact is that MOST people in former soviet republic countries dont even *use* Internet Explorer, which makes the poster I replied to demonstrably myopic. Sure, maybe he isnt from America after all, but that doesnt change the fact that most of the world isnt stuck on Internet Explorer. IE usage is below 50% worldwide. Thats a fact. He begins with incorrect bullshit.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, Italy here, and most of my lusers at work can't grasp the difference between internet and internet explorer. most of them will mix the browser and the net "my internet is broken and the like).

The similarity in the name and my fellow Italians ignorance in english don't help either.

Re:StatCounter etc

[RiotingPacifist]

something a bit more current (last 3 days so not stat significant):
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-monthly-200911-200911-bar - FF3.5 is most popular in Europe (ie6 has half of FF3.0)
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-na-monthly-200911-200911-bar - IE7 is most popular in US (ie6 ~= safari)

overall
EU (50% v 40%)
US (60% v 30%)

Re:StatCounter etc

[zullnero]

What's interesting is that Opera actually has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE (and not just a single version).

I'm not sure why you'd find that more interesting than the fact that Chrome passed Safari or whatever.

The only thing I can think of that means anything in this whole "browser wars" thing, and it doesn't mean as much now as it did 4 years ago, is how vital it is to absolutely stick to web standards as a result of cross browser compliance. Otherwise, it's pretty much irrelevant. My phone has a webkit browser fully integrated into it, so when I hit the web with it, I'm probably being detected as using Safari or whatever...and when I do a search with my Windows desktop through the file explorer, I'm making a hit with IE...and when I fire up Firefox to browse the news...same deal. You can't even detect if people are committed users of a browser anymore (well, unless you install spyware on their router to log their browser usage) because you kind of are stuck using so many different ones over the course of a day these days. And that's why I'm saying the browser wars are pretty much irrelevant, and at the very least, these silly usage stats. And now that OS's have embraced the notion of full browser integration, it's only going to get redundant with OS usage stats.

Re:StatCounter etc

[fredrik70]

Not true, my mother thinks the same, she's swedish. My gf's british parents thought the same (until I reeducated them - they still insists on ie because they can run all their weird flashgames and what not in ie - yes their computer crawls with viruses and trojans, one feels slightly dirty after using it)

Re:StatCounter etc

[jabjoe]

I really don't think it's that bad. It is acceptable to mock majority groups with power because they cann't be described as being oppressed. It's just not the same for minority groups as they will be uncertain enough about their place already. It's just a case of show a little empathy. And that's before you bring the tangled mess of history into it. If you're a adult, male, white, middle-class, heterosexual and well-educated, in the west at least, you are at such a tremendous advantage (because those with power are like you) you just can't ask for the same protections as a old jewish lesbian from Ghana.

Re:StatCounter etc

[obarthelemy]

I personally find that kinda normal ?

I'd maybe add that you can make fun of your own peer group, i.e. gay jokes by gays, Jew jokes by jews... don't bother me. I remember once during a one-woman-show trying to imagine it was a guy on stage... the girl was hilarious, I'd have docked a guy for the same spiel.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Zonnald]

So your parents didn't actually research this for themselves to make an informed descision?
Did they actually tell you they felt they needed a change because they where having a problem?
Just wondering.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Negrin]

The gap between Firefox (all versions) and IE (all versions) is also rather narrower for Europe than for North America.

Yeah, but there's something worth considering. I'm from Poland, which boasts FF leadership over IE (I am an Opera user myself but still) and there's something I realized, thinking about Poland's (and other Central European countries') results and also the massive Opera market share in Russia. Thing is, these are the countries with lower Internet penetration than North America. You have considerably moms and dads online, not to mention grannies and grandpas than, say, in the States. It's only natural that a younger, more tech-savvy Internet population will boost FF (or, more rarely, Opera) usage. Consequently, this is reflected in combined stats for Europe, because it's the less-developed countries that "help" Firefox ratings. If you look at many Western European countries, you will see results similar to the American ones. Granted, that theory totally doesn't explain 60% Firefox market share in Germany :)

Re:StatCounter etc

[Dartz-IRL]

Not really. They didn't ask for anything really. They weren't having a problem at all, they knew no better than Internet exploder. Their computer had a virus and I cleaned it out, installing Firefox at the same time. I told them to use Firefox from then on... cue confusion. It was partly my fault for not explaining it.

Re:StatCounter etc

[LordVader717]

No, that doesn't explain it. Poland actually has relatively high Internet penetration. Developing countries on the other hand seem to be much more dependant on Internet Explorer, although this might have something to do with the popularity of Internet Cafés rather than a home connection.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Shikaku]

I go a few steps further. IE skin, Adblock with all malware sites, silent upgrades. They won't notice the difference.

Re:StatCounter etc

[hedwards]

That's hardly accurate. The accurate thing to say is that there's a grossly disproportionate amount of harm done. An adult, male, white, middle-class, christian, heterosexual, well educated person has all of his rights and can definitely get help if somebody is harassing him. In the case of the former it's hardly worth wasting time or energy on as it's not like we're going to have a vote on his rights.

Whereas a lesbian, jewish, old, female from Ghana probably doesn't have full access to the legal system or related protections in many parts of the country. In this case it's definitely worth getting worked up about, yesterdays referenda in Maine and Washington give a good deal of validity to considering it a more severe problem.

The casting of those two as similar is a tactic which the Klan used for many years because it played upon the entitlement and spoiled attitude that a lot of people with full rights have.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Negrin]

I never said Poland had low Internet penetration, just that I think the mom-and-pop user category is significantly smaller. You know, the kind of people who get their computer and never ever install a thing on it, modify it or update it in any way. Obviously my view can be skewed, since I'm just talking about what I see and know myself. Still, I talked to a Dutch friend today (who used to work at an ISP help desk) and he said "everyone is online here, even grandpas and grannies". Now, I would never say that about where I live. And I think it makes at least a bit of a difference.

And of course I'm not claiming I've found the one answer to a great mystery either. I making this up as I go, for Pete's sake :) Just saying it's definitely _one_ of the factors to keep in mind.

Re:StatCounter etc

[p51d007]

The only reason IE is still as high as it is, is because 99% of the people using it don't know there is an alternative. Heck, it isn't that hard to get people to switch. If I can get my SEVENTY SIX YEAR OLD father to switch to Firefox (he calls it Mozilla LOL), then you can get anyone to switch.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Jason Levine]

They might see Internet Explorer as "The Internet", but this is behavior that can easily be changed. My company actually had to block Google Chrome (not a decision I agree with, mind you) because too many people were installing it (somehow without knowing what they were doing) and then reporting problems with our Intranet*. When we asked what browser they were using, they wouldn't know but when pressed they would say "I'm using The Google Internet." Their view of IE as "The Internet" was easily changed to Google Chrome being "The Internet" (albeit one by Google).

* As a note, I wrote our Intranet to work in all versions of IE and FireFox. I'm unsure why it doesn't work with Google Chrome but as Chrome consists of less than 1% of our Intranet traffic, it is not worth my time to debug it.

Re:StatCounter etc

[realityimpaired]

Then you can't really blame that on your parents' ignorance, can you? You admit that you didn't bother to explain it.

I've been blessed... both of my parents have held jobs as computer programmers in the past. But for some things, I still have to explain to my mother when I want her to change something she's doing. She's smart enough to listen to her daughter, but it still took many years for her to clue in that I know more about computers than my father. In the past when I needed her to change something, I would explain it to my dad who would explain it to her... somehow, it held more weight for her that way than if it came straight from me.

But the thing is... people will be resistant to change for change's sake. If you want them to start doing something differently, you have to explain to them why what they've been doing in the past isn't working, or is doing things wrongly. If, as far as they can see, it's been working just fine for them, then they won't see a reason to change. Incidentally, that's probably why you still see so many damned SUV's on the highways in North America.

But if you were to make a simple security change, like requiring TLS on your mail server, you would have to explain to your users why you needed it. That, of course, will mean explaining why you need them to switch to Thunderbird for mail (MS Outlook and Outlook Express won't permanently accept self-signed SSL certificates, assuming you don't have the resources to buy a certificate from an organization like VeriSign), why using encryption on e-mail is good for the privacy of their mail, why requiring encrypted passwords will allow you to help maintain security on the mail server, etc. etc.. If you don't explain this to your users, then they're going to feel like you're just broadsiding them with sweeping changes, and they're going to complain bitterly and resist it in every way possible.

Re:StatCounter etc

[zippthorne]

You can't afford $150 per year? Maybe you should consider outsourcing your mail servers.

If you simply must use self-signed cert, then you must send the cert out-of-band. So your explanation will also include instructions for adding the certificate to various operating systems.

Re:StatCounter etc

[commodore64_love]

>>>you have to explain to them why what they've been doing in the past isn't working, or is doing things wrongly.

Internet Explorer is an open door for viruses. My PC was plagued with viruses. I would clean them up, and then they'd quickly come back. Since I uninstalled IE all the virus problems have disappeared. POINT: Because you have IE your PC is also being attacked; you need to get rid of it.

Switch to Firefox or Opera.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Rocketship Underpant]

You, sir, will be hearing from my lawyer about this outrage!

Sincerely,
Ms. Mwambala Gertrude "Army Boots" Goldstein

Re:StatCounter etc

[noahisaac]

Not really. Statscounter, for all its bias and flaws, shows that most of the IE6 users are in Africa and China. North America, and especially Europe have far fewer IE users, and very few IE6 users.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Dartz-IRL]

You're right, of course. It is my fault for not explaining them.But computer technology is not something I'm good at explaining, without referring to more technology, which I'll then have to explain. It's just too much hassle to try and make them understand.

There is also a small satisfaction that comes from saying "Trust me, it's for your own good" to my parents, after having heard those exact same words hundreds of times myself growing up, with nary an explanation as to how it was my own good.

Re:StatCounter etc

[kent_eh]

As a member of one of those "groups who have the power" I (as an individual) don't feel very powerful, wealthy or in control of much of anything.
And I resent being called the cause of some other group's problems, simply because I look like someone who might have done something bad to their ancestors.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Yaotzin]

Obviously there is a lack of car analogies in the communication between you and your parents. Try telling them that the internet is like a road and browsers are like cars. All cars (browsers) can use the road (internet), but some are faster (Opera), some have better handling (Firefox?), and some browsers are like a '93 Ford Taurus with rust for an engine (IE6).

Re:StatCounter etc

[salarelv]

My friends are using gmail but IE was damn slow and I showed them that Firefox is way faster. Then they didn't made any stupid comments like "I like the The Intternet better" and started using Firefox gladly. We geeks have to show the benefits not just saying "it's better".

Re:StatCounter etc

[h4rm0ny]

Don't know why you got "Redundant" for that. It's true. Even archetypal parents (and there are plenty of tech-savvy ones) nowadays understand the principle of the Internet. They survived this long on the planet - they can grasp the idea of using a different browser even if you need to explain that Favourites are now called Bookmarks or whatever.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Abcd1234]

As a member of one of those "groups who have the power" I (as an individual) don't feel very powerful, wealthy or in control of much of anything.

Go visit a slum some day, then tell me again how difficult your life is. Trust me, you have plenty of power and wealth. But, like so many other Slashdot nerds, your worldview is so narrow (probably thanks to a lifetime spent in a basement) that you don't even realize it. Which is probably while libertarianism is so popular around here...

Re:StatCounter etc

[mcgrew]

So, if you're adult, male, white, middle-class, christian, heterosexual, well-educated, you're fair game. Whereas if you're a lesbian, jewish, old, female from Ghana, you can hardly be *described* without it being perceived as racism

I'm a black lesbian trapped in a middle class white man's body!

Re:StatCounter etc

[h4rm0ny]

A confusion of terms between you and the GP, there. The GP said that most of the world isn't on IE and meant that for most countries, IE wasn't the most popular browser. And that is relevant information as he's talking about relative distribution of browser usage. You've summed the users from all countries and said that the highest used is IE. That's also relevant information because you are talking about worldwide browser totals. But you're not talking about the same thing. The GP is actually correct in what he says (he's highlighting that the USA's "IE = the Internet" mindset is less prevalent in other parts of the world. However, you think he's saying something else.

Re:StatCounter etc

[jjoelc]

I did find the solution to that... (at least it has worked for me so far...) Install FF. Change all instances of the icon to the big blue "e", and label them all "The Internet".. If you have particularly observant offenders (not likely considering the situation...) Change the title bar text to match, Use an IE clone skin, and set silent upgrades...

Re:StatCounter etc

[word_virus]

And tell me again why we're molly-coddling this people? Folks see enough of their favorite parts of the internet go dark due to having legacy browsers that can't properly render the pages and they WILL upgrade, just like people upgraded from analog to digital over-the-air television. Good news is you don't even need a fourty-dollar mail-in coupon to get a new web browser.

Re:StatCounter etc

[CSMatt]

Versions of IE before IE4 were actually called "The Internet" on the desktop and had an icon of a globe and a magnifying glass.

No other major browser has the word "Internet" in its name, and if it did Microsoft could probably sue for trademark violation. No doubt calling their browser "Internet Explorer" instead of "Web Explorer" to take advantage of the then-more-well-known term "Internet" over "Web" worked out well for them. They may have actually propagated continued confusion of the two terms by doing so.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Maxo-Texas]

That's about what I tell my friends. "Using IE is like walking around the internet with a "Kick Me!" sign on your back."

My best friend hates no-script but has grudgingly come to accept it after I spent some time training her to permanently accept sites she likes instead of temporarily accepting them, to notice the red S (which means some functionality has been blocked), and when I pointed out some of the javascript shenanigans that were occuring when she allowed the entire site (as if she didn't have noscript) like pop-ups and even attempts to execute C libraries (caught by Vista anyway but still) and so on.

Re:StatCounter etc

[bunratty]

No, no, no! Hasn't this been explained enough already? It's a series of TUBES, dammit!

Re:StatCounter etc

[plague3106]

You're doing something wrong then. I've used IE for quite a while now after ditching FF, and I've yet to get a virus.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Archangel Michael]

Okay,

Here's one. How would you explain the same exact situation in one place where it is seemingly blatantly by color of skin, where there is no significant differences in color of skin?

Poverty and slums and ghettos are fairly universal thoughout the world, and very rarely does it matter what color of skin one has, compared to others.

In Africa, there are whole regions where black on black power struggles occur, and the minority is not that significantly different than the majority.

The point I'm making, is that it isn't color of skin that is the cause, it is just something to distract from the REAL cause, man's inhumanity to man.

The worst propgators of this are not the white Anglo Christian heterosexual males (Most aren't Anglo btw), but the self hating race baiters like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright.

They do nothing to resolve the issue of man's inhumanity to man, and turn any dialogue into self fulfilling prophecies.

Whenever you have people pitting one group against another group, it is nothing short of hatred. PERIOD.

Yes, I've been to slums around the world. They are all around the world, and the only thing in common is that you have one group of people being pitted against another, without regard to individuality, and rarely does it have anything to do with "race".

Libertarians don't care about power, or authority, except for that of the individual. Power accumulated into groups is where the problems truly lie. The problem with people like yourself, is that they see power in terms of groups of people, and yet seek solutions by grouping people for power consolidation, which really is the problem in the first place.

True libertarians realize the catch22 nature of using groups to isolate individuals from the power of self.

THAT is why libertarianism is popular around here, as it is about liberty of all people, not just the groups you belong to.

Re:StatCounter etc

[muxxa]

Not so, you can break down the StatCounter stats by country: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-CN-monthly-200810-200911 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-200810-200911

Re:StatCounter etc

[Golddess]

Personally I prefer the South Park approach, and strive to be an equal opportunity offender.

Re:StatCounter etc

[BZ]

So it's ok to mock someone whom you've stereotyped as being "like those in power" until you discover that they are not in fact like them for some reason?

Cut out the double standards; mocking people is no good no matter what. But a lot of what the PC crowd wants to silence isn't exactly "mocking".

Re:StatCounter etc

[Abcd1234]

Poverty and slums and ghettos are fairly universal thoughout the world, and very rarely does it matter what color of skin one has, compared to others.

And that right there is where you lost me. This statement is utterly absurd. Poverty is very often linked to ethnicity *specifically* because ethnic groups are targeted. Are are you going to try and convince me that ghettos in the US aren't predominantly non-anglo?

In fact, that's the whole fucking point. As a white person, your parents, and their grandparents, and so on, haven't been subject to the legacy of US slavery and ongoing racism. As a consequence, you have wealth and power that individuals of those groups don't... hell, the very fact that you've supposedly "been to slums around the world" is proof of that fact (last I checked, the poor and downtrodden can't really afford to visit international slums).

As for your claims of traveling the world, if that didn't open your eyes to the wealth and power you possess, then, frankly, you're an idiot. If anything, such experiences should've highlighted to you the sheer level of wealth, freedom, and power you enjoy, which would never have been available to you had you been born a minority in a St. Louis slum.

THAT is why libertarianism is popular around here, as it is about liberty of all people

No, libertarianism is about liberty for those who can afford it. Fortunately, Slashdot is overwhelmingly dominated by middle to upper-middle class nerds who think that they're downtrodden because the government wants to take away their right to mod their Xbox. But they have no idea what real poverty is like, and as such, they lack the vision to understand just how much power the wealthy have over the poor thanks to their possessing the lion's share of the world's wealth, despite making up a fraction of the world's population.

Re:StatCounter etc

[nametaken]

That story brightened my day a little.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Neil Hodges]

Web standards are there for a reason.

Re:StatCounter etc

[godawful]

This is why I used to apply the Internet Explorer icon to Firefox, and rename the shortcut "Internet"... what they don't know can't hurt them.

Re:StatCounter etc

[rolando2424]

So, if you're adult, male, white, middle-class, christian, heterosexual, well-educated, you're fair game.

Thank God I'm atheist.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Just Some Guy]

As a white person, your parents, and their grandparents, and so on, haven't been subject to the legacy of US slavery and ongoing racism.

I'm part Irish. I'd like you to tell my grandparents that they - and their neighbors, the Italians - are part of a white, privileged, un-discriminated-against upper class.

Of course, you'd have to go to the Irish and Italian ghettos to find them.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Jason Levine]

I do use web standards. The problem I've found is that not every browser implements web standards 100%. Not Firefox, not Opera, not Chrome (and certainly not IE though that should surprise nobody). So my page might look fine in Firefox (which happens to be my browser of choice) but might look awful in Chrome.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Myrimos]

I work at StatCounter and I would just like to point out that we have a very diverse sample size from around the world.

Respectfully, your numbers show quantity, but no guarantee of diversity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_heterogeneity

Re:StatCounter etc

[Anonymous Coward]

So, basically what GP said is true: "very US and English language generic".

English speaking (millions): 1300 + 240 + 160 = 1700,

Non-english: 570+280+260+250+240+180+140+109 = 2029

45% English language speaking...

Re:StatCounter etc

[Archangel Michael]

Wealth power. Your whole argument is based on this flawed point.

Here is a test of who has power and who doesn't. Call someone a racial slur. If you're white, and someone hears you, you'll likely lose something valuable, either job, money or whatever.

If however, you're a minority, you won't. THAT is power. Not only that, it is power based on groupings based on race.

As for your ethnicity claims, again that just proves my point. Groups weilding power over other groups. But that is the nature of groups, and it is worldwide and without regard to anything other than artificial groups, clans, race.

One of the reasons people keep missing my point, is that they can't see the forest for the trees. There is a good reason why the Declaration of Independance says "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". Those are INDIVIDUAL rights that can only be taken by force.

Liberty is for all, not just those that can afford it. True liberty and libertarianism values the individual over the collective. Liberty is not a guarantor of success, just the opportunity of it.

And it is interesting that in the age of Obama, Pelosi and Reed, how people can claim special privilege to white males. The problem is, that people expect different results without effort.

And since you know nothing of me, I had to work hard for my experiences, they weren't handed to me on a silver platter. I'm not rich, wealthy and I've had to dumpster dive a time or two in my life.

I came to the town I now live in, with a suitcase, backpack and a couple hundred dollars. I got my education by working hard, while going to school. I bussed tables at a restaurant, lived with a bunch of people I didn't really like, and focused on the goal.

The same opportunity exists for anyone in St Louis or Watts or Brooklyn. The problem is, people like you keep telling people in those situations that there is no opportunity because of some artificial barrier you see, that doesn't really exist.

In reality, I blame people like you as much as anyone else. The biggest racists in the US are people like yourself who keep seeing racism where none exists.

And no, I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist, the continued existence of the KKK is ample proof. However we just elected a Black President in a large part because he is black.

Again, true liberty has nothing to do with wealth or status, or power. It has to do with valuing individuals over the group. Your whole post is proof that you cannot see anything but groups.

And that makes it impossible for you to realize that you're the problem, not the solution.

Re:StatCounter etc

[jwhitener]

"Poverty is very often linked to ethnicity *specifically*"

More generically, it is linked to immigration date plus the ability to integrate in society.

There used to be Irish ghettos in America. There wasn't as much resistance to their integration, so those ghettos disappeared.

The resistance to African American integration due to racism, and the very long duration of that resistance, meant that the African American community (inner cities, etc..) had created a new city culture, that sadly, is largely stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty.

I've watched many documentaries on that vicious cycle, and at this point, it has very little to do with racism. That culture that was created, almost as a defense mechanism to racism, seems to be now holding itself back.

From what gather, the most effective programs in the ghettos tend to get kids involved at a very early age in community development and pride, and tend to try to help the family as a whole, not just the kid. Unfortunately, those inner city programs are very underfunded for the task they have in front of them.

Re:StatCounter etc

[SerpensV]

Fortunately, my mother sees Firefox as "The Internet".

Re:StatCounter etc

[Abcd1234]

I came to the town I now live in, with a suitcase, backpack and a couple hundred dollars. I got my education by working hard, while going to school. I bussed tables at a restaurant, lived with a bunch of people I didn't really like, and focused on the goal.

Uhuh. And imagine how much harder that would've been if your primary school education had been at an inner city school where crime is rampant, good teachers can't be found, and books and equipment are out-dated. Imagine how much harder that would've been if you grew up in a community paralyzed by drugs, violence, and criminality. Imagine how much harder it would've been if, being black or Arabic or Sikh, employers would refuse to hire you, or your landlord would refuse to rent a place to you.

So yeah, congratulations, pulling yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps. Great for you, buddy. But you did it without the legacy of racism and slavery holding you back, and that makes it an awful lot easier to climb the ol' social ladder.

But of course, I don't expect you to understand any of this. You seem to believe that racism isn't alive and well in the US. That a black president somehow makes everything magically okay, wiping away the inner-city ghettos, the unjust justice system, the poverty economic, social, and cultural poverty. That's absurd, of course, but I'm beginning to realize that describes your entire view on race and racism in America.

Re:StatCounter etc

[RobertM1968]

Versions since IE4 have also had their icons labelled "The Internet" - I think that ended with the US DOJ Consent Decree.

No doubt calling their browser "Internet Explorer" instead of "Web Explorer" to take advantage of the then-more-well-known term "Internet" over "Web" worked out well for them.

Well, I dont think they wanted to call it "Web Explorer" since IBM was using that name for the OS/2 browser regardless. But, like you said, I am sure their reasons were for the suspicions you suggested.

Re:StatCounter etc

[grcumb]

* As a note, I wrote our Intranet to work in all versions of IE and FireFox. I'm unsure why it doesn't work with Google Chrome but as Chrome consists of less than 1% of our Intranet traffic, it is not worth my time to debug it.

You know, I saw exactly this argument countless times in the first (late 90s) round of the web standards wars. In case you didn't get the memo: After a long, bloody and ugly war of attrition, standards won. There's a lot of mopping up still to do, but standards hold all the important ground.

Do yourself a favour and debug these problems. They may be affecting 1% of your users right now, but they point to something not right. Chrome is based on Webkit, which is also at the heart of the Safari browser. Don't wait until your CxO's new MacBook Air doesn't work on your site. Fix it now and save yourself some grief down the road.

And heck, even if you have a captive audience consisting of one browser - it'll do you some good to understand the problem regardless. Frequently bugs like these are hiding bigger bugs behind them. My definition of professionalism includes getting out ahead of problems, but YMMV.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Abcd1234]

I'm just being snarky, but the Irish were treated like crap historically. Alot of groups were. African Americans included. There is a major difference though...baggage.

Well, that and one other pesky little detail: ongoing racism, right now, today. Or have you frequently found yourself discriminated against for being of Irish descent?

Yeah. Didn't think so.

Re:StatCounter etc

[stewbacca]

I've been blessed... both of my parents have held jobs as computer programmers in the past.

Odd. Most people feel blessed for surviving cancer, having 4 limbs and working eye-sight, and having a job, for example. I guess I'm cursed since my mom was a secretary and my dad was a mechanic.

Re:StatCounter etc

[stewbacca]

Poverty and slums and ghettos are fairly universal thoughout the world, and very rarely does it matter what color of skin one has, compared to others.

And the one constant is the people in these ghettos look very differently from the people living in the suburbs around the ghettos.

Re:StatCounter etc

[stewbacca]

In reality, I blame people like you as much as anyone else. The biggest racists in the US are people like yourself who keep seeing racism where none exists.

People like you, who cling to the false notion of "reverse racism" are living proof that racism is alive and strong in America.

Re:StatCounter etc

[stewbacca]

Wow. Best pwnage ever! Wish I hadn't commented already, because +1 Pwned! would be much better than me two feeble rebuttals.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Archangel Michael]

So, basically you're saying that a poor black person from the ghetto is impossibly held back by factors other than effort?

You're a racist, you just don't know it.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Abcd1234]

So, basically you're saying that a poor black person from the ghetto is impossibly held back by factors other than effort?

Did I say that? Huh, no, I didn't. Twit.

What I said was that a poor black kid born in a ghetto is faced with barriers that you never were, barriers that come as a consequence of racism, both contemporary and historical, barriers that you never had to face. Can those barriers be overcome? Certainly. It happens every day. But that doesn't mean those barriers don't exist, that they don't hold people down, or that overcoming them isn't extremely difficult.

Frankly, your worldview is so incredibly simplistic and naive it's hard to imagine you get by from day to day. You seem to honestly believe that everyone is born on the same playing field, and that world is infinitely fair, as if all people, from birth to death, are faced with the same difficulties and offered the same opportunities throughout their lives, and the only difference is how hard they work. You're seemingly one of those jackasses that believes that those suffering in poverty do so only because they're lazy and unmotivated, that socioeconomic or cultural factors can't possibly come into play. Worse, you couch it in some sort of holier-than-thou libertarian bullshit, convinced you're just trying to do those poor people a favour by refusing to believe that the outcomes in a person's life are sometimes influenced by factors that are out of their control.

That kind of blindness would be funny if it weren't so sad and counterproductive.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Abcd1234]

I'm part Irish. I'd like you to tell my grandparents that they - and their neighbors, the Italians - are part of a white, privileged, un-discriminated-against upper class.

Oh, wow, so you or your parents or grandparents have been discriminated against for being Irish/Italian? Really? What happened? Did someone refuse you a job? Did a cop harass you? Have you been disproportionately selected for TSA screenings? Were you given an excessively severe sentence in court?

No?

Then guess what? You're part of the privileged white majority, despite what your immigrant ancestors may have gone through.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Just Some Guy]

Yes, to all of the above. You really need to read up on anti-Irish discrimination, with similar stories for other white ethnic groups.

It's an odd world you inhabit where being any kind of white has always been a free pass. Things are different today where discrimination is based much more on class than race or ethnicity.

And of course none of this has anything to do with Firefox or IE, so I'm done on the subject.

Re:StatCounter etc

[bobzaguy]

you use all the "right" words, but you still come off as blind.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Wyvern2005]

Oh get off the soapbox you brainless prat! Irish, italian, Spanish, black, asian, East Indian..EVERYOne has caught the shit at one time or another. The only difference now is that, instead of getting over it, some are encouraged to make whining about it a lifestyle. Want to earn privlege and respect? Go to college, study your ass off and then do something worthwhile with yourself. Want to whine about how the world is holding you down? Door's that way and here's a chit for the chaplain.

Re:StatCounter etc

[uninformedLuddite]

That's easy mate you blame the jews

Re:StatCounter etc

[kent_eh]

Intereasting guessing.
Of course, you have no idea about my history.
I did happen to grow up poor, on a farm that just barely made ends meet. My wife grew up on welfare in a horrible neighborhood.
I'm busting my ass to make sure my kids have it better than I did.
And I get pissed off when someone sitting on his ass in the street calls me a "fucking asshole whitey" for not helping feed his addictions.

Re:StatCounter etc

[Risen888]

All right, I wrote half a reply to your other comment and then decided not to submit it, but now you've pissed me off.

I am a young, able-bodied, moderately well-educated (if largely self-educated) white male with a decent job. When I was a child, I lived in the rural midwest version of a ghetto. There weren't really any non-white people where I grew up (I remember there being exactly one black girl in my elementary school, and some Latino families that mostly worked at the egg packing plant). SHOCKINGLY there are poor people there. I know, holy shit, poor white people! It must just blow your mind.

But it's true, and I know it's true because I was one. I didn't realize it at the time because I was a kid and you think whatever you're doing is normal when you're six. But I'm here to tell you that you don't know a fucking thing about poverty.

I'm not talking about lower middle class suburban "poor." I'm not talking about "working poor." I'm talking about pissing in a bucket because we didn't have running water. I'm talking about learning at age four to tear apart scavenged old refrigerators and console TVs so we could take the copper wire the fifty miles into town every month or so to get a hundred bucks at the recycling plant and that being food and gas and bills for a family of six. I'm talking about poor.

I'm not telling you this to build cred or get your widdle heart bleeding or make you feel bad and apologize, I don't really give a rat's ass. I am telling you this because you need to wake the fuck up and understand that poverty and hierarchy and class division are everywhere. They've been the bane of man since the dawn of man. Is it often linked to race, especially in very heterogeneous and urbanized areas? Yeah it is.

But there is poverty everywhere. There's poverty in LA, there's poverty in Africa, there's poverty in rural Minnesota. Real poverty that your simplistic "white privilege" rhetoric can in no way even begin to penetrate. I'm sure it's very comforting to you to have this great monolithic theory of why there's injustice in the world, but I can personally assure you that you just do not get it.

Re:StatCounter etc

[cbiltcliffe]

And the one constant is the people in these ghettos look very differently from the people living in the suburbs around the ghettos.

I can't claim to have been to slums all around the world, but I've done a little bit of travelling.

My question to you is:

Have you ever been to Cuba? I'd guess not, as, by the demographic of this site, you're likely to be American.

In Cuba, there a ghettos of Latino people living in one room tin shacks with dirt floors. Then, there are suburbs of Latino people living in moderately nice apartments and row houses. Then, there are the upper class people, who drive Mercedes' and BMWs, but they're Latino.

As you can plainly see, each class of people looks completely different from the next. :-/

I'd guess with the exception of South Africa, the majority of African ghettos are filled with people that look the same as the suburbs around them, too.

You claim that people from slums are too poor to travel, but then seem to imply that slums are full of immigrants who look different. Well, if they're immigrants, then they must have travelled.
How about ghettos that are full of people still in their cultural homeland? They do exist, you know....

Antarctica!

[AliasMarlowe]

And Firefox has a 100.0% share in Antarctica (maybe just 1 user?) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-an-monthly-200902-200902-bar

Re:Antarctica!

[nicodoggie]

Well, obviously Tux uses Firefox doesn't he??

Re:Antarctica!

[Hurricane78]

I just wondered why the Statcounter site showed without and images or stylesheets... Then I remembered that it was completely blocked in AdBlock. Because it's a nasty dirty disgusting privacy-raping piece of shit of a tracking site!

I would see their statistics as more than useless, as everyone with half a brain already blocks them and their nasty friends.

Re:Antarctica!

[rvw]

And Firefox has a 100.0% share in Antarctica (maybe just 1 user?) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-an-monthly-200902-200902-bar

Those damned penguins!

Re:Antarctica!

[antifoidulus]

You would think IceWeasel would win there....

Re:Antarctica!

[morgan_greywolf]

No way. Real penguins use IceWeasel, of course!

Re:Antarctica!

[HaraldBlatand]

Yes, this was in February 09 - and at the time the guy was runningWindows 2003. Since then, a lot has happened. Now, Firefox only has about 80%. But still Windows-only in Tuxland.

Re:Antarctica!

[MrNaz]

I think there's an iPhone app for doing that.
No, seriously.

Re:Antarctica!

[amplt1337]

Nah. Iceweasel.

Re:Antarctica!

[commodore64_love]

This article/summary/whatever seems much ado about nothing.

Saying that Firefox beat IE6 is like bragging Mac OS X surpassed Windows 98 in usage share. oooh.

Re:Antarctica!

[Golddess]

I thought the same thing at first, until I RTFA (I know I know, shame on me). IE6 is the dominate IE version, ahead of both IE7 and IE8 (individually). If Windows 98 were the dominate Windows version today, then OSX surpassing it in usage share certainly would not be "much ado about nothing".

Re:Antarctica!

[Abreu]

Saying that Firefox beat IE6 is like bragging Mac OS X surpassed Windows 98 in usage share. oooh.

If only that were true...

Re:Antarctica!

[skeeto]

Ha, yeah, I've got them completely blocked too. This means they're definitely under-reporting for Firefox users (or any browser with commonly used ad blocking), since these users tend to block this stuff.

Re:Antarctica!

[negRo_slim]

Saying that Firefox beat IE6 is like bragging Mac OS X surpassed Windows 98 in usage share. oooh.

October, 2009

3 Mac OS X 7.38%

9 Windows 98 0.10%

Re:Antarctica!

[VoltageX]

I would think that IceWeasel would be in use in Antarctica.

Re:Antarctica!

[RockDoctor]

And Firefox has a 100.0% share in Antarctica (maybe just 1 user?)

Sorry to break the rules and inject some data into a religious war, but Antarctica has a lot more than one computer-using penguin. The multiple nationalities with multiple permanently occupied bases have large numbers of permanently-connected computers down there. I've seen it cited in the past that Antarctica has the highest proportion of Linux-driven computers of any continent ; this may still be true, because there aren't that many clueless trailer-trash inbred retards who buy their internet machines at Walmart, and a high proportion of scientists, technicians and ... well, nerds.
I believe there's a magic money machine ("ATM" in American English?) at McMurdo Sound ; I wonder if it's a Tux, an OS/2 (still quite likely, I'm told, for MMMs) or even, horror of horrors, a Windoze Box?

Hrmm

[acehole]

So when are they going to rip the skin off Firefox to show "Netscape Navigator - Double Ultimate Gold edition"?

Re:Hrmm

[TheLink]

Hey you just gave me flashbacks... To the days of Blink tags and "under construction" geocities pages filled with bookmarks and animated GIFs.

I think I'll have to delay dinner...

Re:Hrmm

[tepples]

So when are they going to rip the skin off Firefox to show "Netscape Navigator - Double Ultimate Gold edition"?

That happened in 2007. Netscape 8 and 9 were rebranded versions of Mozilla Firefox.

This site best viewed with NOT ie6

[sakdoctor]

I noticed many sites seem to have abandoned IE6 support completely. (Using ie 6 and 7 in virtualized XP for testing stuff)

This is how it should be. No CSS hacks, just IE6 users seeing the bugs that arise through their usage of the browser.
And for corporate users who HAVE to use ie6, for the nicest value of "they can fuck off"; they can fuck off.

Re:This site best viewed with NOT ie6

[RAMMS EIN]

``And for corporate users who HAVE to use ie6, for the nicest value of "they can fuck off"; they can fuck off.''

It is, after all, not you who imposes this requirement on them.

Re:This site best viewed with NOT ie6

[ducomputergeek]

We run an E-commerce site that gets a lot of hits and orders from IE6 yet. Roughly IE 6 accounts for 40% of the visits and completed orders. If our latest version doesn't work with IE6, that's 40% of our revenue gone. Fortunely, that number is finally starting to trend down and quick. Three months ago, IE6 accounted for nearly 60% of all our traffic.

Re:This site best viewed with NOT ie6

[dukeofurl01]

I know Firefox is superior, but I try telling that to my friend who always counters with ___ website doesn't work right in Firefox, and then there's my parents who are small business owners, and some of their vendors have websites that use ActiveX things, so of course don't work with anything but IE.

Net Applications? Slashdot!

[BikeHelmet]

Looks like Firefox is dominating Ars. I'm more interested in slashdot browser share percentages, though.

Oh great and benevolent admins, please gift us with your knowledge!...

Re:Net Applications? Slashdot!

[MichaelSmith]

I have posted this on /. a few times in the past so...

$ grep -v 10.1.1. access_log.* | grep access_point_names | cut -d" " -f12- | grep Linux | wc -l
          180
$ grep -v 10.1.1. access_log.* | grep access_point_names | cut -d" " -f12- | grep Windows | wc -l
          331
$ grep -v 10.1.1. access_log.* | grep access_point_names | cut -d" " -f12- | grep Macintosh | wc -l
            83

Re:Net Applications? Slashdot!

[The Wooden Badger]

What do you want to bet the IE users that visit ARS are doing it on their work computer?

Re:Net Applications? Slashdot!

[brentonboy]

agreed. lets see the browser shares for slashdot!

Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[stressclq]

What this article tells me is that a quarter of the internet users are still using a web browser that was released on August 27, 2001. From a peak market share of %95, it has only come down to %23 in eight years (and change). This survival is against massive "IE6 must die" campaigns, introduction of fairly decent, and standards compliant (comparatively) browsers such as Firefox, Chrome the ever improving Safari and the somehow still surviving gem named Opera.

I was hoping that the rise of social applications like Facebook, Youtube, Digg and popular business applications such as the ones made by 37signals would put an end, a final nail in the coffin if you like, to this monster from the digital stone age.

But obviously I was, surely together with a whole bunch of other fellow /.'ers, wrong. Obviously, the failure of adaptation of Vista played some role in this outcome. But seeing that building a better (faster, compliant, etc.) browser is not the answer, I'm now genuinely hoping that Windows 7 will massively succeed so that we can put an end to this abomination.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[TrancePhreak]

I also saw it a bit as people who advocated staying away from Vista were also likely to be talking to people who probably haven't updated their browser.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[should_be_linear]

As far as JavaScript performance is concerned (increasingly important on the modern websites), moving from IE6 to IE8 is like moving from Segway to Bicycle.... on the highway.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[nmg196]

Unfortunately many/most people do not use social networking sites, and if they do, they don't necessarily have friends who care about browser versions. Any IE6 must die campaign should be supported by the actual websites themselves, telling users they need to upgrade directly on the page.

What would be good is a small bit of script people can embed in their page, which tells IE 6 users to upgrade to something more recent by outputting a bar above the top of the page which tells them what to do. Kind of like the bar that appears on YouTube if you look at it in IE 6. I've found one or two such scripts on the net but I won't use any which don't endorse IE 8 as an acceptable upgrade to IE 6 as I believe it's a worthy replacement and users should have a choice of ALL major browsers when prompted to upgrade. Many sites are simply trying to force users to upgrade to Firefox or Opera. Many users will not do this just because both of those browsers have stupid names (who the hell thought "Opera" was a good name for a modern web browser? Firefox isn't much better and my parents think it sounds like a children's toy and refuse to click the icon).

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[maglor_83]

It didn't have 95% market share when it was released.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[Antiocheian]

I still use IE6 in the very few cases I have to use an internet explorer browser. That amounts to less than 0.01% of my browsing; all sites that require IE to work are compatible to IE6 so no reason to upgrade because I don't use it for anything else.

As an additional bonus I get the pleasure of knowing that I am forcing web designers to do extra work to support legacy. That means more people needed in IT.

See my point?

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately many/most people do not use social networking sites

o_O

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[TrancePhreak]

IE8 is available for Windows XP, your point is moot. If users wanted to upgrade they could.

Most modern operating systems also have a web browser, shipping without one is not a wise choice. As illustrated, it also allows third parties to rely on there already being a rendering engine for such things available (or I have even seen documention ship as html).

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[Chief Camel Breeder]

What this article tells me is that a quarter of the internet users are still using a web browser that was released on August 27, 2001. From a peak market share of %95, it has only come down to %23 in eight years (and change). [...]

That's telling us something about the replacement cycle for Windows PCs. As discussed on Slashdot before, few private citizens will upgrade a browser on a "working" machine.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[Kjella]

I don't care. Honestly, I don't care h0w much 25% of the internet population want to punish themselves. Non-IE has 35%. IE8 is starting to become a decent browser. You don't screw with half your market. Whatever hacks you must do for IE6, it's just web developer annoyances. They're not my annoyances.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[realityimpaired]

As an additional bonus I get the pleasure of knowing that I am forcing web designers to do extra work to support legacy. That means more people needed in IT.

As somebody who's designed sites recently, I have to say: I design for W3C compliance and certifiability. I test it in IE8 under Windows 7, and Firefox 3.5. I have a reasonable assurance, since I run it through the W3C compliance checker, that it will render properly under Webkit and Opera. If it doesn't render for IE6, too bad.

An increasing number of designers are giving up support for legacy versions of browsers, and IE6 is simply the next one to fall by the wayside. It is happening, and it's happening with some big name sites. Some of these big name sites will render anyway, but will give you a nice big warning suggesting that you're using an insecure browser, and asking that you consider upgrading. Google will save a cookie on your computer and only show it to you once, but the first time you visit Google in IE6, it will give you a warning that IE6 is insecure and suggest that you download Chrome or Firefox. There's other sites that will do the same.

And hell, even Microsoft's site doesn't render properly in IE6 any more. I'm in the unfortunate situation of having to use IE6 at work (because some nutter at IT decided it would be the standard), and I have seen, first hand, that the MSDN site, for example, does not render properly in IE6.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[TropicalCoder]

I'm now genuinely hoping that Windows 7 will massively succeed so that we can put an end to this abomination.

It was Microsoft created the very browser you call "this monster from the digital stone age" in the first place but you want to see Microsoft's Windows 7 massively succeed??? That doesn't make any sense at all to me. Microsoft deliberately ignored standards with IE 6 as a ploy to hijack the internet and promote their monopoly. Now you are wishing that very same monopoly massive success - ...and getting modded up for promoting Microsoft! What is wrong with this picture? Why would anybody mod you up for that? Massive adoption of Windows 7 will only further empower and embolden Microsoft to pull more tricks like destroying the ISO to push through their proprietary MSOOXML standard or planting bugs in Firefox.

"I'm now genuinely hoping that Windows 7 will massively fail so that we can put an end to this abomination" - there - corrected it for you.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[sabinm]

Um, you're completely off base here. First of all ie6 browser share is at 18-19%. The subsequent releases (ie7-8) make up the other part of that 62%. Even if we can take it as fact that in 2001 ie6 was 95% of browser share (which we cannot--it was probably ie5 or some sort), then what you're talking about that internet explorer usage has declined 72% in the past eight years, and I would submit that this is significant evidence of the preference of the vast majority of people to Firefox. Considering that a great number of corporations, including the United States federal government still are using ie6, considering that IExplore is the default install on 95% of personal computers, and considering that in order to use firefox you have to 1. connect to the internet 2. know the name of the browser 3. "google" or "get firefox" it and 4. keep changing it back to the default browser every time IEx changes the user back to defaulting to its own, I'd say that firefox isn't the browser that should be worried. Trending at this rate, IE will be a niche browser in the next decade. Although I do tend to like ie8 more than 7 or 6, for me Firefox is MORE compatible with the majority of my websites, including my online banking. Plus I can't stand the fact that they bother me with their "accelerators" crap. I prefer to install my "accelerators" when I needed, not all your pre-loaded crap when I first start up my browser--and I'd wager that most average users feel the same way.

Sir, I do believe you're trolling.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[TrancePhreak]

How often do people who have not even updated their web browser try to reinstall their operating system? I'm putting emphasis on try here.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[mgkimsal2]

It's a bit of a catch-22, because while it's still above that magical 1% mark, you'll do everything you can to cater to those people and make sure the site works 100% for them. This gives them far less reason to upgrade in the first place. And 1% of sales volume is likely pretty darn low, compared to the extra cost of ensuring a 100% experience for IE6. For someone selling $1,000,000 a year, that's $10,000 you're catering towards, when it likely costs more than that in developer time to futz with the site and testing for IE6. For many smaller businesses, a 1% loss, in order to ensure a better experience for everyone else, is usually acceptable.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[gravis777]

The diminishing use of IE6 may be thanks to the deminishing use of XP (although I have no facts to show this). Vista has IE7 and Windows 7 has IE8. Also, for those on IE6 on xp, ie8 is now considered a critical update (not so if you are on ie7, ie8 is a recommended update). So, Microsoft themselves is trying to kill IE6. Now, what would be interesting is if the numbers show an actual increase in Firefox users, or just an increse in IE7 & IE8 with a decrease in IE6. While I am sure Firefox may have gained a few points, I am willing to bet the decrease in IE6 is due mostly to MS trying to kill it, and not to users jumping off the MS bandwagon and embracing Firefox.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[Snover]

For what it's worth, the situation may not be quite as grim as it seems.

If you go to StatCounter Global Stats and look at the breakdown by region, the areas where IE6 usage are still very high are Africa, Asia, and (to a lesser extent) South America. Within North America, Europe, and Oceania, IE6 usage is about 8.5% on weekdays and 5.5% on weekends. Whether this is because evangelism efforts in those regions are failing, or because piracy levels are high and WGA prevents users from updating through the normal OS update mechanism, or because (until Firefox 3.5.4) IE is required for government-mandated encryption to function, I don't know.

There is also an issue that there are a large number of robots, spiders, viruses, and virus scanners that masquerade as IE6; I wouldn’t be surprised if these non-IE6 IE6 visits account for 0.5-1% of the remaining IE6 numbers. Which is frustrating, because getting an accurate count is more important than anything in deciding when to not bother with support.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[tknd]

His point wasn't that IE8 was available, but rather people will just use their computer in the default configuration until they buy a new one. Since many other tech sites (including slashdot) gave Vista bad PR, most people at the stores wouldn't buy a new PC because they heard "vista was bad". So contrary to "use linux" and "use mac" campaigns as well as "use firefox" or "use chrome" campaigns, an actual viable solution to upgrading everyone to new browsers is actually just upgrade to something newer including Windows 7.

If you want an analogy, what should be done is to tell everyone Windows XP and older is "out of style" and anything else (OSX, Linux, Win7) is the new thing. They may be reluctant at first, but when they show up to the stores nothing in their minds will hold them back from buying a new machine that probably has a better browser.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[JasterBobaMereel]

IE8 is not available for Windows NT or Windows 2000....

Yes people are still running these (mostly on internal machines)

And there are many many intranets that rely on the bugs in IE6 to work ....

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[TropicalCoder]

I get modded "Flamebait" for speaking the truth, in response to a shameless plug for Microsoft's latest operating system that gets modded "+5 Interesting"? Please tell me what is so damn interesting about someone's desire to see Microsoft achieve massive domination with Windows 7. We see plugs for Microsoft planted everywhere on the internet and I don't see anything interesting about that. A moderation of "+5 Disgusting" would be more appropriate. What in the world is going on here, when we can no longer speak the truth on Slashdot for fear of upsetting the shills? I will continue to call a spade a spade. For now, I have karma to burn. When my karma runs out - I'm gone, and I'll happily leave Slashdot to the shills and they can have all wonderful conversations between themselves and their sock puppets without my protests. As long as I have enough karma to be visible, however, I'll continue to fight the good fight.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, most people have moved on beyond IE 6.01 SP1 for one good reason: tabular browsing. In fact, a lot of corporate users have switched over to IE 7.0 because of its ability to do tabbed browsing, not to mention much improved security over IE 6.01 SP1.

And with Windows Vista and Windows 7, users are running IE 8.0, which is actually quite good, if a tad slow in some page layout rendering.

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[Antiocheian]

Parent is not a troll. What happened to metamoderation?

Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success...

[nmg196]

There isn't anyone that *cannot* upgrade. All computers that run IE6 can also run IE8 or Firefox - you might need to ask your IT department to do it (in a restricted environment) but it CAN be done. There's nothing special about IE 6 that means it works where IE8 or Firefox would not.

IE6 no more

[AliasMarlowe]

http://www.ie6nomore.com/
Cure the pox. 'nuff said.

Re:IE6 no more

[selven]

http://www.saveie6.com/

Re:IE6 no more

[AliasMarlowe]

http://www.saveie6.com/

That's quite funny! More seriously, IE6 is one case where Ben Tre[*] logic is fully justified:
It must be destroyed to be saved.

[*] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Tre

Re:IE6 no more

[muffen]

Like the comments on that page.

IE6 is the only website browser that should be around.
I don't know what all this buzz is about that Firefork website viewer thing, or that Oprah browser.
I knew she did a talk show and all but web browsers? Get off my interwebs!"

Seriously considering this as my next signature.
"Trying to get your website to work correctly in IE6 is like a puzzle game! Challenging and fun!"

Re:IE6 no more

[blind biker]

I signed.

Ie6 is the new amish

[Ryunosuke]

My job uses WinXp Pro, Ie6, and Office 2003. AND we use an app called QAD in a dos box. It's nice to be in a minority, So I can feel special.

Re:Ie6 is the new amish

[IBBoard]

Ditto here, and the corporate machines are under-specced for all the extra background junk they put on them. Being forced in to IE6 would be terrible if I didn't have a development machine with Linux on it, but I think Office 2003 (or OpenOffice on our dev machines) is preferable to 2007!

Re:Ie6 is the new amish

[kick6]

My job uses WinXp Pro, Ie6, and Office 2003. AND we use an app called QAD in a dos box. It's nice to be in a minority, So I can feel special.

With the exception of the dos box, every corporation I've ever worked for has been the same way. In my current position, I've actually ASKED IT to allow me to install firefox, IE7, or....god ANYTHING with tabs (yea, I have to ask. My company's machines are locked down tighter than a whale's butthole) and have been DENIED. Apparently my company's stance is "no, you can not have a safe browser. Please continue to use the veritable swiss cheese of internet software because its what we've blindly decided to support, and we're to arrogant to change."

Re:Ie6 is the new amish

[IBBoard]

Erm, that'd be "Insert > Reference > Footnote", which auto-numbers by default and lets you choose numbers, numerals, letters or symbols. TBH there's some bits like that and cross-references that I prefer in OpenOffice.

Re:Ie6 is the new amish

[Z34107]

It's because of stuff like this that I learned to like the new Office 2007 ribbon.

I've been a pretty "advanced" user of Word since Windows 3.11 was cool, but 2007 blew me away with features. "Wow, it can do MLA references and source tracking! Wow, it can do footnotes! Wow, it can do xyz!"

Except that all of the "new" features I discovered in 2007 were also in 2003, and some of them were evidently in 6 - I just never knew they were there. Having a tabbed toolbar exposed features my primitive reptile brain never found in the litany of 2003 menus and toolbars.

Now, mod me offtopic!

Re:Ie6 is the new amish

[hodet]

"...My company's machines are locked down tighter than a whale's butthole"

That's a pretty big hole

Interesting Results

[AndrewStephens]

The Ars Technica stats broadly mirrors my own humble blog, I would guess that the techie crowd breaks down 5::2::2::1 Firefox::Safari::IE::Chrome across the board. If this assumption is true, I find it strange that Chrome is not as popular as Safari among the technical people whereas in the general stats they are almost neck-and-neck although less popular overall.

Personally I think that having 4 browsers with significant share (or 6 if you count IE6 and IE7 as separate, incompatible browsers) is very healthy. For a while it looked like it was going to be IE6 stamping on the face of the web forever, but now the population is fragmented web sites have to designed with proper standards in mind.

Re:Interesting Results

[Spad]

Chrome would be my browser of choice were it not for the lack of Adblock, Noscript & IETab; I suspect a lot of other techies feel the same way, which is why Chrome has stayed with such a modest share despite early interest in it.

I can't speak for Safari as every time I've tried to use it (On Windows) I've ended up hating it.

Re:Interesting Results

[adavies42]

my guess would be that very few mac people use chrome, while people who would otherwise be using safari on windows are using chrome instead due to the absolutely horrible first three or four versions apple released. i think it may be somewhat stable now, but those first few releases crashed so often i started wondering if they'd dug up an engineer from Mac OS 8.5 to work on the thing.

Re:Interesting Results

[AndrewStephens]

According to my Google Analytics page, only 4.5% of Safari users were using the Windows version. In some ways I think that is a shame - I like the way Safari renders pages, it does a much better job of smoothing fonts and graphics than the other browsers. Plus it is very quick (although Chrome starts up faster) and the web inspector tools incredibly useful.

But you are right, the first few versions were terrible.

Re:Interesting Results

[apoc.famine]

How many of the tech-site visitors are using iPhones? That might explain the Chrome vs Safari numbers alone.

Re:Interesting Results

[Bigbutt]

Yep, another choice of Firefox for adblock, noscript, and noflash. I tried Chrome once but all the ads and flash had me shut it down and bring Firefox back up. I even use Firefox on my Mac instead of Safari due to the blockers even though it causes the Mac to run a bit hotter.

[John]

Re:Interesting Results

[TropicalCoder]

Chrome would be my browser of choice were it not for the lack of Adblock, Noscript & IETab

I love Chrome! It is just so blazingly fast, I don't have the patience to open Firefox anymore in spite of the fact that I was once a stelwartly loyal fan. The last time I opened Firefox, I counted to 10 before it loaded.
I resisted leaving Firefox at first just because of the protection NoScript provided, though it was such a nuisance when it updated itself every day. Then when I learned that Chrome provides the equivalent protection I never went back. I reasoned that Google is in a very good position to know what web sites need blocking. Chrome also blocks pop-ups. I'm not completely sure what IETab is, but clearly it is having no negative impact on my browser experience or I would know more about it. I think Chrome is an undiscovered gem quietly awaiting its turn for the limelight.

Re:Interesting Results

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I find it strange that Chrome is not as popular as Safari among the technical people whereas in the general stats they are almost neck-and-neck although less popular overall.

The technical people segment of the market is heavily skewed towards OS X and Linux compared to the general population. Just look around at Defcon or Blackhat and count the number of Mac laptops. It's probably five times the number in use by the general population. On OS X, Safari is pretty good (while it is not so good on Windows). On OS X, Chrome is only a dev version and you can't even get it from Google's main site. It's also still buggy. Also, many people who are Safari users don't see the need to move to Chrome, since most of the advantages are already in Safari. So pretty much all of the people that would be running Chrome are running Safari. That's probably enough to skew the statistics for technical sites.

...but now the population is fragmented web sites have to designed with proper standards in mind.

Yeah, too bad Web standards are still considered in terms of which one can't be used at all since the site still has to work with IE. The Web is basically restricted to the subset of Web standards that can be implemented for standards compliant browsers and where there is an alternative method of implementing the same thing for IE with javascript switches. Maybe the Chrome plug-in for IE will help the situation of the crippled Web.

Re:Interesting Results

[the_one(2)]

I need tree style tabs and flash block before i consider moving to chrome. I need my browser to stay usable even with 100+ tabs damnit! Noscript is not a must but would be missed if I switched.

The numbers

[Stan Vassilev]

What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one. If you look only at oldest versions, only newer versions, or all versions together, IE has a solid lead over Firefox in all three categories. I'm not sure about the significance of this, as IE6 being at over 23% share, most sites still to support it for the foreseeable future.

Re:The numbers

[ErroneousBee]

Or looking at it another way, Microsoft appears to be unable to convert its existing userbase to new customers, even for its free offerings.

Re:The numbers

[dingen]

What's most interesting about IE's market share is that version 6 (this oldest one indeed) is actually the most used version of Internet Explorer. Both version 7 (released 3 years ago) and version 8 (released about half a year ago) have not caught on enough to overtake IE6's position as the number one browser out there in sheer market share.

These figures are unlike all other browsers, where the more recent versions have way more market share than the older ones. The usage of Firefox 1 and 2 for example is virtually nothing, while 3.5 is the most popular version. So "all versions of Firefox" actually mean "mostly Firefox 3.5, a bit Firefox 3 and really nothing else", while "all of Internet Explorer" means "Mostly IE6, some IE7 and some IE8".

You are absolutely right that all versions combined, IE is still very dominant, but IE-users are way less inclined to upgrade to more recent versions. Just like Windows XP is still the most popular version of Windows. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing with Microsoft Office. Microsoft just doesn't seem to be able to sell their latest products anymore. This is why it quite significant that Firefox with it's latest product is able to have more market share than Microsoft with it's old version, because the old versions of Microsoft products are the relevant ones.

Re:The numbers

[AliasMarlowe]

What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one.

It's also something that varies by region. Looking at browser versions in Europe, Firefox 3 is on the heels of IE 7, and well ahead of IE 6, which is then followed by Opera 9.6 and Firefox 2. Safari, Chrome, and Opera 9.2 are well behind. Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 are not differentiated, nor are sub-versions of IE 6. Opera 10 and IE 8 do not show yet - they are probably bundled in the "others" category. http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-monthly-200902-200902-bar

Re:The numbers

[ILongForDarkness]

I think what has done MS in is they did some fairly major user facing changes in all their main product offerings. The ribbon in Office, the look and tabs of IE 7-8, the gui, layout of stuff and UAC in Vista etc. People just pretty much said can't I do that with IE 6, Office 2003, XP and people said yeah you can but IE8 Office 2007 and Vista/Win 7 are so much prettier. This was followed by "who cares", and at least in business with "so I'm going to spend all this money and retrain staff and redevelop internal stuff why?".

Re:The numbers

[itschy]

Update your bookmarks, that was half a year ago.
Nowadays Firefox 3.5 is leading
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-monthly-200911-200911-bar

Re:The numbers

[CSMatt]

IE6 has stuck around because Firefox and Chrome (and possibly Safari as well, although I haven't heard anything about its upgrade process) silently push major and minor updates by default, and this is not even noticed by broadband users until they close and restart the browser. IE7 lagged behind for months because Microsoft wanted WGA authentication first, which made IE7 difficult to push through Automatic Updates.

Also, installing a new version of IE is nothing like installing a new version of Firefox. Upgrading IE also upgrades the IE core of Windows, which takes a long time. After download, Firefox takes all of 30 seconds to upgrade, even major releases. Faced with little time and even less incentive to care what browser version they are running, so long as what they have is working, it isn't surprising that a lot of Windows users don't even bother to upgrade IE.

Re:The numbers

[BZ]

Firefox has never silently pushed major updates. It has prompted for major updates, but the user has always had to choose to install it. It does silently install minor (security) updates by default.

Safari uses the same updating mechanism as on Mac: the update window comes up and asks whether you want to update it (as well as iTunes, etc), with all of them preselected if you decide to click ok. Again, pretty simple to say "no" to. I think nowadays it even differentiates between major and minor updates.

Re:The numbers

[careysub]

What's most interesting about IE's market share is that version 6 (this oldest one indeed) is actually the most used version of Internet Explorer. Both version 7 (released 3 years ago) and version 8 (released about half a year ago) have not caught on enough to overtake IE6's position as the number one browser out there in sheer market share.

These figures are unlike all other browsers, where the more recent versions have way more market share than the older ones....

I wonder to what extent this is due to Microsoft's own barriers to IE upgrade - the requirement that the XP user (the large majority of all Windows users) install the so-called "Genuine Advantage" piracy trolling program, and pass its certification of your OS configuration before permitting IE8 download. Those of us who own XP licenses, but find Microsoft's intrusive attempt to control my own installation unacceptable and thus refuse to install the GA spyware, thus cannot get this update. And reportedly something like 22% of all legitimate XP users fail validation once GA is installed, and also can't get the update.

Re:The numbers

[rdnetto]

Just like Windows XP is still the most popular version of Windows

I think you just hit the nail on the head. The majority of people don't keep their computers up-to-date, so they'll have IE6 until they upgrade past XP. Similarly, most businesses will keep running IE6 for compatibility reasons, but when they upgrade to Vista/7 they'll be forced to use a newer version.
It's likely that the market share of each directly influences the other.

Re:The numbers

[dingen]

A much heard argument for not upgrading IE6 to something more up to date is the fact a lot of legacy intranet applications don't seem to work with anything else than IE6. I wonder if this will prevent businesses from adopting Windows 7 as well, as IE6 is not available for that platform.

Re:The numbers

[rdnetto]

Ignoring the higher hardware requirements, I think that the lower uptake of Vista/7 would suggest that businesses are avoiding upgrading so that they can keep IE6.

Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[Tomsk70]

Next we'll be seeing the revelation that Linux has overtaken Windows 98. Or something.

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[blind biker]

Next we'll be seeing the revelation that Linux has overtaken Windows 98.

Well, has it? I know Win98 users are few and far between, but the Linux _desktop_ marketshare is tiny, too.

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[dingen]

It is quite relevant, because IE6 is actually the most used browser in the world. Despite the release of newer versions of Internet Explorer, none of them have caught on enough to change that situation.

This is radically different with all other browsers, where the lastest versions are also the most popular versions of the product.

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[FireFury03]

They will complain bitterly when a site doesn't work though.

I found a solution to that problem a couple of years back. When I first put OpenPisteMap online, I got a lot of complaints from people that it didn't work in IE6. I don't have any Windows machines and I'm not about to buy and install Windows to test it in an 8 year old browser. So I added a note to the website that IE6 users see that basically says "I know it doesn't work in IE6 - if you can fix it, send me a patch". The complaints suddenly stopped. I didn't get sent any patches either, so I guess the IE6 complainers decided that supporting a crappy outdated browser wasn't worth their time either...

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[Technician]

Don't count out the Windows 95 users. Although, to be fair, I can't call myself that until I find an AC adapter. I can't imagine what would happen if I managed to get it onto the net.

It is becoming safer. I forgot where I saw it, but much of the bugs out there target newer versions of Windows and many don't function on Windows 98.

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[Tomsk70]

The most recent article I've seen about this (from two months ago) put IE6 at 21%, and IE7 at 25% - I'd be astonished at those statistics being the same now, especially with IE8 (and now Win7) having been out for a while too. Still, even going on those old figures, IE7 and 8 combined make up 36%, so I'm not sure why you think they haven't caught on.

Not that web developers will take any notice of IE users still outnumbering FF users by over 3 to 1, since they all want to pretend that developing for FF first won't create any problems. In fact, last time I pointed out that this would simply create a second browser war where the users would lose out in order to make the dev geeks happy, I got marked down for trolling. FF may be technically better, but I've yet to see a single machine (now at 150) where the user has password-protected their password list. That alone spells disaster...

I have also yet to work for a company or individual (I contract in Europe) that still runs IE6 on *anything*, hell even my in-laws have upgraded - so it does leave me wondering how they arrive at these figures in the first place.

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm guessing that the intersection of "IE6 users" and "People capable of patching websites into compliance with IE6" is fairly small and (perhaps more importantly) is largely composed of people who have to do that for their day job and don't even want to think about it on their own time.

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[dingen]

Still, even going on those old figures, IE7 and 8 combined make up 36%, so I'm not sure why you think they haven't caught on.

You are right when you say that combining the usage of different versions of Internet Explorer results in quite hefty market share. But not a single version of IE is more popular than version 6. And now Firefox (yes, versions combined) is now popular than every single version of IE, including the most popular version 6.

The article isn't stating Firefox is now more popular than IE, because obviously Microsoft still holds a very dominant position in the browser market. The interesting thing is that the most popular version of IE is a very old one and the most popular version of any other browser is the most recent one.

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[sprint907]

true

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[Tomsk70]

So, to summarise, if you lump all the versions of FF together, they're more popular than IE, as long as you don't allow the numbers IE to do the same....?

And where do you get these statistics from? This is the most recent article I've been able to find -

http://www.techspot.com/news/36374-internet-explorer-loses-71-market-share-during-august-ie6-still-most-used.html

- but as stated before, I find it highly unlikely that all the users/ sites I visit just happen to be the ones that have upgraded to IE7/8.

Another FF issue - I wonder how popular IE/ MS would be if it force-installed updates when opened? How good the coders are is irrelevant - why is this suddenly considered acceptable default behaviour?

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[dingen]

So, to summarise, if you lump all the versions of FF together, they're more popular than IE, as long as you don't allow the numbers IE to do the same....?

Exactly. And since the lump sum of FF means "mostly the latest FF", this is quite relevant for future trends, because the lump of IE means "mostly a very old IE". Of course nobody is saying FF is more popular than IE, that would make no sense whatsoever.

And where do you get these statistics from?

Net Applications. The same source the article referrers to.

- but as stated before, I find it highly unlikely that all the users/ sites I visit just happen to be the ones that have upgraded to IE7/8.

Why? Your own personal experience has little to do with the world as a whole. I know only a few people who use any version of IE at all, but I don't doubt IE's popularity.

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[Bigbutt]

I still have a Windows 98 SE machine. It's a gaming machine for the older stuff though.

[John]

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[Tomsk70]

So, to summarise, if you lump all the versions of FF together, they're more popular than IE, as long as you don't allow the numbers IE to do the same....?

Exactly. And since the lump sum of FF means "mostly the latest FF", this is quite relevant for future trends, because the lump of IE means "mostly a very old IE". Of course nobody is saying FF is more popular than IE, that would make no sense whatsoever.

I'd say that FF is *too* popular with the wrong people (the devs) - but, ignoring the fact that those IE6/ XP boxes will be replaced in the not-too-distant future with Win7/IE8, this leaves us in another no-win - either the statistics are incomplete (which is probably true for dozens of reasons), or the development-swerve towards FF far outweighs the actual usage...leaving us in a second browser war where we all have to run multiple browsers due to fan-boy coders insisting that 'their browser is best'. The fact that IE6 was hell is irrelevant - this sissue hould have been addressed long ago, not once a standard has been introduced that the whole world uses (and when I say standard, I mean what's installed on every machine - so the standard is IE. It's too late to bleat about it not being web-compliant, something should have been done when it mattered).

And where do you get these statistics from?

Net Applications. The same source the article referrers to.

Which (by the text on their site) is way below the actual number of users, which again suggests the stats are incomplete.

- but as stated before, I find it highly unlikely that all the users/ sites I visit just happen to be the ones that have upgraded to IE7/8.

Why? Your own personal experience has little to do with the world as a whole. I know only a few people who use any version of IE at all, but I don't doubt IE's popularity.

I don't agree. I'm not making that statement as someone who only looks to their immediate circle for examples - I (and my team) have to deal with thousands of machines from Europe and Africa. I don't get anyone from my support team calling asking about how to fix IE6. I (and they) should be seeing at least a few sites/ users running it at home, and we don't - usually by the time we get to an XP machine with a problem, the user has already upgraded it themselves. In fact, since it was so horrible, how can all those IE6 users still be happily using it after all this time? It would sort of suggest that they've never had any problems with their browser and have therefore never seen fit to reinstall or upgrade - something that, with Windows, is very, very rare).

It's also worth noting that going by the statistics listed, I should be finding far more FF's than I do and far more IE6's than 7's and 8's (which I don't). I cover remote sites/ VPN users in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Africa - and the remote users are using their own machines, not corporate pre-builds - which suggests that it just happens to be *the rest* of the world as a whole that's on IE6...

It's a similar story with OpenOffice and Linux Desktops - should I start believing the statistics that are regularly bandied about in desperate attempts to make them seem more used than they are? No, I think I'll wait until I actually see them running in a corporate environment. I've been doing this for twenty years now, I've worked for banks, hospitals, schools, investment companies, oil companies, lawyers....all with remote access home users running their own stuff and I'm still waiting to see one. In fact the only times I've seen Linux running is on fellow IT bods' personal boxes, never the users themselves. Macs I've seen a few of (again, less that the supposed market share), but don't get me started on those :-)

Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news?

[aaardwark]

I know you are joking, but there is a more relevant comparison.

Linux overtaking windows 98 has probably happend without anyone noticing it. If linux (all versions) gains a marketshare bigger then XP, you can expect it on the front page again. Tagged with "yearofthelinuxdesktop".

In other news ...

[wye43]

Firefox also passed IE5, and IE4 ...

Re:In other news ...

[dingen]

Firefox has already passed all other versions of Internet Explorer, except until very recently, IE6.

Re:In other news ...

[FireFury03]

A few years ago, I would've considered "$free_browser gets bigger market share than IE6" to be a great thing. These days it just upsets me to think that so many people are still using IE6...

Re:In other news ...

[dingen]

But then again, the browser market is quite different now than it was a few years ago, because large corporations like Google and Apple have hit the scene and Opera became an actual free browser. So while IE6 market share has been declining for years, they haven't all switched to the same product. There used to be only two or three major browsers out there, but in these days you can be the biggest player out there by having a little over 20% market share.

IE6 used to be the biggest browser out there until last month, but actually the vast majority of the surfers were using something else already.

Re:In other news ...

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Yet while Mozilla dropped updates for Firefox 2.x, Microsoft still keeps patching IE 5.01 for Windows 2000 and will until Windows 2000 drops out of extended support next year.

Re:In other news ...

[TropicalCoder]

Yet while Mozilla dropped updates for Firefox 2.x, Microsoft still keeps patching IE 5.01 for Windows 2000 and will until Windows 2000 drops out of extended support next year.

Sorry - I don't get your point. What do you mean to imply here? Microsoft sells IE, in the sense that it bundled with the operating systems they sell. Therefore, Microsoft is obligated to support IE like it is obligated to provide support for all of its other products. Meanwhile, Firefox is a free download, and under no such obligation. In spite of this, it is clear from the statistics that Firefox users can be largely trusted to update, most likely because they have made a concious choice to use Firefox in the first placed.

Re:In other news ...

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Sorry - I don't get your point. What do you mean to imply here?

More of a comment on how people often accuse Microsoft of forced obsolescence, even though they continue to update a product that's almost 10 years old (Windows 2000), including features near no-one use (IE 5.01). Seriously. Who even uses IE 5.01? http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/ms09-054.mspx

Problems are still corporate users and non-techies

[biscuitlover]

This is great, but IE6 is still going to stick around for years. The reasons - as have been widely discussed on these pages before - are:

• Large corporations can't be bothered with the cost and hassle of updating thousands of machines when IE6 is supposedly 'good enough' and doesn't break internal applications which were built on top of its many quirks.
• Many, many home users don't know what a browser is or don't realise that there are alternatives. These people aren't stupid (well, most of them anyway) - they just don't care enough about tech to know the options.

Neither of these situations will change any time soon. Gradual adoption of Windows 7 will certainly help in the second case, but the first one is dependent entirely on enterprise-level IT departments creating lots of work (and therefore cost) for themselves when senior management can't see any tangible benefit... And how soon do you think that will happen?

In other news

[imakemusic]

Tortoise walks past dead Hare.

Film at 11.

Wildly different at work

[Imsdal]

Here are the stats for the company web site for the company I work for. It's a smallish Nordic company, and it's a safe bet that 95% of all visits are from other people at work. (I have no proof of that figure, obviously, but trust me when I say that looking at our site isn't something people do on their free time.)

MS Internet Explorer 2920837 96 %
Unknown 56869 1.8 %
Wget 32632 1 %
Firefox 18582 0.6 %
Safari 4934 0.1 %
Opera 2970 0 %
Mozilla 2532 0 %
LibWWW 148 0 %
Netscape 92 0 %
Nokia Browser (PDA/Phone browser) 12 0 %
Others 7 0 %

These figures are just incredibly different from those in TFA. Figures are page hits for the month of November, i.e. a little more than three days, but the percentages always look like this.

Re:Wildly different at work

[argent]

I'm pretty sure that our internal websites are almost 100% IE, but that's because using Sharepoint in anything but IE is a world of hurt.

Not that using Sharepoint from IE is exactly pleasant, but damn.

Re:Wildly different at work

[Imsdal]

Quite a lot (or even most?) of our visitors are big industrial companies, utilities, government agencies etc. It is quite accurate to describe them as working in tightly controlled environments.

I know for a fact that the website does work in FF, as that is what I use. The relatively high number of Wgets is from automated "screen scrapers" and similar applications. We have quite a lot of data that some organizations probably get this way. Also, we use awstats for the stats, but I can't guarantee that it is quite updated. Thus, I would guess that "Unknown" is almost 0% IE.

I know this data is a complete outlier, that's why I thought it was moderately interesting. What it seems to indicate is that in locked down environemnts, non-IE browsers (and, for that matter, non-Windows desktops) are almost nonexistent.

Re:Wildly different at work

[IBBoard]

Really? I worked as a dev at a company who liked their MS technology and were one of the first (if not the first) in the UK to have a .Net powered intranet. The majority of us devs used Firefox and found it easier than IE since you could even use the quick bookmarks to get to specific numbered articles/tickets. That probably was still back in the days of IE6, though.

Now I get to use a different Sharepoint site, hosted by Microsoft, and it works flawlessly in Firefox on Fedora Linux [i]except[/i] when I need to recover a password. Then the only way to access it is with Opera 9 (not 10) spoofing IE7 on Vista. Firefox, Opera 9 without spoofing and Opera 10 all give an ugly "Internal Server Error" page. Not that I suspect MS of any bad coding or anything, of course...

Re:Wildly different at work

[Pikoro]

HA! Here are the stats from pspthemes.com:

Top 15 of 309 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 2561 34.06% Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)
2 149 1.98% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 Firefox/3.5.4
3 131 1.74% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/3.0.195.27 Safari/532.0
4 126 1.68% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009101601 Firefox/3.0.15
5 122 1.62% Mediapartners-Google
6 111 1.48% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 Firefox/3.5.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
7 95 1.26% Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.htm)
8 89 1.18% Mozilla/5.0 (PLAYSTATION 3; 1.00)
9 62 0.82% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 Firefox/3.5.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
10 61 0.81% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; GTB6; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CL
11 52 0.69% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.3072
12 52 0.69% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/3.0.195.27 Safari/532.0
13 50 0.67% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
14 48 0.64% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)
15 48 0.64% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.045

As you can clearly see, the browser built into the PSP is by far the most popular browser on the intarwebs!

Second place being firefox 3.5.4

Re:Wildly different at work

[Pikoro]

Although, here are the stats for distrowatch.net:
Top 15 of 879 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 2578 5.27% msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
2 1884 3.85% curl/7.18.0 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.18.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8g zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.1
3 874 1.79% msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
4 850 1.74% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
5 833 1.70% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp/3.0; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
6 721 1.47% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
7 689 1.41% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
8 658 1.35% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.13) Gecko/2009080315 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.13
9 612 1.25% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009090216 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.14
10 567 1.16% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
11 415 0.85% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
12 394 0.81% Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.3 Safari/531.9
13 351 0.72% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-AR; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
14 348 0.71% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
15 325 0.66% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

which states that curl gets more usage than both firefox AND ie6...

Re:Wildly different at work

[Midnight Thunder]

Are you one of those sites which is totally broken with anything but IE? I am joking, but in reality the visitors you get depend on what market you are targeting, or at least attracting, and whether you site works with all the browsers listed.

A few years back there were many sites that weren't usable unless you had IE. If you were using one of the other browsers then either you had to dig out IE, or move on to the next site. Happily I see this less and less.

From a web development point of view IE is a bitch, since each version breaks web specifications in different ways. The number of times I have had to implement IE specific hacks is just not funny.

Re:Wildly different at work

[Imsdal]

As I noted in another reply, the site works perfectly well with Firefox, and that is what I use. I can't guarantee that it works with other browsers, but there isn't anything fancy about it, really, so I definitely expect it to work well enough not to force people to switch away from their standard browser.

I should probably have called my post "Wildly different at my particular place of employment". As also noted above, it is a fair assumption that a very large share of users come from environments that are very much locked down. (I was going to say "secured", but that word and IE would just give most /. users a seizure.) And in locked down environments, IE has a market share that is orders of magnitude above other browsers.

Re:Wildly different at work

[argent]

I guess your Sharepoint isn't using all the "features" of ours. I can't edit shared documents or even use all the pulldown options on documents unless I'm using IE.

Re:Wildly different at work

[jim_v2000]

Here's from my blog which has a good amount of Ubuntu centric content:

Internet Explorer 53%
Firefox 31%
Opera 10%
Safari 3%

Re:I 3 IE6.

[maglor_83]

Plus, running IE6 on my machine can provide for potentially interesting conversations if it ever comes up.

And I thought I was dull.

ienotwelcome

[stickmangumby]

http://nfm.id.au/projects/ienotwelcome/
Was originally called iefuckoff, but I changed it to be a little more subtle ;)

Not on my site

[imakemusic]

I help run a website for an art gallery/shop - make of that what you will. The stats for our site is quite different:

Firefox (all versions) 42.1%
IE (all versions) 40.1%
Safari 7.8%
Chrome 4.5%

Go firefox!

Re:Not on my site

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, well, I'm a manager of a Starbucks located near amajor university campus in the most yuppie part of town, and our stats are quite different, too:

Safari: 75%
Firefox (all version): 15%
IE (all versions): 9%
Chrome: 1%

* Note: tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Re:Not on my site

[imakemusic]

What is your point?

Re:Not on my site

[morgan_greywolf]

I'm saying that the kind of person who looks at the website of an art gallery/shop isn't necessarily the same sort of person who logs into Facebook or ESPN.com. It's not exactly a representative sampling.

Re:Not on my site

[Interoperable]

Firefox just doesn't go with a tweed jacket. A PC just doesn't say "indie" as loudly as a mac does. (Odd isn't it? You'd think an esoteric Linux distro would say indie better.)

Re:Not on my site

[imakemusic]

Yes, I know this. That's why I put the part about it being an art gallery in there rather than just saying "my stats are X". That way people can see the difference between my type of site and other types of site.

Oh sorry, I forgot this is Slashdot where only pure, unbiased, verifiable, empirical data is considered worthy of mention.

Re:Not on my site

[ACS Solver]

I have a (PC) gaming-related site. To my knowledge, the amount of IT-expert visitors isn't higher than among the general population, but obviously people who play PC games at least see the PC as something more than just a Web access device. So, over the last 6 months, I'm showing

Firefox 37%
IE 35%
Chrome 15%
Safari 6%
Opera 5%

Note that Chrome's share here is definitely higher than its overall market share. Also, IE6 is also quite unpopular. Out of IE's 35%, IE8 is 13%, IE7 is 17% with IE6 at a bit under 4%.

Re:Not on my site

[imakemusic]

I know a lot of "creatives" (as apposed to destructives?). A lot of them - the majority - use macs. They can and do use PCs but they prefer to use macs for two reasons. One: a lot of the software they use works a whole lot better on macs. Two: you can spend more time actually doing what you needed to do as opposed to PCs or Linux where you spend more time making it work.

Re:Not on my site

[imakemusic]

Disclaimer: I use Windows, Linux and Mac. They all have strengths and weaknesses and each one is better for a certain value of "better".

Win7 or Vista Remarketed...

[TheDarAve]

"(we can only hope that as Windows 7 gains popularity, this trend will reverse)"

Why oh WHY would you even want to hope for that? I think a better thing to hope for would be for Windows XP to lose popularity. Hell, I'd rather see people transition to... *shudder* a mac over Vista Remarketed.

And before I get the "Why don't you try it" or "You're a mac fanboi" crap: My network is 7 linux boxen (2 Cell, 3 SPARC, 2 AMD64) 2 Server 2008 (1 as a workstation, 1 as a DC) 1 Win7 Ultimate, and a hoard (lost count) of Win XP laptops. No macs. No Linux on anything that isn't some form of server.

Re:Win7 or Vista Remarketed...

[realityimpaired]

Why oh WHY would you even want to hope for that? I think a better thing to hope for would be for Windows XP to lose popularity. Hell, I'd rather see people transition to... *shudder* a mac over Vista Remarketed.

Because, idealism aside, it's unrealistic to expect either Mac or Linux to gain a dominant market share as long as the games market targets Windows specifically. Anything *else* can work just fine on either platform, but when your 14-year old son insists that you buy Windows because Random_game_63 doesn't run on anything else, and he *has* to have it because it's the latest and greatest and all his friends are using it and he'd be a pariah if he couldn't play it and you wouldn't want that would you?

And have you actually looked at the changes to the way things are done in Windows 7? It's definitely not "Vista Rebranded". It is a *huge* improvement, both in performance and security, over both XP and Vista. If you *have* to have Windows, then go with Windows 7.

Re:Win7 or Vista Remarketed...

[Z34107]

Why would you call Windows 7 "Vista Remarketed" but run Server 2008?

The latter is Vista.

Re:Win7 or Vista Remarketed...

[TropicalCoder]

[Windows 7] is a *huge* improvement, both in performance and security, over both XP and Vista.

Citations? You have not provided any. Any studies I have seen comparing Win 7 with either XP or Vista certainly do not show "a *huge* improvement" in performance.

when your 14-year old son insists that you buy Windows...

...you have a wonderful opportunity to sit down and have a good talk with him about what a monopoly is and why we don't want to promote one and how bad their business ethics are, just like we educate our children about the environment and other important issue.

Some comparisons...

[tjstork]

All users of every version of FireFox taken together use more than one old version of IE.

Re:Some comparisons...

[Pteraspidomorphi]

I agree we still have a long way to go, but remember the one old version of IE is the one bundled with the most widely used operating system in the world (by far) and all its users have to do in order to use that version is not upgrading or installing anything else, whereas changing to Firefox (in the said operating system) requires them to actively do something about it. The way I see it, people who do upgrade their browser are more likely to upgrade to Firefox (or another browser) than a newer version of IE, which is interesting.

Does that mean... ?

[jonaskoelker]

Next we'll be seeing the revelation that Linux has overtaken Windows 98. Or something.

Does that mean 2008 was the year of Windows 98 on the desktop?

netbooks

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Firefox is too slow and bloated to use on a netbook. I had to switch to IE for netbook use. Firefox is slow as hell and then it will freeze or crash if you try to do anything demanding like watch youtube or visit google finance. Then when you restart it the thing that says "Oops! Looks like Firefox crashed!" made it freeze up! Useless! I used to believe the hype and think Firefox was better than IE now I see it's bloated crap and IE is the one that's actually fast and light.

Re:netbooks

[TropicalCoder]

I had to switch to IE for netbook use.

"Had to"? Who said you had to switch to IE, when there are so many other choices out there? Google Chrome is the first thing that comes to my mind as an excellent alternative, but both Safari and Opera are excellent browsers as well.

I've been collecting stats too...

[BigBadBus]

They're displayed here

IE6

[FrostedWheat]

I decided to collect some stats for the trade services section of my companies website. Our typical customer is *not* technically minded in the least:

MSIE 8.0, 38.4%
MSIE 7.0, 33.8%
Firefox/3.5, 9.5%
MSIE 6.0, 9.1%
Chrome 9, 8.4%
Firefox/3.0, 3.0%
Safari 4, 1.5%

IE 6 is dropping fast, but a very poor showing for Opera and Safari. The OS stats are dominated by Windows XP (62%) and Vista (33%), with OS X and other flavours of Windows taking the remaining few percent. No Linux at all sadly.

Re:IE6

[mxh83]

And when was "Chrome 9" released?

Re:IE6

[koiransuklaa]

Apparently your visitors are not mathematically minded either: Sum of those figures is 103.7% and that's without a line for "unknown"...

Re:IE6

[FrostedWheat]

Whoops, my bad. That was left over from the total count. Safari is the same.

Re:IE6

[FrostedWheat]

Chrome should have been 3.4%, and the rest (Firefox/2 and Opera) are below 1% so I didn't include them.

Re:IE6

[Just Some Guy]

Our typical customer is *not* technically minded in the least:
Chrome 9, 8.4%

Uh-huh. A twelfth of your users have managed to install the geekiest (in a good way) browser around, but they're not very technical.

Re:IE6

[FrostedWheat]

I typo'ed there, it's actually less at 3.4%. Still more than double our Safari users though.

Re:IE6

[Archangel Michael]

Here is my top 5 browsers by %

1 41% Internet Explorer 7.0
2 17% Internet Explorer 6.0
3 15% FireFox 3.5.4
4 15% Internet Explorer 8.0
5 4% FireFox 3.0.15

Most of the IE6 are most likely spam/malware bots looking for exploits, because the page views for these tend to all look like they are looking for a "registration" page, login page, lost password page, etc.

Yes, I have dummy pages setup for just such a purpose.

Old news

[salesgeek]

My websites and our client's websites have been showing Firefox passing up IE6, IE7, and IE8 combined. IE typically shows around 38%, Firefox shows around 39% and all others (mix of Chrome, Safari, Opera and mobile browsers) make up the difference. It's like it 1997 all over again. I'm kind of excited about the whole thing because now the new crop of standards can come to the front faster (SVG, HTML 5, etc...).

It's about time.

Re:Problems are still corporate users and non-tech

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What you say is true. However, the reason we care about browser market shares isn't (in general) evangelical fervor; but concern for web development, features used by web sites, HTML5 vs. Flash, etc, etc. For that reason, what we really care about is not "How many people are using browser X vs. browser Y?" but "How much influence on web development/deployment of new web technologies does browser X or browser Y have?"

Large corporate installations are highly change averse; but they also tend to be unsupportive of non work related web activity. The poor people who code corporate intranet portals will have to support those IE6 users until the end of time; but a fair few of them can't even ping facebook through the corporate firewall, much less make it into the browser stats.

I suspect that the total extinction of IE6 could take years to decades; but that its survival will be extremely uneven, and largely irrelevant outside of large corporate legacy applications. Nontechie home users may never upgrade; but computers don't last forever and you already have to go out of your way to buy a computer with IE6 on it today. That won't get any easier as time passes.

Don't confuse "unpopular" with "unsupported"

[Crash Culligan]

A company I worked for had similar similar browser-share for their major web applications, and it really had little to do with Opera and Safari being niche outcast browsers. It had a lot more to do with the site being so broken as to be unusable in Opera and Safari. People would go one or two pages in, realize there was a problem, and either switch to a different browser, or as the growing fear was, switch to a different company.

It stems from the complaint above that many large corporate IT departments don't want to switch from IE6. Well, guess what the in-house web developers code for first? IE6. Then they try to tweak the design to work passably in other browsers when they should be working the other way: create a standards-based layout, then tweak for the peccadillos of other browsers.

This tells something about Ars

[pmontra]

Maybe we can compare how much technically savvy are the users of different sites by looking at the share of different browsers. We can compare the data of Ars with the data of w3schools (monthly data since 2002).

W3S's share of Firefox is larger that all the IE's together. FF overtook IE at about the beginning of this year.

MS must be happy about it

[Ilgaz]

I don't try to be sarcastic. Each IE 6 losing its "default browser status" is good for MS especially for their image. They "won" the browser wars already, some developers working for their rivals can't dream about MS Windows without MS HTML engines/objects. Even Big Blue relies on IE in certain jobs so they need "IE 6 compatibility" mode.

IE 7 and 8 incompatibility/quirks serve in the place of IE 6 now, why should MS really bother? Outdated browser which is bad for their security/performance image is being replaced with Firefox which is just a browser, not an engine which can be used system wide.

Want to cause red alert at Redmond? Revive the Gecko and make sure even the most basic .NET developer can plug it to their application. Talk with companies who serve Fortune 500 to make Firefox administration kit. Release a freaking .MSI for God's sake... That is how you can bother MS with your stats.

Re:MS must be happy about it

[FictionPimp]

You really want to help push firefox in enterprise? Develop some nice patch management features for it that I can control.

I can't let firefox update itself without testing that new versions work with internal resources, and there is no easy tool for automating this from mozilla.

I'm left with 3rd party tools that cost money, or just keeping people using IE and managing them with our patch management software.

At the very least, come up with some kind of system that lets restricted users get security only related patches, and block new version patches. Even that will be tough though, I have over 800 computers that need to be kept up to date. I don't need 800 computers downloading updates from mozilla.

I also need a way to manage the browser settings remotely across all of my users. I need to be allowed to control what extensions the user can install, how often the cache is cleared, how long history is kept, etc.

I've pushed hard to get firefox to be the default browser on our computers. These are the reasons I get shot down.

Opera Mini/Mobile stats

[Ilgaz]

You know what? Web developers act so surprised when you tell them Opera Mini is the most popular mobile browser on the planet. Not some "stat counter" stuff, professional companies will give you those stats. Last time I checked, it was like 40%.

So, when you ignore that fact and don't support Opera Mini and Nokia S60 browser (which is Webkit), support only iPhone with some m.something.com , you ignore about 100-150 million people who either has J2ME or Symbian/S40 in their hands, perhaps richer than iPhone users.

Re:Opera Mini/Mobile stats

[realityimpaired]

So, when you ignore that fact and don't support Opera Mini and Nokia S60 browser (which is Webkit), support only iPhone with some m.something.com , you ignore about 100-150 million people who either has J2ME or Symbian/S40 in their hands, perhaps richer than iPhone users.

Android's built-in browser uses Webkit, and it's a little higher profile than the Nokia browser (though the Nokia browser has higher market share). the iPhone browser also uses Webkit (like Android browser, it sends a browser ident string that identifies it as Apple Safari). So the chances of running across a mobile site that doesn't support Webkit are fairly slim....

I can't speak for the iPhone market, but Opera is available for Android. That doesn't, of course, mean that it's going to be used, but it does mean that more people are going to be aware of it, and possibly using it. Opera also powers the browser on the Nintendo Wii, which I know some people are using to browse the Internet.

All that said, Opera's penetration in the mobile market is sinking. None of the major smartphones are using Opera to render pages, and their market penetration is growing significantly. While Opera may be available for the smart phones, I found it was sluggish and slow to open on the Android, and went back to the Android Browser within a day or two. Your mileage may vary, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Re:Opera Mini/Mobile stats

[wakingrufus]

"All that said, Opera's penetration in the mobile market is sinking." really? http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-daily-20081216-20091104

How is this news?

[genw3st]

This is hardly worth discussing.... in fact, to me this seems about as news-worthy as FireFox surpassing Netscape Navigator or IE5.5 in browse shares. Sheesh.

OMG REALLY?!?!?

[MacGyver2210]

Wow, really? You mean people prefer functional efficient browsing with modular add-ons rather than the buggy built-in half-mandated browser that hasn't really changed much in 10 years?

Did that ages ago here

[Cloud K]

This is definitely not news for our company website. Don't know how well it reflects the rest of the world, but I'm quite surprised so many are still using IE6 in the first place.

Our stats show 24.25% using Firefox and 65.12% using various version of IE. (The rest going to Safari, Chrome etc. Interestingly, Safari and Chrome are almost neck and neck at 4.20 and 4.11% respectively.)

Of the 65.12% using IE, 27.11% of those are using version 6. That's 17.65% total, if my maths is any good. It's not dying (wish it would) but has long since been overtaken by Firefox here. 7% less doesn't sound a lot, but when you consider that Safari and Chrome are 4% on their own, it's a fair difference.

Bring back IE6

[Twinbee]

I for one am disappointed with this result, and truly hope that IE6 makes a comeback, perhaps so that W3C can adopt its idiosyncrasies. My tricks, hacks and all-round experience with the workarounds for IE6 are going to waste, and suddenly my knowledge isn't so valuable in the workplace.

IE6 creates jobs, in abundance, and even creates higher paid jobs over those web developers who are obviously less talented. It gives people something to do over these new fangled 'web browsers' that tend to simplify everything.

Re:Bring back IE6

[Yvan256]

IE7 and IE8 still need tweaks. Cleaner and less complicated tweaks, but tweaks nonetheless.

Re:Why does anyone care?

[DaveV1.0]

IE 8 has already been released. Firefox has overtaken a browser that is 2 generation old.

Re:Why does anyone care?

[biscuitlover]

People are making comparisons to IE6 because its market share is still relevant and affects the state of the web as a whole. For example, developments like Google Wave simply aren't possible on IE6 (at least without the somewhat controversial Chrome Frame plugin), so IE6 is hindering the adoption of new technology. Additionally, IE6's endless list of quirks cause untold lost hours of devlopment time for web developers worldwide.

Once IE6 drops down to a negligible percentage it means that many developers can free up a large part of their time to do more productive things, as they abandon support for it altogether. This would be great news not only for developers, but also for the web as a whole, which can proceed into new cutting-edge areas without being hindered by stale and outdated platforms.

ie6 == quirky

[JoeCommodore]

Because IE6 is a thorn in the side to most web developers; there are css/html standards and then there are IE6 adjustments. And most books put in a statement like "while IE6 is not compliant it is a dominant browser, so futz up your code to support it."

Having IE6 being the minority lets the developers un-hobble thier HTML/CSS and improve the design and usability of the sites.

Re:Problems are still corporate users and non-tech

[drinking12many]

Agreed. I would love to migrate our 10,000 machines to IE8 but we have several apps that they have no plans on upgrading to support it. Its now part of our Windows 7 project plan that they have to be updated or tough because we cant go back to 6. Its the only way it will ever happen.

It's time to stop caring

[swordgeek]

Yep, IE still has the lion's share of the market. That's not news. IE6 is dwindling finally, that's not news. Firefox, Opera, and the others are gaining--that's not news anymore.

All version of IE combined have less than a 65% share of the market. While it's big, it's no longer a monopoly. The others are big enough that IE can't bully the market into adopting its nonstandard 'extensions' anymore, nor can it avoid adhering to the standards set.

There are meaningful alternatives. THAT is what the browser wars were all about, and in that sense, we've won. YAY!!! Seriously, yay! This is a clear and decisive victory for consumers, and firefox doesn't have to beat IE's actual percentage to accomplish it.

Or to summarize: Woot!

/sigh...

[illumin8]

And yet, the Fortune 15 megacorporation I work at still mandates IE6 on every corporate computer, because their hopelessly outdated and clueless web development team doesn't know how to make our apps work on anything else...

Yes, finally!

[SanityInAnarchy]

Can I stop supporting IE6 now? Just throw up a "please upgrade" link?

Re:I 3 IE6.

[FictionPimp]

You can put this machine on the internet without it being just filled with infections?

Wow IE6?

[Chicken04GTO]

GG Firefox. IE8 has been out for a while. IE6 - Really? Playing games with statistics, are you guys politicians or what?

Re:Why does anyone care?

[StayFrosty]

IE7 has been in the wild for at least 6 months, perhaps a year (I don't use it so I don't know exactly) so of course IE6 market share is going to be dropping. From what I can tell more and more people are migrating to IE7 and it's a reasonably decent browser now.

IE 7 has been out for 3 years now. IE 8 has been around for about 6 months. If what you say is really the case, you would think that IE6's market share would have dropped a long time ago.

Why is anyone comparing anything, be it Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, or anything else, to IE6 now?

Because it is still the dominant version of IE even though there are 2 newer versions.

Of course FF is gaining.

[kent_eh]

It supports more sites, and protocold. Like Gopher.
Let's see IE7 do that!

Nokia's worst mistake was switching from Opera

[Ilgaz]

Android has potential and has a big backer but it is absolutely nothing in mobile market. Opera Mini, which is only a state of art J2ME client with server on the other side has no reason not to be available on Android in future.

40% of global mobile browsing is being done by Opera Mini and it doesn't ask anything rather than sticking with web standards as much as possible. My argument is perfectly valid against every single "lets do an iphone site" webmaster who ignores the REAL numbers. It is same for Android, Blackberry, Symbian S60 and especially J2ME Opera Mini. I would be surprised if they knew the true stealthy, gigantic market size of J2ME and S40.

Re:Nokia's worst mistake was switching from Opera

[realityimpaired]

My point, however, is that the "let's do an iPhone site" are targetting Webkit, which also powers Android, Blackberry, and Symbian. They may have different branding, but under the hood those platforms are all using the same page rendering engine.

Opera may have 40% of the market share, and anybody who's wise to business can tell you that ignoring 40% of your market is bad, but they're not shooting themselves in the foot as badly as you make it out to be.... they're still targetting a combined 60% of the market.

Besides which, by your own admission, the only thing you really need for something to render properly in Opera is to have it comply with W3C standards. As there aren't really any idiosyncratic quirks in Webkit that you need to code specifically to, it's a fairly safe bet that anything which renders properly on Webkit will also render properly on Opera. There's a good reason that Webkit is consistently the highest scoring renderer on tests like Acid2 and Acid3. All you really need to design for on a mobile/wap site is the small screen size and limiting things like active scripts, flash, and animations. Most of the time, that's as simple as not putting huge images or using specific x-y coordinates for positioning CSS elements.

The pie is bigger than 100%

[Junior J. Junior III]

I mostly use Firefox. But, I have IE8, Chrome installed on my PC as well. How do you work out marketshare from that?

It seems that "they" must base it off of server log statistics, which show actual use. That seems like the most sensible approach, but really, if in a parallel universe these three browsers all cost money for a license, all three companies would be happy (and I would not be) -- they'd have their money from the sale of license, and why would they care if I generally prefer to use one over the other?

The other question I have is, I don't know how marketshare stats are done to filter the results to account for user agent impersonation. I don't have any idea how widespread this is still, but a few years ago it was quite common to impersonate IE in order to get "bad" webservers to serve pages when they were set up to break Firefox because "bad" web developers were only testing for IE, and configured their web app to check for user agent and fail if it wasn't IE, even though other browsers might well be able to handle the code that it would have served them. Do they have a method to account for this?

Well, everyone says the same but they do nothing

[Ilgaz]

I have seen the work has to be done rolling a Firefox update to clients on a large enterprise network, a truly large one. I really understand your feelings and in fact, I really wished a Mozilla foundation "suit" should see the amount of that work and compare it to IE update/domain level changes which absolutely looked like some basic computer game in comparison.

MS was evilly clever to roll out that IAK right when IE 4 shipped (or 3?), the companies, ISPs and large portals (Yahoo etc) loved that idea. How many years have passed? It is absolutely stunning that they expect companies to download some third party supplied MSI.

Look what Skype does, that mainly end user P2P phone company who doesn't really know enterprise:
http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/windows/business/ , I picked it immediately for a single laptop office. It would still have advantage like "repair" even on a single company machine.

In fact, the days where Apple admins and large home network users ask for a .package (think like MSI for OS X) has come already. Even with Apple's genius "drag&drop" install method became pain at homes with 5+ computers.

Sigh... I hate statistics.

[SpectreBlofeld]

Statistics where percentages are concerned are of little value in many situations - a growing market is one of them.

100 people use computers, of these 95 use IE, 4 use Firefox and 1 uses Opera. therefore IE = 95% market share, Firefox 4% and Opera 1%

Now 105 people use computers, of these 96 use IE, 7 use Firefox, 2 use Opera. Now IE has a 91% share, 6.66% Firefox and 1.9% Opera.

So market share has reduced, but the amount of users has increased, no one has to switch for this to take place.

IE6 Hate?

[darkpixel2k]

Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser

Maybe you forgot about IE5...and IE4. Remember IE3?

And have you been in a deep freeze for the last few years? Remember IE7? I hear we're up to IE8 now.

Feel the hate. There's enough for every version.

Didn't Microsoft force an update a while back?

[Yvan256]

So why is IE6 still so high?

Cookies

[wwfarch]

Don't most of these stats sites use cookies to track unique visitors? Assuming this is the case then there is probably a flaw in their methodology. IE users tend to be less technically inclined and therefore unlikely to delete cookies. Firefox users are probably the most likely group to block/delete cookies regularly. Wouldn't this cause Firefox numbers to be artificially high?

Obviously I don't know whether this is true or not but I could see it having an impact on the overall numbers.

Whether to stop supporting IE6

[Nerdposeur]

It depends. If you're a business, here's how to decide:

1. Calculate how many dollars you save by not spending the time to support IE6
2. Calculate how many dollars you lose by driving away IE6-only users
3. If #1 >= #2, stop supporting IE6

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

[bunratty]

If your intranet site doesn't work in Chrome, and users are forbidden to install Chrome because the intranet site doesn't work with it, it's no wonder that Chrome accounts for less than 1% of your intranet traffic. Perhaps if you fixed the problem with the site and users were allowed to install Chrome, the usage of Chrome would be far higher.

Re:Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

[Jason Levine]

Actually, users are forbidden from installing Chrome because users installing their own software is a bad idea, not because of any website compatibility issue. If users can install any software they want, then our help desk will be swamped with calls to support those applications (and some of that software might not have proper licensing or might contain spyware/viruses).

Looking at our external website's traffic (where we obviously don't control what browser user's use), we get 27% from IE8, 33% from IE7, 23% from IE6 and 16% from Firefox. Google Chrome doesn't even make up 1% of our external traffic. I have many projects to complete and my time is limited. Why should I work towards compatibility with a browser with less than 1% market share? Instead, I work with web standards as best I can and iron out any wrinkles in IE and Firefox. If Google Chrome has a few wrinkles when dealing with my site, so be it. I honestly don't have the time to remove all issues that every single browser in existence has with my websites.

IE6 is faster... ;)

[prcko]

More proper title would be: IE6 passes Firefox in Browser Share... I think that IE6 is moving down faster then Firefox is moving up...

Re:Problems are still corporate users and non-tech

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that the issue with large corps not wanting to change will resolve itself sooner than you think.

Many corps have been sticking to WinXP for some time now because of Vista's reputation, and the fact that MS has continued to make new XP licenses available to them.

This situation will have to change at some point -- MS cannot continue allowing new XP licenses for ever, and corps can't resist upgrading to Win7 forever. At some point, those corps who have been holding out will be forced into an upgrade cycle. At that point, those old web apps that only work in IE6 will have to updated or replaced.

With the IE6 lock-in effect removed, corps will be free to use any browser they like. I suspect almost all of them will standardise on IE8 (because corps tend toward making the same mistake twice), but that's still a heck of an improvement on IE6.

There's only two things that will delay this: Firstly, the global financial situation is making companies hesitate before spending money, so normal upgrade cycles may be delayed. And secondly, when will Microsoft stop offering XP licenses? That will really force the issue, because even if you're not doing an upgrade cycle, you still need the occasional new PC.

Do you recommend an upgrade?

[zogger]

Do you add a little text there when it detects ie6 and encourage people to upgrade to something newer?

Re:Problems are still corporate users and non-tech

[TropicalCoder]

Many, many home users don't know what a browser is or don't realise that there are alternatives ... Gradual adoption of Windows 7 will certainly help in the second case.

Gradual adoption of Windows 7 will help people learn what a browser is or that there are alternatives? ...and this faulty reasoning is somehow "insightful"?

bad comparison

[jdkane]

Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser.

That does not make Firefox look good by comparing it to a 8 year old browser that is really hated. Honestly, that fact works against Firefox IMO. It's like saying Steve Balmer's rep on Slashdot is getting better because he's surpassed Darl McBride's popularity level here.

Yeah but you are still way off!

[grandmofftarkin]

Opera and Google are both able to accurately work out the size of their own user base using unique auto update hits. This would seem like a more conclusive method than your own. With this in mind Opera still has a third more users than Chrome globally.

Re:Yeah but you are still way off!

[MacDork]

Opera and Google are both able to accurately work out the size of their own user base using unique auto update hits. This would seem like a more conclusive method than your own. With this in mind Opera still has a third more users than Chrome globally.

As a web developer, I couldn't care less about installed base. If you have a browser, but never use it, I don't give two shits about you. I care about the guy shopping on my site. In that respect, statscounter's method is quite a bit more 'conclusive' because it measures usage, not installed base.

This just in!

[mschuyler]

Linux soars past Windows 3.11 in market share!

OT -- hint

[mcgrew]

it works flawlessly in Firefox on Fedora Linux [i]except[/i] when I need to recover a password.

If you do it like this:

it works flawlessly in Firefox on Fedora Linux <i>except</i> when I need to recover a password

It will come out like this:

it works flawlessly in Firefox on Fedora Linux except when I need to recover a password.

Re:OT -- hint

[IBBoard]

Pah, stupid Slashdot. Sometimes I remember, sometimes I forget and drop back to BBCode.

Re:OT -- hint

[mcgrew]

I noticed the BBCcode and thought perhaps you were a new user here.

Re:OT -- hint

[IBBoard]

No, not overly new (a couple of years registered, I think), I just visit too many forums and get used to BBCode :) I keep trying to use BBCode in my Trac wiki occasionall as well.

Re:Problems are still corporate users and non-tech

[biscuitlover]

I think you misunderstood what I meant - Windows 7 certainly won't educate people about what a browser is, but it will at least get them off IE6. I probably could have been a bit clearer.

What is needed

[dukeofurl01]

I think, what we need is a popular website that purposefully doesn't work right in IE, only in Firefox.

Re:Problems are still corporate users and non-tech

[tepples]

Large corporate installations are highly change averse; but they also tend to be unsupportive of non work related web activity.

Even on employees' scheduled break times?