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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Rocketship Underpant]

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

Sincerely,
Ms. Mwambala Gertrude "Army Boots" Goldstein

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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!

[morgan_greywolf]

No way. Real penguins use IceWeasel, of course!

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".

Hrmm

[acehole]

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

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.

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

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...

[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...

[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).

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

[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!

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.

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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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 :-)

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: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.

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

[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%.

Some comparisons...

[tjstork]

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

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: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.

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.

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.

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.