Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
And Firefox has a 100.0% share in Antarctica (maybe just 1 user?) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-an-monthly-200902-200902-bar
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
So when are they going to rip the skin off Firefox to show "Netscape Navigator - Double Ultimate Gold edition"?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
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.
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!...
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.
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.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
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.
Next we'll be seeing the revelation that Linux has overtaken Windows 98. Or something.
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:
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?
Tortoise walks past dead Hare.
Film at 11.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
http://www.saveie6.com/
Plus, running IE6 on my machine can provide for potentially interesting conversations if it ever comes up.
And I thought I was dull.
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!
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
All users of every version of FireFox taken together use more than one old version of IE.
This is my sig.
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.
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.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.