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IE 8 Is Top Browser, Google Chrome Is Rising Fast
An anonymous reader points out that the latest Net Applications numbers show that MSIE 8 has become the world's most-used browser, taking over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP. PCMag.com emphasizes another angle on the numbers, which is that Chrome is the fastest-growing browser. Firefox's market share has stalled just below 25%. Chrome is now in third place, ahead of Safari. The Guardian's article reminds: "There's no guarantee that NetApps' numbers are accurate, and they are very unlikely to be correct to two decimal places. However, they do appear to be a good indicator of market trends."
With so many people still using IE, whatever holes there are in firefox and chrome just won't get the same attention from the hackers. That alone makes me not want to use it. Obscurity may not be obscurity but it's also not jumping up and down with a target painted on your chest.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
obscurity not security rather
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
[...] Obscurity may not be obscurity but it's also not jumping up and down with a target painted on your chest.
;) I see what you did there.
MS HTML control 62%
Gecko 24.5%
Webkit 9.7%%
Opera 3.0%
Miscellania 0.7%
If you think Chrome is becoming popular now, just wait until Chrome OS is finally available on netbooks. Chrome's usage will literally shoot through the roof. It will rise from its current 8% up towards 45% to 50%.
Everybody is underestimating the market penetration of netbooks right now. They're going to go critical within the next two years, and Chrome OS will be there to bring Chrome to the masses.
I use it at work, and at home on my Mac and PC.
I have used it for months, but I am quickly becoming agitated with its bugs. I have had multiple occasions where the entire browser becomes unresponsive (which was supposed to be extremely uncommon with each tab as a process).
Flash absolutely destroys the browser after a few hours of listening to last.fm, and if I leave the browser on overnight, I regularly return to a browser that I can watch as it refreshes the screen line by line (literally, I could count the lines as it repaints the screen).
With Firefox's latest improvements, I am very eager to see what they can dish out in 3.7, and I am slowly working my way back to using their browser.
I also hate how Google "helps" by hiding a large portion of modestly large URLs when I highlight the link.
Google won me with speed, but, as usual with everything except search and GMail, they are losing me with bugs and a lack of features (Print Preview, the ability to remove typos from my search history (like "sl," which gets very annoying now when I type sl and it googles it instead of selecting Slashdot, and internal settings, like automatically signing into corporate intranets, while on the intranet--Firefox and IE support this).
The results show that we've got pretty heavy diversity of browsers. We now have four browsers with ranges in the 12% to 24% of market share (although why they made the graph with those as the numbers easy to track isn't clear to me). This means that any single exploit that is browser specific isn't going to harm more than a fraction of all users. Just as genetic diversity helps prevent epidemics from sweeping through and wiping out a species, browser diversity does the same thing. The real upshot is not the rise of IE 8 but that we have more than 2 serious browser choices that are being chosen by people who aren't just the types who read Slashdot. That also means that a lot of people are making real choices about their browser types, possibly indicating that the general public is more aware about browswer issues than they were about a decade ago. On the other hand, another way of looking at this data is that around 40% of people are still using some form of IE. So all of those people have what is essentially their default browser. It might be interesting to compare this over longer term, but the data in the article only goes back a year.
...I could really care less who fights for what place. The bigger impact being made by the browser wars is we finally see more than one damn browser on the list, forcing many websites to adopt to user choice rather than the IE "my way or the highway" web hole we dealt with for many years.
The fact that IE has most of the business market also makes it a much more profitable target.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There's no real difference with respect to security. A porn addict could easily still get a Win 7 PC loaded up with crapware, even with Avast and Ad-Aware running.
Who's laughing now, Alfonso? Want me to put Ubuntu back on? All because you wanted to run the latest version of Nero, crybaby.
NetApps? The guys who make the storage filers/toasters/whatever?
Net Application != NetApp (nee Network Appliance)
It took a long time to parse that summary, because I was trying to figure out what the storage guys had to do with browser share.
Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer. If it's a computer that I set up for someone else I install Firefox AND Chrome and explain to them the values of IE, FF, and Ch, and months later I'm still seeing them using Firefox.
Ok I take that back. Some of my coworkers (and myself I suppose) use IE for some Cisco and HP devices that have clunky web interfaces. But those browsing sessions don't get registered on these kinds of reports and certainly don't add up to 40%.
I'd like to see a list of what sites are being browsed with what browsers. I bet that would be a very telling set of statistics as well.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Something that bugged me throughout the whole China-Google-IE6 fiasco... Why were Google etc. using IE6 internally and got hacked? MS released IE7 with sandboxing in Vista and Windows 7... and Google's internal IT saved lots of money by sticking with IE6, but then turn around and blame MS for IE6 when MS itself recommends upgrading. Did I miss something or did Google PR and astroturfing successfully prevented this point from being made in any of the articles or Slashdot comments?
I remember posting about this about a year ago or so on /., and now I see the trend continue.
I run a website about the Heroes of Might and Magic game series (very little "geek bias"), in Poland and for Polish-speaking audience. It's relatively popular, about 1500 unique visitors a day, first hit for "Heroes of Might and Magic" in a localized Google search, thrid for "heroes" only after a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the term and the page on that goddamned TV series. The statistics are so completely different that it looks almost as if it were a parallel universe or something:
January 2008:
53.58% - Firefox
31.19% - IE
13.83% - Opera
January 2009:
60.99% - Firefox
23.99% - IE
12.32% - Opera
2.10% - Chrome
January 2010:
60.33% - Firefox
16.12% - Opera
15.29% - IE
6.24% - Chrome
Data gathered by Google Analytics, active on just about every non-static page on the server. It gets even more interesting in a month-by-month comparison on a graph, some of the fluctuations clearly correlate with new releases of FF, Opera, Chrome, *and* IE, but I'm afraid that I don't have the time right now to prepare something you could see and decide yourself.
Any other admins out there with similar statistics to share?
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Konqueror?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
And I have a bunch of random observations. Nothing so coherent that I'd call it a review, but still relevant here.
So far, I've been really pleased. It's very fast compared to Firefox.
Unfortunately, almost all of my Firefox plugins are geared towards privacy and security. I can't run any of them on Chrome, so I am only willing to use Chrome to browse a small subset of the websites I'm willing to browse with Firefox. Slashdot happens to be among those.
Strangely, now that I no longer browse Slashdot with Firefox, Firefox behaves significantly better than it has been. Apparently, one of the absolute worst sites for the overall performance of Firefox is this one.
I routinely keep at least 30 or 40 tabs of state in Firefox.
Incognito in Chrome also looks like a much more convenient (and in some ways better) privacy feature than anything I currently use on Firefox. Though I still really wish I had Ghostery and NoScript.
Chrome does have some features that are almost as nice as Firebug built into it.
I really wish Firefox would just go multi-threaded, get a much better Javascript rendering engine and lose the horrible memory leaks. Last time I had to shut down Firefox it had a VSS of nearly 4G!
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Chrome the fastest growing? Looking at the numbers, it seems growth is also flattening out. Perhaps a headline: "Chrome will not make it if they continue this way" is more accurate of their situation.
This childish shit is ridiculous.
Why would so-called adults battle each other over web browsers?
The fanboyism involved is utterly lame.
Alright, I can almost understand the 'Internet Explorer versus All The Rest' wars, what with all the shilling and astroturfing so prevalent and common these days.
But why almighty fuck would the fangirlies of one non-IE browser devote so much time and effort to bashing any other non-IE browser?
"Z0MG TEH OPERAS IS TEH GAY AND R33L GEEKS USE TEH FIREFOX Z0MGLOL!!!!1111ELEVENTYONE"
To spoof this information? Could you have a bank of servers trolling the net giving unique browser identification information on each unique page hit, there by giving the impression that a browser is more popular than it really is.
I could see Microsoft doing exactly that.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Are you sure about that?
So what? If porn sites bothered to have malware targeting Ubuntu, a porn addict could easily get an Ubuntu PC loaded up with it. No amount of OS security is a defense against the user being stupid enough to fall for "you need this program to get $thing_you_want!"
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Since it will largely be mobile browsers from iPhones, Android, and Palm, which are all Webkit based.
From TFA:
IE8 works just fine on Windows XP. There's no need to upgrade to Windows 7, which requires you to buy new hardware as well. It's all a big scam to boost sales.
This just confirms what I wrote in an earlier post:
-----
It's not up to Microsoft how Windows is installed on a computer delivered to an end-user. It's companies like Dell, HP and computer shops who actually install Windows.
They (Dell, HP and computer shops) need to learn to install Windows properly: ntfs, no automatic login to admin user, least-privileged account, install latest version of a web browser (whether it be IE8, or something else), etc, etc, etc.
And power-users don't use pre-installed OSes anyway, correct? So the main problem is with users who use computers with a pre-installed OS.
-----
I am so sick and tired of it that end-users are tricked into believing they need to buy a new computer with a new OS, just so they get a more secure internet experience.
Wake Up, people! Your current OS, if properly setup, maintained and used, will work just fine.
And here's some more food for thought: we should all be logged with a least-privileged account when using our computers. But the automatic update feature of most software requires you to be logged in as admin. If you're logged with a least-privileged account, the automatic update feature does not work and is disabled. Example: Firefox.
Which brings me to the conclusion that the automatic update feature is contradicting basic security recommendations and therefor sorta useless and that it's really up to the user to properly maintain and use their computer.
Well - I could just go on and on about this ... y'all get the point, I hope.
IE8 sucks. It particularly sucks on XP, but in general, in a slow, bloated pile of garbage. I've given up any hope that Microsoft has any capacity to build a browser that isn't pure unadulterated shit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They probably could build a good, lean, fast browser if they didn't have to support legacy bullshit.
Lonx?
Your seriousness and conviction astounded me, but your post's moderation of "Funny" has returned balance to the world.
Well, Chrome OS doesn't let you install or run any programs at all. It might be sufficient, but you never know.
Dilbert RSS feed
"Legacy bullshit" is Microsoft's stock in trade. That's what they are. Windows is the win32 API; IE is IE6-style HTML. That's the core of their business, why it's so hard to get rid of them. Lots of people would like to be rid of Windows and move onto a platform that's less of an attack vector, but nearly everyone has some shitty old application somewhere that they can't do without and Windows provides a good upgrade path, or at least better than anyone else. IE may be a shitty browser but it works on a lot of shitty intranet sites that were designed for IE6 and that nobody can afford to fix now, and probably won't be fixed for a decade at least.
If they decided to pull an Apple and just say "screw you, everyone who built stuff for the old API, you're dead to us," they'd be torn apart by the market as a thousand little competitors jumped in and tried to get in on everyone who'd been left behind. (Apple only gets away with it because they're small enough, and cater mostly to home users with shallow pockets, that nobody really caters to the people who get screwed by the Steve Jobs Upgrade Treadmill.)
It's Microsoft's blessing and the key to their success, but it's also their curse and will probably be their eventual downfall. They can toss billions of dollars around and try to get the greatest programmers in the world, but they're always going to be hampered by the thing they can't (or are unwilling) to change -- the legacy cruft that gives them real vendor lock-in, or at least a huge advantage over all comers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So why is this modded funny? Unrealistic maybe but funny?
It's already happening. Take a look at Firefox. http://i.imgur.com/qD2OV.png
Everybody is underestimating the market penetration of netbooks right now. They're going to go critical within the next two years, and Chrome OS will be there to bring Chrome to the masses.
Wow... Nasty! The market likes it rough yeah.
And I predict that we will see the Year of Linux on the Desktop within the next two years as well. Just wait and see...
Those are W3Schools stats. The kind of person who visits W3Schools.com isn't your average web user.
If 2010 is "The Year of IE6's Demise," will 2012 be "The Year of IE6's Death?"
From what I'm reading, users aren't upgrading browsers till they upgrade machines (or Operating Systems). With Vista on the outs and Win 7 on the rise, will IE8 come to dominate the average and corporate user base?
BTW, I swtiched Mom to Firefox two years ago. Now I have far fewer problems with her Vista laptop.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
Seriously?
This space for rent.
Netbooks are great, if you need that sort of thing.
Netbooks with expensive hardware requirements(SSDs still aren't cheap) and no non google native code, only running Chrome(so no IE only web sites), are not great.
ChromeOS is pretty much the most insane thing I've ever heard of, the iPad is less locked down, has more functionality, and is probably going to be cheaper, and even that's probably a toy.
The same reason that you yourself could not bring yourself to just give up the IE-bashing. Some people are idiots. Including, it seems, yourself.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
"There's no guarantee that NetApps' numbers are accurate, and they are very unlikely to be correct to two decimal places. However, they do appear to be a good indicator of market trends."
Of course they are not accurate, the stats are under representing the people who do not have Internet access.
I don't see any IE bashing there. (S)He's bashing the fanboys, not the browsers.
A netbook's main advantage is that it is inexpensive, and runs people's existing stuff, albeit slowly. The problem is that if netbook added stuff which people wanted (faster CPU, RAM, Bluetooth, faster graphics, TPM chip for security, etc.) then the machine will end up having to be priced as an ultraportable.
It's Microsoft's blessing and the key to their success, but it's also their curse and will probably be their eventual downfall. They can toss billions of dollars around and try to get the greatest programmers in the world, but they're always going to be hampered by the thing they can't (or are unwilling) to change -- the legacy cruft that gives them real vendor lock-in, or at least a huge advantage over all comers.
There are many approaches to ensuring backwards compatibility. Traditionally this meant supporting all the cruft directly, but you only need to look at Virtual XP mode in Win7 to see the future direction.
Well, Chrome OS doesn't let you install or run any programs at all.
Doesn't that somewhat limit it's utility?
None of which explains IE8's horrible performance. I could accept shitty speeds in legacy mode. That's fine. But when you're talking about IE8 straight out of the box rendering modern pages that don't require compatibility mode, there's no excuse. IE8's Javascript performance is ludicrously bad, its sandboxing is so miserably slow it's a joke. I can't believe all this effort, and what they've produced is a substandard browser whose single selling point is that, if you want it to, it will behave like IE6.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A decline in usage of IE6 doesn't mean XP is used any less, given that IE8 is available for XP as well.
Even according to the CLAIMED numbers, IE8 rose by 1.5%, Chrome rose 1%, and others mostly remained unchanged.
That would make IE8 the fastest growing browser, not Chrome. And a small increase on a web browser that nominally has 5%, tends to be within the realm of statistical noise, especially when all of the major browsers/OSes besides IE/Windows have seen fairly random multi-percent gains and drops over the last few years, with occasional hiccups in samples that seemed to mean something, but never panned out as a long term trend. And before somebody chimes in, it's a fixed "pot" of 100%. A growth of 1% on that scale is absolute, regardless of how much percentage you already have. 1.5% always means faster growth, even if you already have a high percentage.
This is a single snapshot, and one that's being mixed in with grease to turn the wheels. The numbers and claims are basically meaningless, and are the sort of "OMG!" story that turn up on reddit at least once a month.
There are even a few flubs, like saying that Firefox 3.6 was released mid-December, and they don't appear to include "IE8 compatibility mode" as part of IE8's numbers, despite it being the same browser, despite hitslink, what they're basing all of the data on, considering them different versions.
Chrome 4.0 and Firefox 3.6, released nearly the same time, both have very similar market share. 1.16% and 1.07%, respectively, which is impressive for new versions not even a week old.
On the non-version-specific list, IE has 62%, FF 24%, Chrome 5%, Safari 4%. As far as FF "declining", there just isn't that much room to grow if you can't wrestle it away from people who use Internet Explorer. Hitslinks' own TREND charts point out that FF has grown from 23% from March 2009 to 24% now. Hardly the loss these PC Magazine goons are pointing at now. Only IE suffered a meaningful loss, 68% to 62%, which is where all of the gains of EVERY other browser are coming out of.
Somehow, I think the real loser here is the integrity of tech journalism.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
IE8 is not a complete rewrite, and was never advertised as such. It doesn't have a significantly different JS engine, either (it's all on IE team blog). The main goal for IE8 in particular was to get it to be standard compliant to the current final W3C recommendations (HTML 4.01 & CSS 2.1), and to make it more secure (sandboxing etc).
Since performance is now a major problem in IE when compared to other browsers, it would be logical to assume that it will be tackled next.
Meanwhile, those companies that still have IE6-only intranet web applications around can use IE6 in XP Mode...
Whoa there. I've been a porn addict since the BBS days of grainy gif's of Vanna White and never had a problem. As for file sharing, i've been "sharing needles" since Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and a box of microfloppies... again with nary a single problem. And I've used every OS BUT mac.
According to the most recent StatCounter stats, Firefox 3.5 is the World's "most used" browser.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-weekly-200827-200951
"Oh, what sad times these are when passing ruffians can say 'ni' to helpless old ladies."
Lonx?
No, Lonks.
I'm surprised nobody has caught the obvious here, that IE8 is gaining ground thanks to a two-pronged strategy. The first is Microsoft pushing IE8 out forcefully to everyone via windows/microsoft update. Even on the server side of things. They rank it as a critical download rather than optional, so if you just have important updates turned on, it will show up all by itself eventually. The second is that Windows 7 and Server 2008 are both gaining momentum as people buy new stuff and companies begin to upgrade their infrastructures. It's a new year which means a new budget and money to spend on replacing dead or dying computers and servers.
All this results in IE8 gaining marketshare. It will end up capturing as much, if not more, of IE7's share over time. There may always be some old holdouts from companies running some crazy in-house web-based app that only works on IE6, but I'm sure there are still NT4 boxen humming away in some dusty server closets somewhere too.
My only beef with IE8 is how the rendering engine destroys some pages. Buttons don't appear, images and text gets cut off, and I'll be damned if the page printing feature doesn't still chop the sides off of pages rather than reformat them to fit the page for printing. MS releases "compatibility" updates for it nearly every week or two, just to get it to render as cleanly (which is relative at this point) as IE7. At many companies I take care of, I have intentionally disabled IE8 from WSUS and unchecked it from Windows Update using the "fuck you don't come back" button due to rendering problems that end up crippling some work-related sites.
You can use Webapps and that's pretty much it (although their enhanced with HTML5 local caching and such so they can be useful even in offline mode).
It's limited to me, but it would be more than enough for many of my relatives.
Dilbert RSS feed
It's really easy to hit the wrong mod on the dropdown. And so long as it's not +1 where you meant -1 or vice versa, there's no reason to post to reverse it.
Chrome's usage will literally shoot through the roof.
Holy crap. You heard it here first, everyone. STAY AWAY FROM CHROME!!!! It will literally shoot through your roof!
we want something easy and fast. Chrome gives us this.......... for now...
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
Firefox's market share started rising rapidly after the release of Adblock+. You can cross reference the dates taking into account the diffusion curve to see that it is true, if you wish.
Chrome just got first version of real extensions, but not yet fully (not on all platforms) and the ad blocking nearly works (it still downloads the ads but hides them). When they get proper ad blocking really working the popularity of Chrome will explode because it offers what Firefox does (adblock+) but is more convenient to use. Chrome's usability is unparallel.
Yet another angle on it, is that all IE combined has been on a steady decline for a good while, now also in January.
Now for the FIRST TIME, w3counter puts IE below the 50%-line, which means that slightly over half of all users now actually DO run a more sensible browser.
In my mind, that's a sign of a fantastic, and unexpected awareness amongst computer users.
I find that the latest round of 'browser wars' are an interesting choice. At the end of the day the consumer will end up forcing the market into moving with the times. There are several key points to raise specifically about firefox. While I do use firefox as my primary browser in windows, I also have chrome installed and I use konqueror on KDE when I use Linux. I have been using Firefox since I gave up netscape (i've never liked IE), It started off as a great browser that was fast and efficient. I have to agree with many users that it just does not have the pace that it once had, they really need to sit back and focus some real effort on closing off the bugs in existing featuers and focus on stability before they start to work on '4.0' or whatever the next major release is. I know its not going to be the most interesting work for developers to do but the reality is, happy customers use the browser to earn more money through google etc.. Unhappy customers use IE, Chrome, Opera etc.. I really feel that Mozilla/Firefox have lost sight of what made them so popular in the begining.. yes they have great market share now, but how many of those users are actually loyal to the brand? I doubt that the number is very high. Please don't make the same mistakes that netscape made..
Many people on the forum wish that IE becomes a minor browser used by few people. Let’s just say for moment that IE’s market share drops to like 5 - 10%. Does that really change anything when it comes to web design? In those 10+ years I have been working with creating Internet portals there has always been a customer demand for supporting all major browsers. Hell, we had to support Firefox when it had less than 5%. Chrome even when it had less than 1%. Guess the same demand will be there is IE marked share drop. So please explain why a web developer’s life will become easier if IE’s marked share drop to single digits. You have to design for the same browsers as today.
I've got nothing against netbooks aside from the fact that I hate those tiny keyboards. I think it's a market niche that will disappear as lighter cheaper laptops and more powerful phones squeeze in on that space, but that's a story for 5 years from now.
ChromeOS on the other hand is google trying to sell an appliance to run their apps(with no native code executing that isn't written by google(so no flash, silverlight, applets, or javafx) no one elses will run properly.
That's hardly proof of anything without some context. All I can see from the screenshot is that there are a shit-ton of toolbars. Whether this person deliberately installed them (intentionally or to make FF look bad), they were installed as part of some third-party program (optionally or otherwise) or they are the result of some sort of malware infection(s) isn't clear.
In fact, a lot of the toolbars strike me as horribly suspicious to be anything related to malware. Google Toolbar, Netcraft, Facebook? These certainly don't seem like sites that malware would bother installing toolbars for. Somebody just went out of their way to cram as many stupid toolbars as possible into their browser for some reason.
I'm a Linux user, it seems I'm not supposed to say anything positive related to Microsoft. ;)
You could compliment them on having a lot of marketing savvy---that's what got them into a monopoly position despite having what many^{[who?]} agreed to be an inferior product.
And in general you can say something positive about your competition; for one, Apple seems to understand how to make a usable desktop OS that still lets power users do powerful things. It's a shame they're not known more for that but the iPods and iPhones which are locked down beyond... well, my comfort level anyway.
Sure, we love Linux around here. But think about this: how would you like a world of 40% Windows, 30% OS X, 20% Linux and 10% Other? I think I would love it---it'd be a market share majority for POSIX. People wouldn't so easily justify the position "Let's make it Windows only, it's the only platform that matters". If a 20% increase in effort lets you hit another 50% of the market, isn't that a good deal? I think it would make a lot of software vendors target Linux.
Even though I'm a raging Linux fanboy, I don't have to impose that on anyone else to get what I want. So I think I'm allowed to recognize the value that Linux competitors can provide to their customers.
only running Chrome(so no IE only web sites), are not great.
ChromeOS is pretty much the most insane thing I've ever heard of, the iPad is less locked down, has more functionality, and is probably going to be cheaper, and even that's probably a toy.
Besides on internal network apps at work, I haven't seen an IE only site in years. And for those few sites left that do, the ipad won't work either.
My audiance, clearly more technical folks (as I just blog about technical stuff) say otherwise (this is last month's unique visits to my blog):
1 6962 38.20% Firefox
2 6818 37.41% Microsoft IE
3 1034 5.67% Chrome
8 491 2.69% Safari
9 346 1.90% Opera
22 149 0.82% Wireless Transcoder Google Wireless Transcoder
28 119 0.65% Android
71 44 0.24% Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.10
91 37 0.20% Konqueror
> IE8 sucks.
Performance wise: yes, absolutely. Despite all the claims of better javascript performance etc it feels a lot slower than IE6.
However, the rendering is pretty accurate, and that is all that web designers care for. Because a badly looking website is the designer's fault, while a slow browser is the user's problem.
And you should also realize that there are many organizations that still are stuck with IE6.
I'm working on a web-based application and the clients accessing it are more then 70% IE6, 23% IE 7 and 3% IE8. The remaining are the other browsers. But this application I work with is not placing demands on which web browser to use, it only takes statistics of the user agent and is designed to be W3C compliant through the HTML Validator.
And it's also easy to see that there are still clients out there running Windows 2000 and Pre-SP2 Windows XP. (information that is provided through the user agent string).
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
News at 11.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
And you should also realize that there are many organizations that still are stuck with IE6.
Well we're stuck with Gopher !
IE6 is now 10 years old. It predates Windows XP. The Windows XP which will be retired in July (or at least which ought to cease receiving support).
So granted there also are orgs that are stuck with VT120s but that doesn't mean anyone has to support them.
If some people really want to develop in-house stuff using terminals or IE6, why not, but excuse us while the world moves forward. It just doesn't make sense any more to support those specifically any more (except that a terminal hooked to a machine running links or lynx or somesuch will probably work better than IE6 on a well written site).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Aren't those opposites?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
So as always with statistics it can be skinned anyway you want it.
For example why are firefox 3 and firefox 3.5 being treated as two different browsers. They are both Firefox version 3
If we were to add those to statistics Firefox 3 would have roughly the same share as internet explorer 8.0 that is 22.30%
Version numbering is affecting the statistics here, MS doesn't use the same philosophy as Firefox when it comes to versioning.
MS never had internet explorer 6.5...but it had internet explorer sp1 and sp2...which are as different from each other as firefox 3 and firefox 3.5. Yet internet explorer 6.0 is displayed as one browser.
Once IE 8 receives a sp or a major update should its statistics be split to ie 8 with sp and ie 8 without sp
How different two versions of the same browser have to be different to justify the splitting of their statistics.
Newer 10" netbooks have a normal-sized keyboards. They aren't much wider than the 7-9" ones, and generally thinner.
Maybe, but the fact still remains that Windows + IE fully patched to the latest version gets hacked in seconds every year at any mayor hacking event. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like using a system that can get infected in seconds by just visiting the wrong site.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well, in fairness, it doesn't take much imagination to see why some would rail against Google Chrome, given that Google in fact seem to do the opposite of their mantra (after all, their main business is advertising). It's bad enough them having your search history, but installing software from them for the purposes of all your web browsing? Really that doesn't seem very sensible. In fact I would suggest that at this stage, it would be perfectly logical for a lot of people to consider jumping ship from anti-Microsoft (an aging dinosaur that increasingly poses less threat despite their behaviour) to anti-Google.
Now I agree to some extent as regards other non-IE browsers, but although not an expert myself, I presume there are sufficient differences for people to argue which one is better.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
You erm... do know what Chrome OS is, right? Specifically it's a replacement OS. The clue is in the "OS" part of GGP's post...
Like a twelve year-old's dick
- Sergeant Dignam, "The Departed"
The strange thing is where I work IE is the least supported internally. Developers here don't support it for the main reason that it consumes too much precious time to make it work right due to non-standards and very painful testing tools. It's not due to anti-MS sentiment. We just don't have the time. When your schedule is overloaded the natural tendency is to cut the more difficult platforms and do primary support on the ones that come with better testing tools and tend to work right on the first try.
For any organization still boxed in with IE6 or IE7 then I say they were arrogant and ignorant and now they're getting their just deserts. These were the crusty companies with idiot managers dictating technical standards--not a good sign when doing the job search. Unless the option is going jobless and hungry, I will avoid pursuing a job with them like the plague.
Camping on quad since 1996.
It's also a pain to use. It BSODs on boot in KVM, you have to first boot it in another hypervisor, run mergeide, and then it'll run normally. Plus they expire every few months, so you get to do it all over again. Ultimately easier to just fly to bird to IE users.
If Google is just using IE6 for testing their website/services wouldn't just using IEs4Linux be good enough?
Better yet, they could use/build their own version of Wine to run instances of IE6 on linux. After all they are experts with Wine and Linux.
You obviously didn't read my whole post (which was only two sentences,) you shit for brains.
And to the mods - THIS is you fucking flamebait troll post.
I was wondering just why I didn't know anyone using IE 8 and then it dawned on me.
With the way they run their metrics it is the number of web accesses and nothing churns up the pot more than pushing those browsers' buttons as fast as possible to see what fails.
Or it could be Microsoft QA doing it. They do have QA, don't they?
Do you have to link to the 'Microsoft Jack' blog. A site dedicated to posting at least one anti-Apple-Google post per day, and ever sing the praises of everything Microsoft. Do these 'market share figures' factor in people who use more than one browser or use the user-agent-switcher, to spoof sites running IIS, that's still (2010) hard-wired to not work with any other browser.
I prefer Gopher over today's JavaShit laden, ad infested, bloated, bandwidth wasting, privacy invading Web 2.0 world any day.
Gopher is like the web without the cruft. You only get the information you actually want to see and its so very fast even on a bad connection. There are more gopher servers online now than there were a few years ago so worth having a peek in gopher://gopher.floodgap.com if you are bored.
Gopher is quite a limited protocol compared to HTTP and thats a good thing - it means there is no rat race between site owners to have all the latest effects and gimmicks. I'm not saying the world should convert to gopher because then the protocol would likely be revised to allow for HTTP's annoyances but it is refreshing to use once in a while
IE 8 might be the most used browser, but top it ain't ...
why almighty fuck would the fangirlies of one non-IE browser devote so much time and effort to bashing any other non-IE browser?
Because he's 15?
The fact that people are still using IE at all leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But as long as they're getting away from IE6 in particular, this is still good news, as it means IE holds back the Web just that much less.
Seriously; I'm looking forward to the day when my work will allow me to drop IE6 support. It was a big improvement over IE5, yes, but it needs to die as soon as possible.
Like it or hate it, IE8 can run just about any corporate crap you throw at it - if run in compatibility mode, and you have sensible group policy settings for security zones and the pop up blocker.
I just migrated the domain to it and niggles have been few and far between.
Admins sticking it out on IE8 (without bothering to actually test/attempt to fix the breakage) are being overly fearful, imho.
Put it this way, if you're a corp and want a supported version of Windows, you need to go to IE7 or IE8 with Vista or 7 in the next 12 months or so in any case...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
it... is designed to be W3C compliant through the HTML Validator
But I thought you wanted it to work with IE6? :)
Given the choice between having to support 350 clients on IE8 with auto patching via WSUS, etc - or Firefox/Chrome by relying on 350 PCs to go off and get their own updates whenever the user feels like it - I choose IE8 as the corporate standard.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Given adequate malware protection, IE/Windows is quite maintainable. Which is why there are plenty of businesses out there successfully running it...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
wooooosh
http://p8ste.com - Web based Clipboard
Not surprising really - Firefox seems to get more bloaty and unstable with each release. I still run Firefox but its definitely taking second place to Chrome these days.
N.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I prefer Gopher over today's JavaShit laden, ad infested, bloated, bandwidth wasting, privacy invading Web 2.0 world any day.
This might be a bit off-topic, but it is refreshing to reflect on the fact that /. does still indeed work with Javascript turned off. Faster too.
Reply to That ||
My numbers look different. I'm seeing IE6, IE7, Firefox, IE8, Chrome, and Safari in that order. All the other browsers (e.g., Opera, Konqueror) come in with lower numbers than Googlebot.
IE8 market share *is* increasing, and IE6 decreasing, but I haven't seen them switch places yet.
Though, it wouldn't surprise me very much if my users were behind the times. I also haven't yet seen the numbers for Vista and Seven (even if combined) rise above the level of Mac OS X, somewhere in the sub-1% range. I'm seeing 85% Windows XP, and most of the rest is Windows 98, and most of the rest after that is search indexers.
I think I have *one* regular user with an iPhone, a couple of Nokia phone users (exactly two different models), a small handful of Mac users, and a couple of Linux users. There's also at least one user with Windows Me, one with FreeBSD, and at least one Blackberry. (I happen to know who the Blackberry user is. Used to be a coworker.)
And no, I can't be absolutely certain of my user counts. But between the number of hits and some other stats that we keep, it's pretty obvious that most of the ones I've guessed at "one user" probably really are just one user. And it's entirely possible that one person is responsible for more than one of these categories (e.g., maybe the FreeBSD guy as a Nokia phone, who knows).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Your post isn't internally consistent. First, you say that you're willing to not support multiple browsers to save time, then you say that organizations that did just that are arrogant and ignorant and deserve to suffer?
Or were you ignoring the fact that for several years IE6 was basically the only choice for a free browser? That's not the case anymore, but. . .
The biggest factor that decides what browser a person uses is which one was already installed when they bought the computer. Most people who use the internet are not computer literate, they just click the button that takes them to google and get on with it. They don't notice that there may be a different logo in the top left corner of their screen.
Mozilla have done a creditable job getting firefox used by so many but I reckon Chrome on Google OS netbooks will start overhauling FF in a couple of years
Re-read my post and stop making up lies. I said we support the ones that come with better testing tools. We support Firefox, Safari, and Opera. There is no concerted effort not to support IE. This is very different from a top-down corporate mandate for IE only support. Apparently I have to repeat myself for this to sink in with you. We just don't have the time.
You are the most ignorant I've seen in quite some time. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
Camping on quad since 1996.
I believe you have that slightly wrong:
The main reason for releasing IE8 was to keep the appearance that Microsoft is actively working on making IE better. It's the 'U' in FUD.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Bullsh*t
Because putting a star in it makes it ok to swear.
Too late. I already have holes in my roof from this irksome Chrome behavior, and the rain that came in shorted out my computer and ruined the delicious cake I was making.
Can you explain what, exactly, was uncertain about what new features IE8 was going to have, and (perhaps more importantly) what it was not going to have?
This is very different from a top-down corporate mandate for IE only support.
Sorry, I'm not really seeing a difference.
You are the most ignorant I've seen in quite some time. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
Thanks! Hey, were you doing web development and did you try supporting Netscape during those early-2000s years? I have to think not, because if you did you'd realize it was so fucking awful that it doesn't count. I'm glad we ultimately got Firefox out of that mess, but let's not pretend that the later years of Netscape were something other than what they were.
Lynx also doesn't really count. I mean, it's good for what it is, but a non-graphical web browser isn't really relevant to this discussion.
You are the most ignorant I've seen in quite some time. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
Actually, while you are technically correct. When I look at that chart, from late 2001 (IE6 release) to late 2004(FF 1.0 release) IE6, Netscape and Opera really do look like the only well known choices for windows users. I suspect that the GP was specifically excluding Opera with the 'free browser' comment, and Netscape was really in a bad way around that time (which is why we've got firefox today). I'm not familiar with all the browsers in that time-frame, but many are not for windows, and it seems likely that those that were were no better than IE6. It looks to me like the spirit of the GPs argument is valid.
I don't accept this as a valid excuse anymore. These organisations were stuck with IE6 over five years ago. Since then there have been umpteen security and technical problems with IE6, and several service packs and new OSes that replace it. Yet we're supposed to believe that these big organisations still have critical backends that will not work ono any other browser? You're telling me these people prefer ActiveX programming over web interfaces or rich clients? I know this is commonly accepted wisdom, but is there any real evidence for it?
IT sometimes moves slowly, but not THAT slowly. The corporate world has moved on. Something else is the cause of all these IE6 browsers still hanging about.
May the Maths Be with you!
Actually, while you are technically correct. When I look at that chart, from late 2001 (IE6 release) to late 2004(FF 1.0 release) IE6, Netscape and Opera really do look like the only well known choices for windows users. I suspect that the GP was specifically excluding Opera with the 'free browser' comment, and Netscape was really in a bad way around that time (which is why we've got firefox today). I'm not familiar with all the browsers in that time-frame, but many are not for windows, and it seems likely that those that were were no better than IE6. It looks to me like the spirit of the GPs argument is valid.
You've correctly understood what I meant; thanks for restating it more clearly.
I was doing a lot of web development work at that time; for graphical intranet-ish apps, the companies I was working for weren't interested in buying Opera, and Netscape was just terrible and really inconsistent from version to version.
So I guess what I'm really saying is, to have an app that's built to run in IE6, you don't necessarily have to have had managers who were slavishly devoted to Microsoft or stupid about standards -- for a span of years there, IE6 (for all its many flaws) was the standard because it (largely by default) was just that much better than any of the free-as-in-beer competition. Basically, you just need the app to have been written at a certain time by someone who decided to not support Netscape because it both had almost no market share and essentially required you to use different arcane hacks depending on the version of Netscape to get your page to display half-right.
Browser Statistics
Web Statistics and Trends
Statistics are important information. From the statistics below, you can see that Internet Explorer and Firefox are the most common browsers.
Browser Statistics Month by Month
2009 IE8 IE7 IE6 Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
December 13.5% 12.8% 10.9% 46.4% 9.8% 3.6% 2.3%
November 13.3% 13.3% 11.1% 47.0% 8.5% 3.8% 2.3%
October 12.8% 14.1% 10.6% 47.5% 8.0% 3.8% 2.3%
September 12.2% 15.3% 12.1% 46.6% 7.1% 3.6% 2.2%
August 10.6% 15.1% 13.6% 47.4% 7.0% 3.3% 2.1%
July 9.1% 15.9% 14.4% 47.9% 6.5% 3.3% 2.1%
June 7.1% 18.7% 14.9% 47.3% 6.0% 3.1% 2.1%
May 5.2% 21.3% 14.5% 47.7% 5.5% 3.0% 2.2%
April 3.5% 23.2% 15.4% 47.1% 4.9% 3.0% 2.2%
March 1.4% 24.9% 17.0% 46.5% 4.2% 3.1% 2.3%
February 0.8% 25.4% 17.4% 46.4% 4.0% 3.0% 2.2%
January 0.6% 25.7% 18.5% 45.5% 3.9% 3.0% 2.3%
None of the major smartphones use Opera.
> Everybody is underestimating the market penetration of netbooks right now
I can't tell if you're serious ... but I totally disagree. Netbooks, sadly, just can't seem to hit the price point they need to really hit the big time. They need to get down to about half or less what they are now (say $120) and perform about double. They need to meet some specific targets:
* I can afford to buy one for each of my kids
* I can afford to lose it when it gets dropped / stolen / stepped on
* I can easily play full screen video at reasonable quality
* I can easily look at the ridiculous 11 megapixel photos spewed out by my camera.
The current generation just doesn't do it. Not to say they won't / aren't selling - but they won't "go critical" until these conditions are met.
using an apt proxy and have the 350 pcs update their whole system when and with whatever you want is what i would choose instead :D
>But why almighty fuck would the fangirlies of one non-IE browser devote so much time and effort to bashing any other non-IE browser?
Why? To get posts like yours in response!
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
So you're running debian unstable? Otherwise you're going to be relying on some ancient version of Firefox...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
There are more gopher servers online now than there were a few years ago so worth having a peek in gopher://gopher.floodgap.com if you are bored.
Er, how does one Google the gopherspace to find what one is after? :>
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
Google spam chrome, M$ force it upon you and package other software with security updates. Adding all these screwed up toolbars, sorry for being cynical but what is wrong with Lynx at times?
All cows eat grass!
Mozilla shot themselves in the foot by having Firefox start using the Internet Explorer security settings. If you want to download anything executable with Firefox, you have to give IE the same permissions. There's a config setting to turn this off but it doesn't work.
You forget the lower level of the governmental world where nothing is changed until there is a landslide or other issue that requires a replacement of the computer and subsequently a software upgrade.
Realize that the majority in the governmental and municipial services are a decade behind on any technology and method. I wouldn't even be surprised to find Novell and DOS services in those areas.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
you don't. you use vinshu or veronica instead although google will index a lot of gophers which also support http
I live in Oz, very few companies give us newer anything for quite some time, so I haven't seen those yet.
None of this of course changes the joke that is Chrome OS.