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."

Comments

the more prevalent it remains, the bigger the risk

[jollyreaper]

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.

Going by rendering engines...

[argent]

MS HTML control 62%
Gecko 24.5%
Webkit 9.7%%
Opera 3.0%
Miscellania 0.7%

At some level this is may be a good thing

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Can someone please answer this?

[mystikkman]

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?

It's very different in some parts of the world

[Enleth]

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?

Re:I'm using Chrome

[goldaryn]

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

I agree with you. I switched to Chrome as my main browser for similar reasons. I used to use Firefox, but I became weary of how slow Firefox is relative to Chrome, even without extension. With extensions it's a joke. (Side note: I like the userscript extension method in the Chrome Beta - which is very stable for a Beta).

But why, as you say, can't they have a half intelligent search history, like Firefox? Why does the browser constantly chatter to 1e100.net? image If this is a Google server, why doesn't it LOOK like a Google server? Why doesn't a Google search for "Chrome plugins" have as a result the proper Extensions page? https://chrome.google.com/extensions. In fact, why is that page the SECOND result for "Chrome extensions"?

Mystifying.

I downloaded Chromium a few days ago

[Omnifarious]

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!

Re:I'm using Chrome

[Duct Tape Pro]

Why does the browser constantly chatter to 1e100.net? image If this is a Google server, why doesn't it LOOK like a Google server?

I suspect they were going for 1x10^100, which is by definition a googol

Re:the more prevalent it remains, the bigger the r

[Kadin2048]

"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.