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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
MS HTML control 62%
Gecko 24.5%
Webkit 9.7%%
Opera 3.0%
Miscellania 0.7%
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.
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.
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
Old people, non-geeks, spouses of slashdotters maybe. Seriously, a lot of people still use IE. There are reason though. I was able to "convert" my wife from IE to FF a few months ago, however, her company's payroll system only works on IE. Once she switches it on, she continues using it. That to me is a big problem with FF. We as geeks just don't go to crazy ass sites as other regular people sometimes and we think FF is the best whereas, there are still a number of sites that don't work well with IE. I remember flashblock extension screwed up videos on a number of sites for me for a long time. Also, FF has its own issues. I typically have to restart my browser every other day because it makes my system slow and I am already using Adblock and Flashblock to cut off the junk and the memory leak from flash. The biggest advantage of Chrome is its popularity due to Google and perceived speed. It feels like Chrome loads pages wayyy faster FF. However, in many instances, it succeeds in loading only half the page fast, there are elements of the page that load slowly and if you note down the start to end loading time, it is comparable to FF. However, since it loads a visible portion quickly, people believe it is wayy faster than FF.
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"
Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer.
I believe the majority of that statistic is the result of corporate computer deployments where IE is pretty much the norm, and employees are unable to install their own browsers. That's why IE6 was at the top for so very long, even through the entirety of IE7's lifetime, because corporations hadn't taken the time to install new software like that en masse.
I'm glad to see that IE8 is on top now, though(*). Shows that corporations are perhaps finally realizing how utterly bad IE6 is and they're moving forward.
(*): this is not an endorsement of IE... I honestly can't stand it... just anything is better than IE6.
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
When I got my girlfriend a Mac she had a hard time switching because she thought I was "taking her Internet away"... yes, she's hot.
"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."
It's already happening. Take a look at Firefox. http://i.imgur.com/qD2OV.png
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!
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.