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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.
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.
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.
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.
Do a validation test on this page. I just got: 104 Errors, 2 warning(s)
*whew*
I'd get fucking FIRED if I put out that kind of crap at work.
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.
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!