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IE Market Share Falls To Historic Low
An anonymous reader writes "Predicting that Microsoft will lose market share from month to month isn't especially difficult. Yet it is amazing to see the downfall of what was once a bastion for Microsoft. It appears that Microsoft can't defend IE against Firefox and, as it seems, Google's Chrome. Net Applications now believes that IE has a share of less than 60%, which is about the range that IE had in early 1999, when IE5 was launched. IE is now officially back in the 1990s. Chrome, by the way, is the fastest growing browser, both in absolute numbers and percentages. It is well ahead of Safari and more than tripled its share within 12 months."
The reporting is also flawed because even if you change your default browser from MSIE to firefox, programs will still use the MSIE branded http dll to download things. To wit, make your proxy reject all requests that contain MSIE in the user agent string, and try to install the next version of lets say skype. Or browse in Outlook internet content. Or try to access any link through http from an Office 2007 document: http://blogs.msdn.com/vsofficedeveloper/pages/Office-Existence-Discovery-Protocol.aspx
http://superuser.com/questions/41935/clicking-hyperlinks-in-email-messages-becomes-painfully-slow/42237#42237. I wonder if any of the legislators in Europe who settled with Microsoft over the Browser wars were aware of these issues. Bottom line: you cannot get rid of MSIE because Microsoft designed it that way!
Wasn't there a news explaining that a big part of that market share drop was due to the new "choose a browser" screen the EU forced Microsoft to include in the latest Windows versions?
Netscape wasn't sticking to standards, either, though.
I noticed a couple of months ago already, that Firefox's usage share is flat by all indicators. It's been stagnating since July-August last year.
Maybe that's fine compared to IE, which is shrinking, but pretty sad compared to, say Chrome.
Which I really like and would use also at work, if there was a portable version (so I can run it without installing it).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Yes, the deals Google supposedly cut with some PC manufacturers are probably insignificant. But Google promotes Chrome...everywhere, I believe. Not only on almost all their websites, also for example on largest social networking sites. OK, not exactly bundling; but at the least a marketing campaign which jumps at you several times per day, it seems.
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Well, it sounds like they had real reasons to switch to IIS. You basically need it to use ASP.NET, and ASP.NET has significant traction these days and provides significant value for a lot of companies, at least over PHP. The functionality offered by Java/JSP is a lot closer, but PHP vs ASP.NET is like bringing a bazooka to water ballon fight.
That's not to say that PHP is bad or sucks. Lots of sights make great use of it, but it just doesn't offer the same level of control, supportability, and enterprise integration that ASP.NET does. C# really is a vastly superior language to PHP's c-like system, which only recently became semi-object oriented. PHP simply isn't the right tool for a lot of jobs.
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The default browser for android phones is a google browser, chrome based...
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Meh, you should try being a PC repairman for a living! I swear we are treated just like plumbers, we walk into somebody's house and it is like "Hey buddy, glad to see you! BTW, could you look at my PC? It is acting funny"
As for IE, I've even moved my 67 year old dad over to Firefox. IE is too virus prone, they take too long to patch holes, and is still too big a target for hackers IMHO. Firefox with Adblock seems to take care of most of the clueless users (like my dad) along with a decent AV, which I prefer Comodo.
As for the GP whacking IE users with the stick? The key is to give them candy, NOT whack them with the stick. Here is how this old greybeard gets IE users to switch...Give them Adblock along with, and this is the key, give them ForecastFox in the Menubar at the top set to their zipcode. I have found folks loooove having that little 3 day forecast right at the top where they can glance at it before work, and when you tell them it will pop up severe weather alerts if something bad is headed their way it seals the deal. I have yet to have a user go back to IE after giving them ForecastFox with Adblock.
Oh, and if you are switching them from IE? Take note of what their home page is set to and be SURE to make sure Firefox has the same! Folks get really pissy if their favorite homepage isn't on startup. I have found a good 85% have it set to that ugly Yahoo portal, but do NOT change it, no matter how much you think it sucks! They actually like that mess, and like to read the headlines and check their mail before going out onto the bigger web. Just give them FF with ABP and FCF, make sure their home page is the same, and you'll see you don't need that text file, as they'll be quite happy to stay with FF. Always catch more flies with honey than vinegar you know.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
> I'm not so sure about that. I have to wonder if the explosion of iPhone
> and Android based phones has not contributed significantly to this.
I won't say they haven't contributed, but I don't think it's really the major factor. The 2010Q1 stats from our website at work (which, admittedly, is small and of mostly local import) show all known mobile platforms combined at less than 1% (and just barely ahead of Iceweasel), compared to Firefox (branded as such) at 19%, Safari at 16%, and Chrome at 4% (up *substantially* from just one quarter earlier).
What interests me is that there appears to be a lot of motion, people switching to one browser and then another, and it does not appear that everyone is moving in the same direction. It doesn't look to me as if everyone is moving en masse from one particular browser to another one, because the loss and gain numbers don't match up in a way that makes sense for that. Firefox numbers, for instance, have scarcely changed at all in the last year, although I know there are people moving to Firefox (especially from IE) and others moving from it (e.g. toward Chrome). I think the browser market has become competitive again, and people in general (not everyone, of course but more than just a handful) are starting to experiment with different browsers and make a choice based on personal taste. I view this as a good thing.
Incidentally my stats also show IE8 up to 22% now (up from around 1% a year previous), which makes it the single most widely deployed version of IE at this point. I'm showing IE7 at 14% and IE6 at 12%, down from 40% and 18% (respectively) a year earlier. Note the huge drop in IE7 (40 to 14, a loss of 65% of the market share it had a year earlier), compared to the slower drop in IE6 (18 to 12, losing 33% of what it had). Of course, that's partly because a lot more of the IE7 users had automatic updates turned on, which by default puts them on IE8 now, even if they took no special action. In the next year, I look for IE8 to continue to rise and IE7 to continue to drop significantly, possibly falling below IE6. Whether overall IE numbers will continue to drop, I don't know. It might depend on what kind of showing IE9 presents. I also don't know whether Firefox will be able to hold near 20% in the long term; I suspect it may have peaked. Chrome, obviously, is still on the increase. Opera appears to be holding its own in the less-than-1% range where it has always lived. Konqueror is below IE5 and apparently tied with IE4, which tells me that all the KDE users (not that there are that many of them in the first place, though it's difficult to measure this since the UA string does not generally disclose window manager or desktop environment) are using other browsers (probably mostly Firefox, but that's a guess).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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