Slashdot Mirror
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."
There was a moment in time when MSIE had effectively 0% market share right? So this 60% is still a huge triumph if you choose to spin it that way.
But seriously, any drop in market share is a historic low for Microsoft. And here's what I love about it -- Microsoft will be hard pressed to explain why it would choose to not completely support competing browsers with its web based applications such as Outlook Web Access and the like. It has been a while since I looked at it, but OWA did not offer full functionality to browsers other than MSIE. I don't know if that is still the case, but I suspect it is.
In any case, it is in large part due to Microsoft's behavior that our next enterprise email server at the office will be anything but MS Exchange.
so i have ie8, firefox, chrome, safari, and opera installed on my desktop
i often find myself in this common usage scenario: 4 browsers open at the same time. ie8 opened with code being tested, opera running pandora, chrome with nytimes.com and other reading media on it, and firefox open with some online code documentation
i use those 4 browsers all the time, i don't use safari at all really unless testing code (but since its webkit like chrome, that's often redundant)
honestly, i lately have found myself prefering chrome over firefox. i love firefox, but chrome has a sleek ui and seems faster (opera's latest ui is pretty hot too, but opera has some compatibility issues, such as google map's api)
chrome just has more... chrome. consider this small bird adequately bedazzled by the shiny bells and whistles
currently i rank the browsers according to this personal preference:
1. chrome
2. firefox and opera tied for second best
3. ie8 and safari not at all
if firefox wants to win my heart back, it has to be super fast and bedazzle me with a hot ui. opera is doing a good job of that, but opera has issues
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes, but had MS stuck to standards to begin with, you would have been able to just design your pages per the standard, and never had to worry about any browser. Even now, my company is just getting around to piloting IE8, and only because the inevitable rollout to Windows 7. I suspect a lot are in the same boat, where they skipped Vista, and made no effort to stay current with the browser that came packaged with XP. I don't know why my company chose to just stay on IE6 but I suspect it worked at the time, it was updated from MS so they got their security fixes in a standard way along with the other OS patches, and it was simply conveniant.
My company is usually very keen on get current stay current, but they failed miserably on IE. I can only assume that they design apps specifically for IE6 and simply couldn't break away, or didn't see any need to move on. Now that the move to Windows 7 comes bundled with IE8, they simply have no choice.
My biggest problem is that MS has deliberately broken standards to hold backup online development because it is a threat to their desktop based monopolies. Its not like they don't know what the standards are, or they can't afford to adopt them. Its a deliberate torpedoing of the market to protect their cash cow monopolies. Screw 'em. They can't be trusted to do the right thing. Them saying they will at some point in the future does not cut it. They have a long history of essentially lying through their teeth.
In truth, IE8 does a much much better job of displaying standards so this has been almost a non-issue.
True, IE 8 is a huge improvement over IE 6, but it still doesn't support W3C event model. For example, in IE 8, what's the recommended way to specify that a script shall run once the DOM content is ready? Or how do you attach multiple event handlers to an object, such as multiple things to run on load? IE is the only browser to support attachEvent and the only modern browser not to support addEventListener.
It's been great to see MSIE lose its grip on the browser market, but it seems that maybe things have become more complicated.
As bad as MSIE is, the user can add whatever they want to it. For example, Flash delivers new codecs and Google was able to deliver an HTML5 compliant core that worked with MSIE6.
But one of the browsers taking share from IE is Safari on the iPhone/iPad/iPod. Those users can't try a different browser or use any technology that Apple doesn't approve it. Can a third party deliver a new codec to Safari on these devices? Does Opera Mini for the iPhone come with Ogg codecs (I mention Ogg because I'm imaging Apple would Opera mini if it did)? I really don't know the answers to these questions and I hope someone will enlighten me.
While Safari supports HTML5, times changes, and other things like codecs are becoming more important.
So perhaps now we are looking at a much more fundamental threat.
That's changing too, hopefully. I was surprised to see that the new Steam UI runs all of its web pages on WebKit. Although the move makes sense since they want to port Steam to OSX and Linux (WebKit being compatible with all three platforms while IE obviously isn't), this is still a very good development. The fewer things use IE's rendering engine, the better.
Well, the reality is that people don't want to pay for it - at least not as much as advertisers.
Let's take a brief math example: The superbowl had 62 ad slots which averaged 3 million dollars in 2008 and 98.7 million watched it. That's 1.90$ per person watching, but since it was only 48.1 million households a PPV licence would have to work out to about 4$. But that is assuming there'll still be 98 million viewers and 48 million households, which is unlikely - it's RIAA/MPAA math. First of all, many people just casually interested might not watch at all, those that do would be gathering more and you might see maybe 60 million viewers on 20 million households. Then it's a 9-10$ / PPV license which drives away more people and the numbers work out even worse and so on.
If advertising is simply made unfeasible, there will have to be large cutbacks all around. It's not just that people can get the same thing for free as they get behind the paywall, it's that people value the content much less than the advertisers value the eyeball time. I think this whole scenario that everything will be behind paywalls are ridiculous, the harder it becomes to get eyeball time the more it'll be worth - it's basic supply and demand. Eventually when enough content is behind paywalls it will again be profitable to run ad-based sites. Which I don't even think will happen in the first place.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, you can use a comma and have it be an additional clause. That is perfectly valid. It's also valid to start a new sentence with "but". It retains the same concessive semantics, but can be used in situations where you don't want two clauses to be joined to each other in a single sentence. Consider the following example:
"We have developed all kinds of advanced technology and because of that, we consider ourselves to be the greatest species on the planet. But without that technology, we are as
fragile, if not more so, than many other species."
You can't convert the period before the "but" to a comma without creating, at best, a run-on sentence. You also lose the strong contrastive force. If it were an additional clause, it would be a concession as a mere afterthought ("I would go, but I don't have time"), perhaps even just a clarification. At the beginning of a new sentence, however, it says "what I just said is about to be seriously questioned or refined". It applies instead to a whole string of thoughts, not just to the clause preceding it.
You might say "however" or "yet" would be better. They sound a bit stuffy and perform the same function as "but". Thanks the flexibility of language (which pedants, such as yourself, seem intent on needlessly stamping out, lest people be able to express themselves in anything but sanitary prose), the word can be used as a plain old coordinating conjunction, or it can be used as a sentential adverb (or even as a preposition -- gasp!).
The point is, there's no good reason to avoid putting "but" at the beginning of the sentence, and there are actually very good reasons *to* put it at the beginning of a sentence. In light of that, I will gladly put "but" at the beginning of sentences where appropriate.
www.pcc.edu for the last 30 days.
Internet Explorer 532255 50.94%
Firefox 334610 32.02%
Safari 119225 11.41%
Chrome 53363 5.11%
Mozilla 1922 0.18%
Opera 1463 0.14%
SeaMonkey 578 0.06%
Mozilla Compatible Agent 482 0.05%
Camino 377 0.04%
Opera Mini 306 0.03%