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."
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.
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.