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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."
It's insecure and awful. Bye bye!
Most people are not complete morons. If they get burned once with IE, they'll tell their friends to use a different browser. And of course, they themselves will use a different browser. As the number of people recommending alternative browsers increases, more people will switch away from IE voluntarily...
As a human being I'm normally predisposed to abstain from unconditional hate.
As a web developer who has "done the dance" with former versions of IE late into the night too many times I hate hate hate and welcome this news. Nothing can undo those atrocities. IE6. Never forget!
My work here is dung.
This is the best news since... the last news that IE market share was dropping...
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
I recently forced my sister and her husband on to Opera because they kept getting new spyware every month. I used to prefer IE to the others back when it was simple and fast, I can't stand it anymore.
It's become even more of a hassle now that everyone has a computer and is using it incompetently.
Microsoft is desperately updating their browser to meet the same modern standards as the competition. IE9 is supposidly going to be a revolution for them, supporting all sorts of long standing stuff like SVG, CSS3, HTML5 and supporting a fast Javascript engine, which is exactly the direction in which Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera have been developing lately.
Obviously Microsoft is doing this in an attempt to gain some market share again. It's great for web developers, because they can finally start really deploying some of that shiney new tech. But in reality, most people aren't aware of these webstandards at all and aren't switching to Firefox or Chrome because MSIE doesn't support them. They're switching because other browsers are faster, more secure, less obnoxious, more cool and support more plugins and other goodies.
I don't think IE will ever be as big again as they once were, but because MS doesn't get what the root of the problem is, they're helping the web forward in the process of trying to get some users back. Which is actually great for everyone.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
"Falls To Historic Low"
[...]
"which is about the range that IE had in early 1999"
?
So, it's historic, because it's the second time it's around that range?
...is that most people now either use Firefox or Chrome - which heightens these browsers' endangerment concerning malware specific to them.
It's not as if it really affects me as an Opera user, but having to put up with Firefox at work, I'm not too excited about this, since the company I work at usually takes its time to update (FF 2.0.0.7, here).
Oh well, at least MS's share is dropping...
Non-supporter of Online Activation and any other draconian DRM
Ironically, if the market share for IE keeps droping; the number of hackers targetting IE will drop and the people trying to hack firefox's security will rise... and maybe IE will become safer then... nahhhh, even then I'll be worried.
That's why the 10 users of Opera and the user of lynx for all practical purposes are considered safely browsing the web :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
why is this news that people should care about?
*rolls down his turtleneck to reveal the permanent bruise from trying to hang himself after spending an endless night trying to figure out what was causing IE6 to crash but not Firefox*
*rolls up his coworker's sleeve to show the scars of slash marks on his wrist after trying to get alpha transparency working in PNG images inside IE6*
*holds up a memorial plaque of yet another coworker who jumped to his death from the top of the building after trying to code Javascript that would abstract many functionalities so that they would work both in IE6 and Firefox*
Trust me, as a developer who has tried to understand the madness that is IE6, we care and we are not alone. The damage continues to this day.
My work here is dung.
Tinfoil much?
I'm happy to hear that Chrome is on the up and up.
I'm not sure that anybody could really be shocked by this news. Internet Explorer has been grabbing at straws since IE5. They continue to implement other companies ideas in a very poor way. The current IE is a complete farce, I don't understand how anybody could use it, unless you were forced to by restrictions at work.
I know it would be impossible to glean, but the amount of people using various versions of IE while at work would be interesting.
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
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!
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
Here's what I mean: -
1: Better aesthetics. I mean, the current theme and all available ones are not that appealing to
the eyes.
2: Print Preview: Heck how can a today's desktop application fail to have this important
resource? An application from Google should have "everything" necessary to be productive,
and print preview is one of those things I believe.
3: The over minimalistic paradigm Google has followed has gone too far. Heck, what ends up
happening is that extensions have no where to live at the bottom of the browser, crowding uup
space elsewhere.
If these are implemented, it will surely not hurt...or will it? I stand to be corrected.
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?
I have Internet Explorer, Fire Fox and Chrome. I regularly use all 3.
So in what group do I fall into?
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/24/1927255/Microsoft-Agrees-To-EU-Browser-Ballot-Screen
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/19/2135254/Details-Emerge-On-EU-Only-Browser-Choice-Screen-for-Windows
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Yeah, after reading what these people do, I am a bit paranoid..
IE works fine for me. And on business machines, I do restrict third party installations. Maybe it's because I'm lazy, but it makes my job much easier.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Internet Explorer has always been stuck in the nineties. That was the problem, really.
Hardware bundling lock-in defeated by even more hardware bundling lock-in?
Wow.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Trust me, as a developer who has tried to understand the madness that is IE6, we care and we are not alone. The damage continues to this day.
Guess I'm lucky, my last 2 jobs got to drop IE6 as a supported browser, and my current one doesn't even directly support IE7! It's standards only, and if it works on Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, we really don't give a rats ass about IE other than that IE8 doesn't make a complete mess of the pages. In truth, IE8 does a much much better job of displaying standards so this has been almost a non-issue. Amazingly enough, almost everything works in IE7 as well.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Chrome has the best UI amongst all browsers, hands down. I adopted Chromium months ago and then went to Chrome, and despite minor incompatibilities now and then (mostly rendering issues), I can't leave it. I tried to switch back to Firefox for a while, but after a week or so I came back to Chrome, primarily on the strength of the UI.
Nobody else seems able to come up with a UI that is:
- Businesslike and no-nonsense
- Small and out of the way
- Free of rendering artifacts and glitches
The default Firefox theme is just huge. Any replacement themes are buggy, loud, amateurish, and often glitchy. The "personalities" or whatever they are (you know, my web browser is now my wallpaper) are just ridiculous. There is a chrome UI for firefox, but it's not as fast and doesn't actually have all of the great behaviors of the Chrome UI, just a basic appearance.
Everybody else ought to take a page from Chrome!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Print? Why would you ever need to print? If you need to send a copy of a document to someone else, that's what Gmail is for. If you need to read documents away from a PC, that's what an Android phone with a $60/mo plan is for.
</sarcasm>
Firefox just starts up way too slowly. I still keep it around in case I need to use FireFTP or ChatZilla.
Or if I need to download an attachment in my Yahoo email.
Technoli
Yet I know I will see this posted again next month...so would someone please explain the agenda to me?
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.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Net Applications doesn't say anything about users and what they have installed or use. They look at website and which browsers people use to access them. So apparently, out of every 100 hits on the websites they monitor, less than 60 of them use IE.
So whenever you surf with Firefox, you'll be counted as a Firefox user. And when you surf with something else, they'll count your hits too and put them under some other browser.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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.
Unbundling wont work because of all the parts of Windows and of Windows Apps that use the IE rendering engine.
All of the various Help technologies Microsoft has used and supported in the last decade (including HTML Help and its replacements) use IE to render. Game related programs like GameSpy and Steam use (or have used) IE to render. All kinds of custom written software (written for specific companies or markets) use IE to render HTML.
Even more apps use various parts of IE to do things like HTTP up/downloading, SSL and other things.
If that were true, one would expect Firefox's share to have risen significantly, but in reality, it's stayed pretty much the same, in fact it's at the exact same level as in November of last year. Further, the Browser selection screen has only been out there for 3 months and the trend of chrome and safari goes back a lot further than that.
Frankly, I'm more inclined to believe the rise is due to the rise of iPhone and Android based browsers rather than much change on the desktop.
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Do you restrict *any* kind of alien exe file? 'cause I'd use Portable Firefox anyway.
Dilbert RSS feed
All around me, I see the otherwise-paranoid IT administrators allowing people to install VLC, because that is the easiest way to allow DVDs to play on a Win XP laptop.
I used to think I was a snarky anarchist installing free software to people's computers, and now they have gone and taken away my joy.
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
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.
how do you think the shit you like gets paid for?
i mean, go ahead and block ads, nobody will ever stop you from doing that
but if you were smart, you'll shut the fuck up about it, because the more people who do that, the more the websites you like disappear. if you don't understand that, you're an idiot
show some fucking discretion, and stop telling people you block ads. its nothing to be proud of, and you are obviously so very fucking proud of your smug smarmy self
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Using a buggy, insecure rendering engine to render trusted content by installed apps is somewhat different from using it to surf the web.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Indeed. DOM seems to be the only area in which IE has consistently failed to improve. I'm hoping that will change in IE9.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Firefox AwesomeBar give better result and use local data only (the search bar is a keylogger, but you are searching anyway, so it does not really mater)
More accurately, it gets search suggestions as you type, which naturally requires transmitting what you’ve typed so far.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
index.html:
...
...
...
<script language="JavaScript">
if ( navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('msie') != -1 ) {
window.location.replace("msie.html");
}
msie.html:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5; url=http://www.microsoft.com">
</head><body><p>msie users move along. There's nothing for you to see here.</body>
First, we take OWA; then we take SharePoint.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Additionally, I've never been too savy with the seperate window it opens when you want to download something. To me, these are on par with pop up ads.
You need Download Statusbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/26
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
as a web developer, i hate you fucking ad blockers
Tough shit, asshole.
If you want someone to blame, go blame the website operators, who've forced users to block ads because they got steadily more and more obnoxious, until they were simply too unbearable to endure any longer.
And yes, I block ads, asshole. I block ads as a big "fuck you" to you to all the douchbags out there that made browsing the web a fucking nightmare without it. Does that mean I end up punishing the "good" websites, too? Yup! Tough shit.
Meanwhile, if these sites have decent content, people will pay for it. If they don't pay for it, then evidently it's not worth the money. But if your little fantastical nightmare scenario comes true, all the good content will be hidden behind paywalls, and so if we really want it, we'll pay for it anyway. Which is fine by me, as long as I don't have to put up with pop-ups, pop-unders, overlayed ads, interstitials, flash ads, and all the shit that comes with them (including drive-by virus infections, among other things).
So, in short, fuck the website operators, and while I'm at it, fuck you too.
Why not? You can't express certain thoughts without doing that.
I firmly believe that the free market should hold the answers to most problems in the free market, but I also recognize that monopoly conditions alter the nature of a free market, and generally require outside intervention to set right. This is especially true in the case of a monopoly that will LIE, CHEAT, and STEAL(*1) to protect its monopoly, in which case they are actually destroying the free market that is required for a healthy economic ecosystem.
The primary effect of a monopoly running amok is the destruction of most other players in the market. MS accomplished that.
One secondary effect in this case was the html incompatibilities that MS introduced shattered the most basic premise of the world wide web - that information could be made available and read by all based on certain standards. The efforts of web developers to create work-arounds is all that prevented the www from being completely partitioned into IE and non-IE space. Unfortunately, there are still many important sites (or parts of sites) that *require* Internet Explorer in order to work(*2). The result has been real costs to people and businesses in terms of software costs, web development costs, and communication issues because of broken IE-only government web sites, to name a few. These are costs we have been forced to bear in order to line Bill Gates' pockets. In short, there is great harm in allowing a monopoly to go unregulated and unrestrained.
Having seen over a decade of a stifled, monopolized market (ie, no longer free) and a largely broken internet, resorting to government intervention is hardly unreasonable. The loosening of MS's grip on the de facto control of html has only happened through a combination of events and independent efforts. Firefox, Opera, and other innovators have breathed life back into the browser market, but it hasn't been easy. Government intervention (belated and heavy-handed, but in the end, I believe at least partly beneficial) has helped accelerate non-MS browser adoption, and clearly demonstrates that given a free choice, people are happy to choose non-MS browsers.
(*1) The overall list of MS's deceptions, market manipulations, and outright fabrications is too long to list here. However, I suggest you examine the federal case against MS in the late 90's in which they knowingly presented fabricated evidence to a federal court ... got caught ... and got away with it. Literally. Just for contrast, around the same time, a much smaller courtroom lie nearly toppled a sitting President.
It's not a truly free market when a monopoly is in place, but here's an idea anyway. The free market has no government intervention, right? Well, since the government already intercedes in the market on the behalf of copyright and patent holders, let's remove such protections from those that have monopolies. Let's stop feeling sorry for MS and its complaints about pirating. If you put a virtual gun to my head and force me to buy your software because you fucked things up by breaking the html standards, it is the duty of a free market to restore balance by removing your financial incentive to harm the market.
(*2) Sallie Mae's web site looks fine in many browsers, until you actually go to fill out the forms required for student loans, and then they drop the IE bomb on you.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I really don't mind ads on web pages, per se. The ad supported model is reasonable. Yet, I find that there are numerous web pages I won't read because of their ads, and eventually I installed ClickToFlash to get rid of the worst of it. Here's what ticks me off:
If websites cannot find a way to stay in business without the annoying kinds of ads, then they need to find a new business model. This is not my problem, it is theirs. Or yours, as the case may be.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Microsoft is now producing a 'consumable' that cannot be easily consumed. I believe it was never their original intention, but the market has evolved, and they did not adapt. Internally, they probably feel obligated to support their installed base for compatibility reasons, but I suspect the team senses they are on the Titanic. It is rare, but sometimes you get to watch the inevitable unfold in slow motion before your eyes. It is tragic and spectacular to witness. Wait until MW7 releases with an IE8-compatible browser, it will sadly make their current situation seem bearable by comparison.
when the content you like disappears, you'll want to know why
It won't disappear. It'll get buried behind a paywall and I'll just pay a subscription fee for the content I like, or fall back on free content, such as blogs, forums, and other non-profit content providers. It'll be like back in the days of cable before they fucked their customers over.
Why is that so hard for you to understand?
Will be interesting to see how (if at all) this changes when two things happen: 1) IE9 comes out with all its speed improvements, 2) HTML5 video becomes more prevalent and FF still doesn't support H.264. Note: Yes, I realize all browsers continue to offer better and better performance, but the delta between IE9 and IE8 is likely to be much larger than between Safari 4 and Safari 5, FF 3.x and FF 4, etc. IE9 may be the release with which Microsoft achieves "rough parity" with the other browsers with respect to performance.http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/03/1258258/IE-Market-Share-Falls-To-Historic-Low?art_pos=2#
Also google has been quite heavily advertising Chrome...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I first caught a virus in 1991. And it was also the last time in personal level. But professionally, I also caught one in 2001. Here is the story:
I was teaching some basic skills to people who had been asking me to help them learn how to surf the Internet, use eMail, and create and print documents. Despite my preference to Lynx/Mosaic/Netscape and then Mozilla, I wanted to give the students the standard experience -- the stuff almost everyone was using: Windows XP, Office XP and IE6.
I had fully updated and secured the systems with a few policies against unsigned activeX and taught the students to avoid clicking OK to messages that would install new software, despite the misleading text saying "the manufacturer asserts that this content is safe" in which YES WAS THE DEFAULT ACTION. I knew dozens of people who had installed dialers on their systems due to that design, but I thought that if no code would be installed, we would be safe.
Yet after a week, one of the systems had its home page changed into a porn site. It was a virus; the process could be killed only to be revived in seconds. Searched the web and found it was one of the worst viruses ever made; it had injected itself on system files of both partitions; no tools existed to remove it, so the entire disk had to be formatted.
I asked some other guys, who were doing this thing at a professional level, if they had the same problem and yes, they all did. But they figured that it wasn't an issue since the students were at the basic level and they wouldn't have important files to lose. They also wanted to conform to the exams who would require an additional process if an "alternate" browser was taught to the student. I found that unacceptable. Teaching basic skills to people should also have included basic principles. And at the time, avoiding Internet Explorer had to be such a principle.
My problem wasn't that some hacker had found their way to run code with IE. That was simply a mistake from Microsoft. But the fact that Microsoft would allow installation of software based on the message I linked above and considering that IE was the defacto browser of new, inexperienced Windows users -- now that was bordering with either malice or stupidity. Of course things must have changed since then, especially with IE8 and sandboxing, but the problem is not that I have simply lost my trust to IE -- it's that I find it counter-productive to try and get it back. Trusting IE again would require effort which I have no reason to make since the alternative (Firefox) is simply great.
Then comes the issue about standards. Yes, like many others here I've wasted time trying to make pages work in IE6 work the same way they do in Mozilla and Opera. Again IE8 is improved, but when I read people in Slashdot saying that IE6 is the only problem, I smell astroturfing. Hey fanboys, did you check IE8 Acid3 scores lately ? It's worse to what Firefox, Opera and Safari had been ages ago!
I don't block ads. But I don't see many because I do block flash and javascript on untrusted sites.
However, I am seriously considering add blocking ever since one of my "trusted sites" started using their own domain to serve some of the most horrific browser hijacking ads I have ever seen.
So basically, you have to wait for enough of the old apps to die out or be upgraded with newer versions that support newer browsers before you're going to get anything close to killing IE6, or IE-anything for that matter.
Well.. that, and the death of XP in 2014(I think), when companies that have yet to move form XP will have to move somewhere.Or is there away to run IE6 natively in 7?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Because it makes good conversation. Slashdot is as much a forum as it is a news site. This is a fun thing to discuss.
Careful, you were bordering on incoherent before, and now you've finally crossed the line into nonsensical hysteria.
the sites you use just appear by magic?
No, they're like any other business. Someone with a neat idea secures some funding (either privately or via venture funding), develops a site, deploys it, and hopefully attracts a user base.
Ads or paywall, it works the same way either way.
Seriously, maybe you should try taking your head out of your ass and consider that there may be business models other than the ad-supported-content-model.
but if you smugly trumpet yourself in a public forum
Sure do! I block ads! Hey everyone, get an Ad Blocker!
as if you are doing nothing wrong,
I'm not doing anything wrong. What gives you the silly idea I am? If the websites wanted me to compensate them for their content, they'd ask me to pay for it. They don't, so I alter the content the strip the ads (as an aside, I do the same thing with my PVR when I'm watching TV).
i will call you out for what you are
With nonsensical rhetoric? Wow, bravo.
you seem incapable of seeing your own shitty ignorant way of thinking about how the web actually fucking works financially
No, it *has* worked that way financially. I might not work that way in the future (though I doubt it), in which case other business models will take hold. And so the web will evolve. So be it.
I am a Firefox girl through and through, but the last few days I've been helping a friend set up a new system and she wanted something more simple, so I showed her Opera and Chrome. Now I'm thinking maybe I should test all the browsers, including IE, so that I see for myself what is good and what's not.
The primary effect of a monopoly running amok is the destruction of most other players in the market. MS accomplished that.
Actually, no.. they didn't. If that were true, why are there so many browsers and media players today?
What a monopoly seems to do (and then, only if the monopoly product is "good enough") is to destroy the wounded gazelles... the products that aren't all that good and give no compelling reasons for users to switch away from the bundled version.
Once the bundled version becomes a monopoly, then even products with compelling reasons have a hard time, but as can be seen in this case, they do chip away at the incumbent.
I think we all owe microsoft a HUGE debt of gratitude for destroying Netscape. Without that, Mozilla would have never been born, and Firefox would have never happened, and Chrome would have never happened.
In other words, the non-Microsoft market would have continued with their "browser extension of the week" methodology to lock people into their products, and would not have been forced to use standards conformance as a competition mechanism.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
the more people who act like you, the more paywalls we have
So?
we can have all the free content we want, without any need to pay for anything. JUST LET THE FUCKING ADS APPEAR
Then it's not free. I'm paying for it. I'm paying for it with bandwidth, downloading the ads, and pain and aggravation as I'm assaulted by all the horribly obnoxious ways website operators are now using to try and grab my attention away from the content so I focus on the ads.
then it is more likely all content is going to be locked up beyond our reach
"beyond our reach"? Wha? What, you can't pay a subscription for the content you like? What are you, just a cheap asshole?
just do it QUIETLY you fucking moron
Nah. Dibsout. Block ads everyone! Fuck the website operators and their piece of shit ads! Fuck their popups, their popunders, their interstitials and overlays! Fuck 'em all!
is that a coherent enough point for you
At least you seemed to have a point this time. 'course, it'd be better communicated if you tried using capital letters and punctuation, but hey, small steps, right?
Most people I know that got compromised were compromised via ad's. So I have zero sympathy. Sorry but me avoding getting a computer compromised is more important then some random web admin losing ad funds.
Web based advertising has to do a HELL of a lot of work to regain my trust before I'll open it back up. I don't care about ad's much if they're not in my face, but I'm not going to risk a compromised computer so you can get 3 cents a pageview.
In general I use the lame "load the script in the last line on the page" approach. As I work underneath the HTML layer, building pages out of server side components, I do have control over when that script line gets injected into the outbound response. It's an approach that has worked for all my needs.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'm not surprised at all. Having diligently tried to use IE8 for months, I can confidently say it is a horrible experience. Much worse than IE6 ever was. It hangs on a regular basis - not just one tab, but the whole progam. New tabs can take a long time to come up. It slowly eats more and more memory. I've experienced bizarre bugs, for example I load a page that renders incorrectly, I click through to another page, and then hit the 'back' button, and the first page now renders correctly. Etc... Microsoft is driving down their own market share by providing a shitty product. We're not talking bells and whistles here, just basic functionality.
I think the web is browsed much more by devices other than PCs. I would expect IE market share to drop given all the browsing done by Android phones, iPhones, iPads and various other non-PC devices. I suspect this statistic is reflecting the drop in the percentage of web browsing done by Windows based PCs.
Historic low? What happened to the history where MSIE has a 0% share (no browser) or 3%, 12%, 16%, 22%, 32%.
There was a time when there was no MSIE, so to say there's a historic low is complete inaccurate. Unless of course the person choosing the headline wasn't around during those days.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
In all fairness, it needs to be pointed out that when people were screaming to the courts about MS's monopolistic abuse of the market, that was before FOSS had proven itself. What was true at that time is no longer true because the nature of the market has changed.
The market has changed, and MS's strategies for domination that worked so well in a purely capitalist market are failing in a market where the gift economy of FOSS mixes with capitalism. Now that enough contributors are working to make the whole pie bigger rather than playing a zero sum game of trying to take a larger slice than anybody else, MS needs to re-orient itself and find a business model that fits the new, improved, reality.
Will
As far as I've heard, Opera has been gaining users like crazy since the "choose your browser" thing came out.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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
Well, you can obviously see from the response you got that basically nobody agrees with you. Why? Because we've all been barraged with shit ads ever since the internet became a mass-market ad-fest. The ads are excessive, the ads are abusive, the ads are intrusive, and frankly, ad-supported media sucks.
I love HBO. I love Showtime. I own a Roku box and pay for my Netflix subscription. I pay for my New York Times subscription, and read the online content. I've even paid for Slashdot a few times as a subscriber, though most of the value here is created by the commenters, not the stories the "editors" post. In other words, I do pay for the content I use most.
I am *happy* to pay for quality web content that is ad-free. You can have a reasonably amount of my money if you offer me good value for my dime.
I've been begging and begging for years for proper business models for online content. Like content consortiums, micropayment systems, etc.
You morons in the web content industry have failed utterly to provide this. And then you have the nerve to whine and bitch at me? Go fuck yourself. I hope you go out of business and fail if blinking banners and Flash ads are the best ways you can figure out to make money.
Care to point out which part of the code acts as a keylogger?
Follow me
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.
I actually completely agree with your scenario. What I take issue with is this idea that if people block ads, the Internets Will Be Destroyed! It's BS. As you say, we'll likely hit some happy equilibrium where there will be a mix of subscription- and advertiser-supported content, along with the current plethora of free content.
According to the graph in the linked article, Opera has exactly the same share it's had for the last 16 months.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Or to a particular element:
Of course you have to use a bit of object detection to determine whether to use attachEvent or addEventListener, but a function that handles that for all browsers is one of the first things I paste into my code. Then it's just a simple myAddEventFunction(HTMLelement,'click',functionName); and who cares what browser that runs in.
Dude, absolutely EPIC karma burn. Keep it rolling.
On one site I manage which receives a modest ~2-3 million uniques a year, IE has been losing market share steadily over the past three years.
It's pretty much the same across other, smaller sites I manage or have developed and still watch stats on...
Move along!
IE9 will support addEventListener.
I wrote it, five minutes ago, and it grew from zero to one today. Which is a growth rate of INFINITE! Beat that Chrome! ;))
(Wasn’t there an xkcd or Dilbert comic about how big percentages are irrelevant, if the starting value in extremely tiny?)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It doesn't seem to offer the flexibility of Firefox? I found it to not suit my needs. What's the attraction?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
if(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('msie')!=-1){window.location.replace("http://browserchoice.eu");}
The internet is best viewed without Microsoft Internet Explorer.
If you want someone to blame, go blame the website operators, who've forced users to block ads because they got steadily more and more obnoxious, until they were simply too unbearable to endure any longer.
You have an interesting definition of the word "forced."
Comment of the year
I think the main reason why Chrome is getting traction is because it actually is good in a way that users can immediately relate to: it looks and feels lightweight. It starts instantly. New tabs open in the blink of an eye. Firefox, while still faster than IE, still feels heavyweight enough that you don't get that feeling of a snappy app. Sure, the geeks know that Firefox brings more to the table in form of extensions, but I suspect that most casual users don't know or care, so for them Firefox is just IE with weird icons, while Chrome is observably better.
how do you think the shit you like gets paid for?
Depends - I do pay for some shit, when they ask me to pay (or go elsewhere if I don't think it's worth the money). If they don't ask, then why should I care?
but if you were smart, you'll shut the fuck up about it, because the more people who do that, the more the websites you like disappear. if you don't understand that, you're an idiot
Websites are a dime a dozen today, and, thanks to Google, finding one for a given topic is not a problem at all. In practice, it's websites which compete for users' attention, not vice versa. If you do not understand it, you're an idiot.
show some fucking discretion, and stop telling people you block ads. its nothing to be proud of, and you are obviously so very fucking proud of your smug smarmy self
I don't block ads, but I'm seriously tempted to do so now just to spite you. You're obviously very smug to think that whatever you have to offer on your website deserves that much attention.
the more people who act like you, the more paywalls we have
Well, maybe it'd cut down the number of trolls, at least.
Wow, at that rate everyone will be using it, even people who don't exist!
document.attachEvent('onload',function1);
But isn't that equal to <body onload="function1()">, which is quite different than executing a function once the DOM tree has been parsed; the latter happens before all content, such as images, have been loaded. Which is very handy if you, for example, wish to hide some images.
I've been struggling with this as I've been writing a library for internal use and personal amusement. (I don't pretend to have invented this stuff, well not the WebKit and IE portions anyway, they're shamelessly ripped from around the web. For internal use, that's ok, right?)
Suppose you want to execute doStuff() once the DOM is ready. With Gecko/Presto it's quite straightforward:
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", doStuff, false);
It gets a bit trickier with WebKit-based browsers:
var _timer = setInterval(function() { if (/loaded|complete/.test(document.readyState)) { clearInterval(_timer); doStuff(); } }, 50);
And then, as always, we have IE. I've seen some hacks that utilize document.write for this - in my opinion, it is an abomination that should not have existed in the first place. So some more creativity is needed:
(function() { try { document.documentElement.doScroll("left"); doStuff(); } catch (e) { setTimeout(arguments.callee, 50); } })();
Seriously. It works, but is ugly as hell. If anyone would know a more elegant solution, I'm all ears. IE has improved, especially in the CSS department, but when it comes to DOM, there's still a lot of room for improvement.
as a fellow webdeveloper, I hate ads.
Shit gets paid by my customers, the people offering you their site. If they want to shove advertisements in your face, fine with me.
if you were smart, you'd find another job you'd stop whining and calling potential customers idiots.
Idiot.
You got pretty well flamed here for your post. Like the rest, I tolerated ads for quite some time. However, when I was quietly surfing the web one night, long ago, and one of my tabs started blasting out noise from a flash ad, I installed flash-click-to-play. A few years later, when I moused over an underlined word, and an ad popped up that obscured what I was trying to read, I installed noscript. When nearly every ad started moving, making noise, popping out of the page, and doing other fucking irritating shit, I blocked all the ads together.
I realize that you need to pay the bills. But if you fucking douchebag developers hadn't totally ruined the online experience with ads, completely fucked up and obscured the pages I was trying to read, and created the most distracting, worthless ads ever, I wouldn't have blocked ads. Nor would have a lot of other people here.
It's like wanting to be a lawyer, and getting pissed off that people hate you just because you're a lawyer. You should know that the hatred is well deserved due to the massive amount of douchebags in your field. Either suck it up, or change careers to one not filled with douchebags. Calling us "your smug smarmy sel(ves)" just makes you look like the rest of the douchebags we hate.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
You have an interesting definition of the word "forced."
You're right, poor choice of words. I should've used the word "driven", as in provided a very strong incentive to encourage the behaviour Mr. Circletimessquare seems to hate so much.
Of course, the alternative is to simply not visit those sites that are particularly obnoxious, and I've done just that in some cases. Unfortunately, when I receive a link from someone, I have no way to evaluate, apriori, if the site is going to spam me with popups, and so an Ad Blocker is, I think, all but a required tool to safely and efficiently browse the web these days.
Dude, absolutely EPIC karma burn. Keep it rolling.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/ is pretty much all I can say about it.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
I would advise to the IE designers and engineers to listen to Elaine Wherry' talk:
"What Web Application Design Can Learn from the Harpsichord" http://chi.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4404.html
Sometimes one has to stop to do a fancier and fancier design, but make things really functional and understandable.
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%
$(document).ready(function() { console.log("ready"); });
show some fucking discretion, and stop telling people you block ads. its nothing to be proud of, and you are obviously so very fucking proud of your smug smarmy self
Show me some disretion and let me be able to browse the internet on my 1.3Ghz G4 processor without locking up the system. Why should I have to purchase a new computer just to check the news and email?
Exactly identical as in IE7, IE6, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome. jQuery or Prototype.
Firefox is on a very confortable position with 1/3 of the market, and we really don't want another browser to own the Web.
Rethinking email
Meanwhile, if these sites have decent content, people will pay for it. If they don't pay for it, then evidently it's not worth the money.
I see you posting all over the place here, but there's no little asterisk next to your name showing that you've paid. I find that an interesting juxtaposition with your claims.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I agree on most points. The big thing for me the ability to use add-ons like NoScript to block only the scripts I want, without having to disable JavaScript globally. But IE starts faster and doesn't hog GB's of memory if left up for a few days.
Just to idea that the company that makes the browser also has a vested interest in preventing me from not viewing ads gives me pause. that and the fact that some flagship MS applications (like MOSS 2007) are incompatible (natively) with IE8.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Thanking MS for delivering Firefox to us is an exercise in selective hindsight. By the same token, you can't say what innovations would have happened ten years ago, had MS not destroyed companies like Wollongong. They also had a browser out
In other words, the non-Microsoft market would have continued with their "browser extension of the week" methodology to lock people into their products, and would not have been forced to use standards conformance as a competition mechanism.
That is exactly what Microsoft did - broke standards conformance, forcing the entire internet to conform to their broken, proprietary software or be odd man out. Had they not been a monopoly, they would have been in no position to force it on the rest of the world, and their "innovations" would have died the miserable death they deserved.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
but again, its ok to adblock: no one is going to stop you. the problem is being proud of it. just be discrete, and just admit what you are: a freeloading asshole
If I take a piss durring TV commercials, does that make me a thief?
its ok to be a freeloading asshole. as long as you are self-aware of your sleaziness and shut the fuck up about it
You are a web designer. You make things designed to spread information. Yet you whine when someone uses a website to spread information. Obviously, you aren't a web designer. You are a whore, I mean consultant. What you whore yourself out for is irrelevant, because you are a mercenary willing to go where the money is. You bash someone else doing what you are paid to do, probably because he wasn't paid to do it so it makes him bad.
you seem incapable of seeing your own shitty ignorant way of thinking about how the web actually fucking works financially. someday, maybe you'll understand reality. as it is now though, you're simply a parasite, and you don't even know it
You are a buggy whip maker. You decry that your preferred business model doesn't work, and you want to push others into supporting it. You could do other things. You could sell the content, rather than add space. You could have adds integrated with the content, rather than 3rd party ads, which are more convenient for you because you are lazy and incompetent. But no, you just whine that someone else somewhere is doing something you don't like, then you make up shit about how it's going to destroy the web (which, incidentally, was invented before it was commercialized, so the decommercialization of it shouldn't be able to kill it). But you don't know or understand what you are talking about. It's all just "that's inconvenient for me, so I'll lie and make up doomsday predictions that are absurd to try to scare people to my way because logic proves me false."
Learn to love Alaska
we can only pray that those who have this shirt never, ever, ever take it off in public. *shudder*
$
Dear lord that page is hideous, would it look any better in IE 6?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Hi listen.
It's a war out there. Marketeers would, if they could, tatoo blinking ads on the inside of peoples eyelids. There's a battle for attention in public and private spaces, and advertisers have blown it. They have, repeatedly, proved that they'll do anything they can get away with. Please explain why I should treat with respect someone who has never extended the same courtesy to me ?
You are right that ads provide some revenue. But at the same time, who do you think -pays- for those ads ? When Microsoft or Shell or H&M pay to have ads displayed on websites, whose pockets does the money for that ultimately come from ?
Ads are unproductive. More ads in the world, does not generally speaking make my life better. Paying for ads, is thus against my self-interest. Yes, with less ads, some websites would close, and others might become more expensive in other ways. But on the flipside, other products would get cheaper, to a larger degree. The math works like this:
Company A spends 100K on ads, 20K of that is spent making the ads, 80K is paid to have them shown. Company B shows ads, but they use a ad-network for doing so, to not have to take the technical work themselves (plus A and B needs an arbitrator anyway), the ad-network takes a cut of the action, so though they're paid 80K, only 50K end up in the pockets of B.
End-result ? A have spent 100K, but B is only 50K richer. The rest is wasted in the ad-making-and-distributing-machinery.
While on the subject of grammar, your first sentence isn't a question, so the question mark is also incorrect. What you did was make a request for information, not ask a question about it. If it were changed to "What is "improper" about using "but" at the beginning of a sentence?" then it would be a question. Both would have the same answer, but your version is not a question.
I find it funny that your sig states "intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it" yet you savagely attack people blocking ads. Some people consider ignoring intellectual property law to be theft too... Pot calling kettle black? I dunno why you are so angry, if you are a recently out of work web developer, you have my sympathy. I work for an internet marketing company, and I for one enjoy my ad blocking.
Ogre Wedding Planners llc.
I prefer NoFlash + to redirect the most obnoxious ad providers to 127.0.0.1 in my etc/hosts. It's a little less user-friendly, but I find it to be a good balance of getting rid of what bothers me most and not penalizing the "good" ads.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
English FAIL!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!