Microsoft IE Browser Share Dips Below 50%

alphadogg writes "Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has dominated the Web browser market since blowing by Netscape in the late 1990s, last month fell below the 50% market share level for the first time in years. IE's share of the worldwide market fell to 49.87% in September, down from 51.3% in August and 58.4% a year ago. It is followed by Firefox, which increased its share slightly from 30.09% to 31.5% and Google Chrome, which grabbed 11.54% share, more than triple its September 2009 share, according to market watcher StatCounter."

Comments

good riddance

[poetmatt]

while they're doing interesting things in IE9, I'd love to see MS acknowledge that a majority of the people who use IE are either forced or don't even know there are alternatives.

Re:good riddance

[click2005]

MS will never acknowledge anything except that IE9 is better/faster/safer/blingier than the other browsers.

The point is that with IE9, all of the major browsers aren't that bad really.
Thats the way it should be. Your choice in browser shouldn't matter.

Re:good riddance

[hedwards]

Not going to happen, sort of like how it would be nice for Google to acknowledge that people don't want to be spied upon whenever they're online.

Re:good riddance

[hedwards]

Indeed, but until IE 6, 7 and 8 are out of the way, it's likely still going to matter. It really should be a matter of personal preference, at least that's what I thought standards compliance was for.

Re:good riddance

[js3]

How and why should they? Funny story my moms IE had a huge toolbar filled with crap so I tried to remove it but she complained! she whined that she likes the huge toolbar because it had useful stuff on it like auto form filling or some nonsense. different people different things.

Re:good riddance

[A12m0v]

I wish this happened 9 years ago when they released IE6 and not now when theyfinally started to care about standards and performance. IE9 is good that I wont have to go to friends and family and talk them into the merits of switching and I don't mind seeing IE being at top if all IE instances were IE9 and later future releases. Then again Microsoft would have never cared if they didn't bleed market-share on a constant basis.

Re:good riddance

[NonUniqueNickname]

IE6 still has 3.47% in the USA and 7.42% worldwide. So maybe 2-3% more before it really will be good riddance. Graphs and raw data are published on http://gs.statcounter.com/ home page, very nice.

Re:good riddance

[A12m0v]

True, and thanks to many convoluted reasons this wont happen for a long time. I can see IE7 and 8 dropping to single digit before IE6.

Re:good riddance

[A12m0v]

I should have posted a link with the stats, sorry. http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2

Re:good riddance

[poetmatt]

once firefox and/or chrome have enterprise tools to make it work with activedirectory, you'll see IE share drop to 0. Until then, it's sadly a bit higher than you think it is.

Re:good riddance

[Millennium]

This. IE6 won't die until XP dies; even though IE7 and IE8 run on XP as well, there will always be people who Just Won't Upgrade.

Even if IE6 eventually does die before XP, IE8 certainly won't, since IE9 can't run on XP. This is why Microsoft really should have added XP support to IE9.

Re:good riddance

[AnonymousClown]

A lot of folks don't care. Many many folks think that, since they have [name brand] Anti-Virus, they're safe.

Although the new IE isn't the security train wreck that it once was.

Re:good riddance

[jefe7777]

I don't know why parent was modded down.

Google has acknowledged working with the intelligence agencies. The CEO of Google said "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of". They track and record everything they can.

Let's be honest shall we?

Re:good riddance

[muckracer]

> once firefox and/or chrome have enterprise tools to make it work with activedirectory

Am not sure why the browser would need 'enterprise tools' for AD (what kind of tools anyway?)...we use AD at work and Firefox is offered pre-packaged for all those, who want it. Tell me what you mean...

Re:good riddance

[Don_dumb]

I would imagine the figure is somewhat higher, as it won't be counting much of the corporate users (who will mainly be on Internal networks, occasionally venturing to the public network)
I guessing most private users (even average Joe) will have had/been coerced/helped/tricked into an upgrade to IE7 or higher by now (even if just because they have brought something newer).
So I'm guessing the stat isn't entirely accurate. This would also be true of the article's statistics. My opinion only of course.

Re:good riddance

[patjhal]

I use firefox for my real browser, but am forced to use ie for a variety of state government and business sites that have dire warning about using anything but Internet explorer. Of course these apps have too big a consequence to me individually if they do not function so I fire it up for that. Add to that I keep IE, chrome, and safari as one off browsers for quick searches. So while I am working in firefox with the tv on and I decide I want to search something that came up in the news real quick I go load IE or whatever since it is not important. Also my wife would likely still be using IE, but I introduced her to firefox and she never turned back. Neither one of us care about browser ranks or tests or whatnot. We just care that it does what we want it to and no more.

Re:good riddance

[Bert64]

IE9 is still a problem tho...
When IE6 came out it wasn't all that bad compared to its peers, just like IE9 today. However, if everyone moves over to IE9 and other browsers die out then you can kiss goodbye to any updates, IE9 will stagnate and become the new IE6.
Market share of any browsers other than IE should be as high as possible, otherwise MS will just screw the web like they have done before.

Re:good riddance

[poetmatt]

many companies make this argument, that because they can't use AD for everything under the sun, it can't be approved for corporate.

I personally don't care, but many corporate offices do. Then comes the argument of "oh we'll be supporting two browsers" as opposed to "it would work in all of them if it wasn't programmed like shit".

People want to be able to enforce policies via AD on firefox/chrome, to control addons and security settings, etc. This is currently available via a few specific tools designed for it, but it's not "formal via Mozilla/Google".

Me? I don't care. Adblock + noscript + greasemonkey + sync + enterprise office = I'm usin firefox.

Re:good riddance

[poetmatt]

firefox with just adblock + noscript is pretty darn secure, in fact substantially more than IE, overall. Question is how much work to set it up properly.

Re:good riddance

[MozeeToby]

The CEO of Google said "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of".

No he didn't. He said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." That seems more like a warning to me: if you do something stupid and it gets on the internet, you've already lost. You can't complain about people reposting it, or indexing it, or emailing it; the genie is out of the bottle and it is impossible to delete something from the internet (at least if the collective internet finds it entertaining in some way).

Re:good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

According to these stats, IE still has 59.45% market share across all the versions listed and compatibility mode. 55% with just counting IE6-8.

Re:good riddance

[TheRaven64]

He said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

And you think that's better? I'm sure people like Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde would have appreciated that advice, when they were alive.

Re:good riddance

[Surt]

But by gets on the internet, of course you must mean 'Google sells your tracking data to interested parties'.
Use a strict cookie policy, use noscript, use adblock, take some control over what you expose online.
I interviewed at google recently, one of the things they mentioned impressed them was how little I had exposed online. People over there joke all the time about how much people are exposing, and looking up friends and acquaintances searches and browsing history seems to be a popular pass-time.

Re:good riddance

[Amouth]

when using domain clients and sites with integrated windows/ad authentication - IE will happly pass along user creds to the server - where firefox and chrome both prompt for username/password..

i know it sounds silly but when you are forcing hundreds or thousands of users to use something - you want it to be clean and simple - with the more focus on web/client-server apps in the enterprise - it makes a big difference when you can remove that hurdle - especially when going from one webapp to another.

also making them work better with group policies would be nice too.

chromes auto updating nature is also a key factor preventing a large corp from using it - don't get me wrong - updates are good.. and i like the way they do it.. but auto updating can be bad (think back to a few months ago with McAfee and them crashing some large names with an update).

but you also have to look at the vender's support and willingness for keeping backwards capability.. is FF going to give you that? Google? no one wants to make a switch and then in 6 months get stuck with no upgrade path.

IE might be completely insecure - but MS is one very corporate friendly company - which is why they get used so much.

Re:good riddance

[Bert64]

Thats because the AV products marketing is specifically saying that...

Re:good riddance

[vlueboy]

Chicken and the egg problem detected here in reverse ("who LEFT first.")

IE9 will be out some indeterminate number of weeks AFTER the fixed date of end-of-life for XP. Assuming that MS does give out IE9 to all XP users who we reckon "Just Won't Upgrade," that will work against solving the upgrade problem, won't it?

It's just like further spoiling a spoiled child for later to avoid problems now. Eventually you have a blowout situation and realize the line should have been drawn much earlier.

Re:good riddance

[Dishevel]

Look. I love the whole "Everyone is Equal", "All points of view are valid", "There is no right and wrong" thing people are doing.
It makes me feel all warm inside when I think of it. Really it dose. Every time I hear someone say one of those things you can just see them grow and become superior to the rest of us.

Problem is it just isn't true. Extremist Muslims are just fucking WRONG. Born again Christians killing doctors is WRONG. Late term abortions due to inconvenience is WRONG.


And, If you are doing something you do not want anyone to know about, mostly you should not be doing it. I do not think it should be illegal. If you want to take some care that you are hidden and it is harming no one else I am cool with that as well. But we all know that those things that we hide we Should not be doing.

Re:good riddance

[GrumblyStuff]

You should just backup her files, format the drive, and put some variety of Linux on there and say a virus did it.

Re:good riddance

[vlueboy]

I clean spyware for my teen-ridden kin group. It's funny when I ask parents, or even the teens I know to use the PC's. They're almost always clueless what the toolbars are for.

The only justified one is a quick translation bar for IE, added this year in one PC out of half a dozen I've tended to for a nearly 15 years. Everything else is just bundled with MSN, games (ugh, wildtangent)/cursors or their [secret] pr0nsites. I have never found a complaint after killing even non-threatening bars when they are in the face of popup-related distress.

Re:good riddance

[poetmatt]

lets be honest that you misquoted? He said don't do shit online if you want it to be private.

Re:good riddance

[drsmithy]

Am not sure why the browser would need 'enterprise tools' for AD (what kind of tools anyway?)...we use AD at work and Firefox is offered pre-packaged for all those, who want it. Tell me what you mean...

The two most obvious things would be SSO authentication and configuration via GPO.

Re:good riddance

[HermMunster]

I don't want to seem facetious, and I'm very happy that the browser market share is shifting. What went through my mind when I started reading this is that if you took the statistics from Microsoft's website hits the share would be strikingly higher for IE.

What I'm saying is that when you get stats from sites such as English language sites you would expect English to be seen as the predominant language. If you hit Linux sites you would expect to see Linux as dominant there. If you don't seek foreign sites in your stats you will never see them represented as those people most certainly account for a higher percentage of non-Microsoft products such as Linux.

Unless you can accurately account world-wide you'll never get a real picture of the market share and unless you can represent to those foreign countries the bad about a specific company they'll never know to try some other OS or browser.

Re:good riddance

[HermMunster]

The fact that IE9 won't run on XP will most certainly reduce their market share by many more share points. XP is still predominantly used in the world. Though I have several Vista boxes I rarely use them and though I have a couple Win7 boxes I use them sparingly. My OS of choice is Linux. It's the better OS in my mind as I have taken the time to learn it. I realized a few years ago that I wasn't giving the OS its due without actually learning it and using it over the long haul. It does everything I need it to do. I'm impressed. And the software available for it is tremendous.

Microsoft thinks they can grow Win7 market share by demanding people update to it in order to use the browser features of IE9 but people won't do that. We'll tell them to go to Google's browser or Firefox, or to even go to a different OS (Mac OS X or Linux). Why stay with a company that keeps trying to manipulate the customers into outlays of cash that are beyond their best interests?

Re:good riddance

[HermMunster]

I think he meant bing'ier.

Re:good riddance

[clone53421]

Eric Schmidt? Isn’t he that guy who got pissed at CNET after one of their reporters posted some information about him (found on Google, of course) that he thought was a little bit too personal? Wasn’t he the one who dragged Kate Bohmer into court over a picture she posted on her blog?

Does anybody still take him seriously on the question of online privacy?

Re:good riddance

[Sancho]

Of course it's better. One statement is saying that you shouldn't have any privacy, and one is saying that you don't have any privacy.

The question that prompted Eric's statement was

People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?

Eric says "I think that judgement matters" and then goes on to make that quote that I bet he wishes he could take back, and adds

if you really need this kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines do retain this information for some time

and mentions that Google, like anyone else, is subject to the laws of the land and may have to give up some information on its users to law enforcement.

Framed in that way, what he said makes perfect sense. Don't search Google for "how to kill my wife's boyfriend." Don't put on your Google calendar (privately) that you need to be at the corner of 5th and Franklin to sell dope. If you become the target of a police investigation, they will likely gain access to these records that you thought were private. The takeaway is that if it's in the cloud, it's not private.

Put concisely, what he said was "You don't have privacy for things you do online." without making any judgement on that fact.

Re:good riddance

[aztracker1]

Honestly, when IE9 came out, it was the best available browser out there. I remember when IE4-6 came out and they were simply better options over the Netscape versions at the time. It was shortly before the Firebird->Firefox rename happened that this wasn't really the case. Opera, iirc, was still adware/payware at the time. Still, that it has taken 7 years or so for this much of an incursion into IE's market share is a bit depressing. That IE6 still holds a significant portion of corporate market share is bad as well. I can only hope that ChromeFrame becomes common-place in the corporate environments where IE6 is the norm, and that the crome=1 meta setting becomes more common.

Even IE9 has some fairly basic flaws in it, that have been annoying at best to me. I'm using it now, simply because it works better with the firewall and I needed to do some testing against it. It's pretty bad that the canvas has seen so much effort, but something relatively simple, like a tag with a background gradient inside a tag with a rounded border will leak over the border. I can see gradients + borders used far more widely than I can people using the canvas tag. Not that canvas isn't or won't be widely used, just not as widely. Even this site uses background gradients (most sites use images), just the same eliminating these images from common use would be very nice.

Re:good riddance

[aztracker1]

Chrome has been working on adding the control settings, similar to IE's, but a bit more limited just the same... I wouldn't mind seeing ChromeFrame deployed in those environments where IE6 is still the norm as required by internal applications.

Re:good riddance

[jellomizer]

Then comes the argument of "oh we'll be supporting two browsers" as opposed to "it would work in all of them if it wasn't programmed like shit".

Back in the Day Getting IE6 and Firefox or a standard compliment to work together was tough very tough still it is tricky. When you are told as a spec that it will need to work in IE6 then you code and only test in IE6 as trying to make it cross browser compatible could add 25% more time to your project costing more.

For public traded companies their far sight is only by one quarter. So if you try the logical argument about taking the time so your app will run better for years and you are not tied to a technology you will be shot down as it will cost 25% more in the short run. And after that quarter then funds could be used to maintain it.

Re:good riddance

[orasio]

The GP is fair paraphrasing Schmidt.
In Schmidt's view, If you don't do stuff that you want hidden, you have nothing to be afraid of.

_Your_ interpretation comes out of nowhere.

One thing is to say, like you say, that published stuff can't be unpublished, so we need to be zealous protecting our privacy.
Another thing is to say, like Schmidt says, and the GP paraphrases, that you should stop doing stuff you don't want others to know about.

What you said is that you can't expect your facebook pics to remain in your circle of friends.
What Schmidt said was that if you don't want others to know you are taking pole dancing classes/affiliated to the non-ruling political party/a Harry Potter fan, maybe you should stop doing it.

I believe there's a world of distance between both concepts, and I'm not comfortable giving my data away to a guy who thinks like that. But I do, anyway.

Re:good riddance

[HermMunster]

Microsoft told us that IE7 was wonderful and necessary to fix all their malware woes. Then they told us that Vista was wonderful and would fix all their malware woes. One of their VPs actually claimed you'd not need a malware scanner on your computer. Then IE8 came out, and not long ago at that. They claimed it was so much better than all the others and that it would solve all their malware woes.

During this time they were pushing their search engine. They pushed Windows Live Search hard and complained at every single share point that they didn't gain, claiming Google was nefarious.

When Bing came out they pushed it and a new browser. IE8 came about around the time that Bing was out and gaining press.

It seems to me that Microsoft has seen that browser market share isn't as important as search market share. They know they no longer have control over whether the web replaces the OS (which was their major concern in the late 80s and through the 90s). Their plan was to kill Netscape because they felt that it, and other technologies such as Java, could replace the OS completely. But we are beyond that at this point. Microsoft has realized there's a point of no return and that we've passed it, at least as far as browsers killing development for the Microsoft OSes.

What they see now is that the only way to get people to even try their products (such as silverlight, bing, whatever) is to do those drive by installs and configurations, similar to the way some malware is distributed (as a bundle with another package). Most of the people today wouldn't have Safari on their computers if Apple hadn't done drive by installs of it with iTunes.

Microsoft learned that if they keep their browser updating, even if they are loosing market share, because the browser is central to the OS, they'll have a good chance of getting penetration with their other products such as Silverlight or even Bing. If you install IE9 then you'll likely get Bing set up with all the accelerators to boot, even if you removed them prior to installing IE9.

The more people see a product the more they recognize it. When Microsoft was gaining ground in the software world they learned that they needed to repeat their name over and over and over, almost to the point of nausium. This meant that people would recognize them as a household word. Now we have the same with Bing. Since the browser isn't responsible for funding Microsoft, yet Bing is supposed to, they need to get the word "Bing" out there as much as possible. They do this with these installs, configurations, etc. By putting Bing everywhere on their web site, by promoting Bing on MSN, by reconfiguring Bing every time they do a browser update, they gain market share for something they can monetize rather than for a product that was meant to stem the tide of competition that might kill their OS.

So, even though their browser market share is declining their search share is increasing because they have been pointing those in search of updates to install products such as Silverlight and to set up bing via the browser updates.

Re:good riddance

[HermMunster]

IE6 likely is used more due to companies still being latched onto Win2K.

Re:good riddance

[aztracker1]

DOH! I meant when IE6 came out.

Re:good riddance

[man_of_mr_e]

"The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from" - Grace Hopper

"The worst thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from" - Virtually everyone else

Standards are supposed to be "fixed" things that don't move. But never in the history of web browsing has that been the case. There has always been "old" standards and "draft" standards. Nobody seems to want to use the old standards, but is hot to implement the latest draft ones... but the draft ones are always changing.

Re:good riddance

[jefe7777]

You're a goddamn bootlicker. This ain't about being wrong. This is about power and the corruption that follows.

Re:good riddance

[anUnhandledException]

No Micrsoft KNOWS (not thinks) that Windows 7 marketshare will grow as a result of PC upgrade cycle. Old computers go offline, new computers sold with a Win7 license. Now you can install Linux but that doesn't change the fact that:

Virtually all PC systems sold come w/ an windows license.
99.9% of users will never install another OS. Hell they won't upgrade (or reinstall) windows either.

Many users treat OS as a fixed psycial part of a computer (as in "I bought a windows 7 laptop"). The idea that they "could" install another OS is foreign and not something they want to even consider. Windows 7 works and it comes for free* with the laptop why bother w/ anything else?

* You and I know W7 license isn't free but considering *MOST* (not all but most) PC have no option for "no OS" which is cheaper most consumers see Windows 7 as free and part of the new computer.

So the slow replacement of old hardware will cause Windows 7 (and thus IE9) marketshare to grow by 10%-15% a year. At this point Microsoft doesn't really need to do anything. If 5-6 years Windows XP will be as common as Windows 98 machines are now.

Re:good riddance

[master_p]

Do you think that MS is incapable of producing the absolutely bestest browser of all times? they can, but they don't want. They want vendor lock in. A 100% standards conforming browser will be bad for their business.

Re:good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

True. That works because a virus is similar to Linux. Both make your computer unusable.

Re:good riddance

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

He said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

And you think that's better?

Do you think it's in their control? Really?

Google notices things that happen on the internet. They get paid to notice; it's what they do. They are really only saying one thing with that statement: It's actually a pretty easy job. If you look around, you notice lots of things. Lots of people are looking. If it happened, and if anyone makes a record of it, people will find it.

It's only a stupid statement in that people will be examining his words closely for any sign that Google is up to no good. The same words have been said, by people who mean well, for ages.

Re:good riddance

[PCM2]

No he didn't. He said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

And how is that better/more reasonable than the GP's interpretation?

I don't think it's anybody's business how my girlfriend likes to have sex. I guess we should practice abstinence only, huh?

I don't think it's anybody's business that I have leukemia -- at least, it certainly shouldn't affect my employment, my access to health care, the outcome of my divorce, etc. Guess I should stop growing those cells, huh?

I don't think it's anybody's business what route my kid takes to walk to school. Guess I should home-school her, huh?

I don't think it's anybody's business how I voted. Guess I shouldn't vote, huh?

Schmidt comes off like a Nazi to any reasonable U.S. citizen.

Re:good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remove it and let her complain. It will far outweigh the bullshit of having to support slowness and spyware that will definitely follow with SpyWare ToolBar 9.0 Super Platinum.

Re:good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Same story here, I tried to clean out my parents IE browser and they complained that I'm taking away their features (although they admit they never used those icons on their bloated toolbars). The next thing I tried was installing FF and showing them how to use it but they don't see a reason why when IE and FF look the same to them.

Re:good riddance

[GrumblyStuff]

You must be thinking about Norton AV.

Re:good riddance

[HermMunster]

That's not what I said. I said they can't grow their market share by demanding people upgrade their browser, hence their OS, hence more hardware.

We must ensure people world wide understand there are other choices and that those choices should lead them to their purchases, regardless of what Microsoft thinks they know.

Re:good riddance

[AmberBlackCat]

I'd love to see MS acknowledge that a majority of the people who use IE are either forced or don't even know there are alternatives.

I'd love to see Google acknowledge the same thing.

Re:good riddance

[poetmatt]

hate to break it to ya, as you already know, but businesses aren't exactly known to be good at long term decisions when it comes to technology.

Good at deciding the investment, sure, but actual *good* long term tech decisions? don't exist nor will it be easy, mostly because tech is interchanging a bit too much to ever be able to reasonably predict long term. That's even if you do make your stuff compliant and/or compatible.

Re:good riddance

[gilgongo]

a majority of the people who use IE are either forced or don't even know there are alternatives

Which is, in a nutshell, everything you need to know about Microsoft. It's also why comparing Microsoft desktop products to any alternatives in the last decade has been a purely academic exercise. When 90% of the market is owned by MS, why would MS logically choose to do anything to improve or change their products in any real way?

I say this because I have been an involuntary user of MS Outlook for about 10 years now. I'm now with Outlook 2007 and even now I can STILL accidentally book a meeting in the PAST. Powerpoint still doesn't have any useful keystrokes, MS Word is essentially the same manically controlling lunatic it always was (no, I do NOT want you to start auto-numbering my paragraphs...). I could go on for hours.

But it's pointless. Because ultimately MS has no reason to improve beyond keeping the DOJ and a bunch of toothless consumer rights groups off their back.

Re:good riddance

[poetmatt]

you're so full of shit, way to microsoft troll. google encourages people to freely use alternatives.

Meanwhile, if you actually paid attention, this article isn't about google at all. nice job.

Re:good riddance

[curunir]

once firefox and/or chrome have enterprise tools to make it work with activedirectory

This has been an option for a couple of years now and it hasn't made much difference.

Re:good riddance

[jonwil]

IE5 and 6 got so much market share because of Microsoft's "Bundle IE with Windows" lock-in policy and because IE6 WAS better than many of the alternatives at the time (including Netscape 4.x and Netscape 6)

These days there are plenty of alternatives (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and others) that are easily as good as IE (even IE9). Its highly unlikely IE9 could get "market dominating" levels of usage.

Re:good riddance

[AmberBlackCat]

Where I work at, Google is the default search engine for the intranet. I think that qualifies as forcing us to use it. And no normal people know how to change the default search engine in anything other than the Microsoft web browser. I think that qualifies as people not knowing there are alternatives.

For bonus points, my friend didn't realize any time he added a phone number to his android phone, the phone was storing his entire address book in his Google account, and Google now has all of our names, phone numbers, and a rather compromising picture of me forever.

Re:good riddance

[jonadab]

> IE6 won't die until XP dies

Could have fooled me. The stats for my employer's site for 2010Q3 show Windows XP market share 8.7 times as high as IE6, or more than twice as high as IE6 and IE7 combined.

IE8, on the other hand, has more usage share than Vista and Seven combined. (Some of our users don't live on what you would necessarily call the bleeding edge, so XP is still the single most heavily represented OS, although it's starting to decline, and Seven is starting to put in a bit of a showing now.)

IE8 uptake has been *much* faster than IE7 uptake was, at least among our users. I attribute this to the much higher penetration of SP2 now as compared to three years ago -- a lot of the people who had OEM installs of the early versions of Windows XP have replaced those old computers now. There are still LOTS of Windows XP systems out there, but most of them have SP2 (or higher). SP2 turns on automatic updates by default, which means people are a whole lot more likely to get the browser upgraded some time before Los Angeles freezes over.

Re:good riddance

[Lanteran]

Wikipedia tells me that IE6 usage is double that plus 2% as of august. I doubt it dropped that far in the space of less than 2 months (but I hope it did...).

Re:good riddance

[sergueyz]

Market share of any browsers other than IE should be as high as possible, otherwise MS will just screw the web like they have done before.

To achieve that the very web technologies should be as simple as possible so that barrier to entry will be low, so that new players can come in at any time.

Re:good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

So people should just never make a mistake in their lives, ever.

Re:good riddance

[muckracer]

OK, can see the SSO part of it.
Firefox is even more annoying when it comes to signing on to the proxy: when you have your tabs saved on restart, it will pop up a login window for every freaking tab! Ironically it behaves far better when crashed and it asks you if you want to restore your tabs. Then the login window comes only once and then gets applied for all tabs once you restore them. I truly hope, they fix that nonsense with the next version because it takes me a good couple minutes, sometimes more just to start the browser and get all the tabs going...

Re:good riddance

[monkyyy]

u sure? i predict win8 will still be bloat piece of crap and xp will still be better and ie 10 will suck at everything

Re:good riddance

[commodore64_love]

No way was IE6 better than Netscape 5
(which, due to a poor management decision, was released as 4.9 but was still better)

Re:good riddance

[poetmatt]

although I get your sarcasm, it's still a troll.

Re:good riddance

[magus_melchior]

You should encourage her to check her credit report annually, as malware is a prime tool of identity thieves.

Or write a scary email convincing her to check it for any accounts she never opened.

Re:good riddance

[dacaldar]

MS will never acknowledge anything except that IE9 is better/faster/safer/bingier than the other browsers.

There, fixed that for you.

And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing changed...

Re:Opera

[The MAZZTer]

You sure? I posted this so fast in Chrome my head is still spinning.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Fastest browser.

obviously not fast enough for a first post.

Competition is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we have quite some mature standards compliant browsers to choose from and evil/lazy web designers have no more excuses to support only their (or their bosses) favourite browser.

this all bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

IE has 100% marketshare... and Windows7 has 100% marketshare too... and WindowsXP has 100% marketshare too... just ask Microsoft and get your numbers from the source!

Re:this all bullshit...

[not flu]

IE has 100% of the Internet Explorer marketshare. Windows 7 has 100% market share of Windows operating systems released since October 2009. Windows XP has 100% marketshare of Windows operating systems bundled with netbooks that can't run Win 7.

Re:this all bullshit...

[TheRaven64]

We're talking about browser market share, not malware distribution platform market share.

Re:this all bullshit...

[b4dc0d3r]

How do you distinguish the two? The browser is after all either the vector or the thing that brings the payload in.

It doesn't matter if the PDF vulnerability is in the plugin or the PDF is saved and then loaded, it probably came through the browser.

So I guess you can say the difference is whether someone is using Outlook too?

Re:this all bullshit...

[man_of_mr_e]

Actually, I really don't get these numbers. (not your numbers, but the official ones).

Every site i have access to, which covers a broad spectrum of non-technology sites shows IE usage still in the 70's to 80's.

I think this must be counting mobile browsers, because that would explain a large increase in chrome usage, which means that IE's (or firefoxes) actual numbers aren't changing that much, but since so many new chrome based devices have entered the market, the total share size has grown.

Re:this all bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

The wikipedia article on the subject references 5 different usage share sources: the mean IE share is 53%. Maybe it's possible that your data is the one that's not representative, instead of the opposite? possibly the sites you see cater to a US/UK crowd that traditionally prefers more IE than other parts of the world...

Competition FTW

[Ben4jammin]

FTA: While web browser advances were few and far between a decade ago, competition among IE, Firefox, Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera has fueled new developments, including increasingly faster browsers

Imagine that...competition FTW.

Re:Competition FTW

[The MAZZTer]

Although I dislike the idea of Internet Explorer actually becoming somewhat usable, (if there's no villains, there can be no heroes!) I suppose it's better for everyone that it happens. Besides, when everyone improves, consumers are the real winners...

Re:Competition FTW

[Mathness]

..., including increasingly faster browsers

Soon they will be so fast that the default theme is plaid. ;p

Re:Competition FTW

[chowdahhead]

The embers are still smoldering from the ooxml debacle. Microsoft supports proprietary standards, not open ones. Until that changes, I don't trust them with a majority market share in anything.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to be fast when you only speak troll.

Hmm..interesting

[Lunix Nutcase]

I find it rather interesting that the source for this figure is the same StatCounter that the same people cheering this figure about IE will claim is wildly inaccurate due to the fact that it shows Linux with like a 1 or 2% market share. But since in this case it shows something negative about Microsoft (IE market share, Windows XP vs Vista & 7 market share) it is taken as holy gospel truth. Hypocrisy. Isn't it grand?

Re:Hmm..interesting

[clone53421]

Yeah, if you took a sample with a higher percentage of Linux users the IE browser share would probably be more like 75%.

Erm... wait what?

Re:Hmm..interesting

[falcon5768]

because usage like this stat is actually a important statistic, while market share is useless since market share does not equal usage. Its not so much hypocrisy as much as market share is a pointless statistic that is constantly misrepresented to mean something it isnt which most people in the IT field know already to disregard it.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies can be right about some stats and wrong about others. Idiocy, isn't it grand?

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Lunix Nutcase]

Companies can be right about some stats and wrong about others. Idiocy, isn't it grand?

Sure they could. Now outline your evidence that this stat is right but the ones about Linux are wrong.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Lunix Nutcase]

And how exactly do you know that this stat is even accurate either? Other than it shows a conclusion that is favorable to people who dislike Microsoft.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[BasilBrush]

Same people? I'm happy to accept both figures as reasonable estimates. The Linux figure they show right now is 0.77%. Which sounds reasonable for Linux clients.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

they are biased towards sites that are willing to include a privacy-violating stat counter.

So "Horse Owner Forum" yes, "My PC Helpsite" maybe, "Linux Weekly News" no.

This affects both the browser usage counts and the OS pref stats, making them invalid in the same sense that an amateur phone survey (call 100 numbers, extrapolate to the whole population without adjusting for demographics) is invalid. But that may not mean they're useless for your purpose, depending on what that purpose is.

Very importantly, these people are a fairly good source for making the decision "Which browsers should I test my generic mass audience site on?" but not for "Which operating systems do I need to support in my next scanner/printer combo device?". Because what they're measuring is only tangentially related in the latter case.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[timeOday]

I agree counting of this nature is somewhat dubious since it's hard to sample the web uniformly. That said, the milestone matters less than the trend, which is most likely reflected accurately so long as they don't change how they count. In other words, it doesn't really matter whether the absolute percentage is now 50%, 60%, or 40%; what's certain is the web monoculture Microsoft wanted so badly and nearly achieved at the height of their power has failed. And that's a good thing.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[gmack]

It depends on what you are trying to measure. If you want browsers accessing websites this stat is very likely accurate. OS share, On the other hand, is a lot more difficult because most Linux usage is server side and those don't generally browse websites.

It's slightly more useful if you are trying to measure Desktop OS usage. In that case, I'm more than willing to believe the numbers they have.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[IndustrialComplex]

Sure they could. Now outline your evidence that this stat is right but the ones about Linux are wrong.

Why should HE? Didn't you talk about 'some users' or 'them'? You know, the vague other that is always used when trying to prove your point. Where were THEY when that guy was doing this, why are THEY so angry now that it's this guy.

Of course, you could be the lone gem in the world of the internet where people can just toss out accusations against tangentially related non-present people and thus tarnish the person you wish to debate.

Oh wait, I just did it too, didn't I?

Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine when people attempt to debate a leaderless crowd.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[pckl300]

I find it rather interesting that the source for this figure is the same StatCounter that the same people cheering this figure about IE will claim is wildly inaccurate due to the fact that it shows Linux with like a 1 or 2% market share.

Why would that seem inaccurate? Way less people have Linux than Mac, and Apple is usually cited around 5-10% market share. 1 or 2% for Linux sounds about right to me.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[ArsonSmith]

How about rewording it: "Despite the pathetic attempts of competitors, the great Microsoft still has nearly 50% of the total browser market. With it's next nearest competitor only a bit over half of that."

There now it's not a negative Microsoft story.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[daveime]

So everyone who uses Internet Explorer 6 for accessing their corporate intranet don't count then ... only when they visit some web page that has the statcounter system in place.

So how is market-share any better OR worse than web usage stats like this ? They are both inaccurate in representing "browser usage".

Oh, right, because it helps support the myth that browser X is now more popular than browser Y.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[daveime]

They have more than half of the web using their browser, compared to all other browsers COMBINED, and they failed ???

Interesting concept of failure you have there.

Something like a tug of war, with a really fat guy on one end, and ten olympic athletes on the other, and the athletes all shouting "haw haw you fail" because the fat guy moved half an inch.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[oh_my_080980980]

Where's the cheering?

Microsoft fan-boy......

Re:Hmm..interesting

[icebraining]

they are biased towards sites that are willing to include a privacy-violating stat counter.

I have to disagree about privacy violation - if the data is broken up (by which I mean, not keeping Browser/OS/plugins/etc linked in a single "profile") and not tied to any personal info, I don't see what privacy are they violating.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Eil]

Hypocrisy. Isn't it grand?

You might say it's almost as grand as painting open source advocates and Microsoft bashers with the same brush.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Colonel Korn]

They have more than half of the web using their browser, compared to all other browsers COMBINED, and they failed ???

Interesting concept of failure you have there.

Something like a tug of war, with a really fat guy on one end, and ten olympic athletes on the other, and the athletes all shouting "haw haw you fail" because the fat guy moved half an inch.

He specifically said they failed at their goal of a web monoculture. They absolutely failed in that sense, and that's good for nearly everyone. It might even be good for Microsoft.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[careysub]

They have more than half of the web using their browser, compared to all other browsers COMBINED, and they failed ???

If you had included the original comment by the OP: "...what's certain is the web monoculture Microsoft wanted so badly and nearly achieved at the height of their power has failed" the foolishness of your retort would be transparent (possibly why you didn't include it?).

Slightly LESS THAN 50% use (not "more than") , and steadily declining, is most certainly a failed attempt at achieving a monoculture (complete market dominance). And at its current rate of decline IE will have the same market share as Firefox in two years, and Firefox lacks any deep pocket hundred-billion-dollar backer to push its adoption. That's what I call a failed business strategy from any perspective.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[anUnhandledException]

Of course they failed.

1) The goal was for (at least on the windows platform) for IE to be the only browser. The browser as part of the OS and the OS linked to the browser. Sure maybe a few nerds will work around it but most users would accept IE as "the internets". That has completely failed. My mother in law installed firefox = microsoft fail.

2) 50% marketshare sounds great until you consider it was 90% less than a decade ago. Microsoft is passing through 50% on the way down and IE "brand" is damaged. IE 9 can't just be "good enough" to regain marketshare it needs to be superior.

3) There is now a lack of mono-culture. Website are being designed against standards. Standards Microsoft can't control. Less and less effort is being place on IE "optimized" websites. Sure websites still apply hacks to get the crippled IE 6 working but they are doing it less and less and it is more of an afterthought.

In this respect Microsoft has failed.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I for one believe it.

Of course, that's because I can confirm it myself. I work for a major international news corporation and I have access to our web site statistics (partly because I am responsible for developing the site software)

Our typical end user is a corporate late-adopter type, and even we already saw IE drop below 50% several months ago. Also, judging by the month on month graph, this trend is certainly not a blip and looks set to continue at least in the short term.

What I don't yes have is access to the OS stats.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing to note is that with adblock and noscript on my firefox, I doubt that any stat counter is able to count my browser. There are others I know who run various types of proxies including the ancient proxomitron to perform a similar function.

It somewhat defeats the purpose if the "IT Elite" / paranoid / privacy concious are not counted in such counters. I wonder if people such as me have a measurable impact in the stats.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

they are biased towards sites that are willing to include a privacy-violating stat counter.

I have to disagree about privacy violation - if the data is broken up (by which I mean, not keeping Browser/OS/plugins/etc linked in a single "profile") and not tied to any personal info, I don't see what privacy are they violating.

Uh huh. Until I can personally audit every last stat counter that may be used for this purpose and verify for myself that it doesn't violate privacy, I'll continue to block this stat counter and all similar tools. NoScript and Requestpolicy and Adblock Plus and /etc/hosts FTW. Kthxbye.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to respond here, but this really should be posted as a response to everyone in this thread.

Most sites like statcounter rely on tracking pages inserted into other web sites either as part of an advertisement or as part of a service like google's Trends service.

Google trends for example uses tags. Other services use tracking from web advertisements, and some even rely on the user to have a plugin/toolbar/crapware installed.

Linux users don't generally install crapware, so the crapware-based statistics are probably 90% made up of parents/grandparents/and friends that were given a pre-configured linux box by a knowledgeable user, and the other 10% is probably idiots who thought "I'm a hacker!" and downloaded ubuntu.

As for the rest of these services, using adblock with a good filter list subscription means that most of the flash and tag based usage tracking services don't see you.

Example, my entire office uses adblock plus with a few custome lines added to the filter list. None of our access to the company site shows up in google trends, simple because the cross site insert tags never get downloaded.

Additionally, none of these computers are going to show up in Statcounter.

Re:Hmm..interesting

[monkyyy]

if u can see a problem with stats w/o trying that hard then theres probably more

Re:Hmm..interesting

[daveime]

Firefox lacks any deep pocket hundred-billion-dollar backer to push its adoption

So Google is just like a rich uncle who ensures the developers have plenty of Mountain Dew and Cheetos while they "play" at running a business ?

No real increase for firefox...

[daid303]

Firefox has been around 30% for the last year, while IE dropped 10% in the same time, and Chrome gained 10%.

If this trend continues then it might balance out at 30/30/30/10 for IE/Firefox/Chrome/Other. Which should be good for everyone I think. There is no holy browser (except lynx), so a good balance of users should make sites more standard compliant in the end.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Monkeedude1212]

so a good balance of users should make sites more standard compliant in the end.

Or will the browsers fight to become more robust than their competitors to deal with the non-compliant sites?

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[magpie]

Lyux?!?!...come on telnet to port 80.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Culture20]

There is no holy browser (except lynx)

Surely thou meanest blessed telnet to port 80? We have learned to respect the ways of wget and curl, but the heretical lynx shall be spoken of with curses forever!

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[jellomizer]

I would expect more of a 25% split across these platforms.

25% for IE because it is the default browser, and is a known quantity that it will work on most websites. However it will drop further as people realizes they are no longer stuck and most websites doesn't care on your browser.

25% for Firefox I see it dropping as Chrome rises even further it will chew up some of IE and FireFox But I would expect from seeing FireFox 4 Beta that they will be comparable and used by who ever like one over the other.

25% Google, it will grow then at a point its privacy concerns that Google brings up will stop it from breaking 25% for a long time.

25% other. Well we have a lot of Mac Users with most using Safari So I could see Safari getting 15% of the desktop With the Mac Users and people who use Safari for Windows. 5% for others... Sorry Opera you are a good browser but as of right now I don't see any reinsurance's.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[elrous0]

Sorry, but I was born a Cello man. And I will die a Cello man.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely thou meanest blessed telnet to port 80? We have learned to respect the ways of wget and curl, but the heretical lynx shall be spoken of with ncurses forever!

FTFY.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no holy browser (except lynx)

Surely thou meanest blessed telnet to port 80? We have learned to respect the ways of wget and curl, but the heretical lynx shall be spoken of with curses forever!

Telnet? Telnet??? Hedonist! The disciples of the only true web use netcat!

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[delinear]

There is no holy browser...

Maybe not, but for a long time IE has been the holey browser.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you meant to say an automatic morse tapper, screw-terminaled to an RS-232 port. A glass TTY would simply be uncouth.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[blind biker]

the heretical lynx shall be spoken of with curses

Were you going for a "+1 Ironic"?

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Lynx? No! Emacs all the way: http://www.ucc.ie/doc/editing/emacs-www.html

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Culture20]

I was going to say it was founded on curses, but it was too obvious. Good eye. :)

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[jfbilodeau]

p="google.com";d="d"&&if [ -e $d ];then rm $d;fi&&wget -rO $d $p&&chromium-browser $d

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye, beware however, lest ye mention the schism that is ncurses.

'twill not end well

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[lahvak]

lynx shall be spoken of with curses forever!

Not necessarily, you can choose to speak of lynx in slang instead.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[kimvette]

There is no holy browser (except lynx),

Some of us use links, you insensitive clod!

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Anonymous Coward]

the heretical lynx shall be spoken of with ncurses forever!

FTFY

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[KiloByte]

Uhm, netcat is an _easier_ tool for browsing than telnet. Well, perhaps bytes containing 255 are not supposed to happen except for some Windows-running Icelandic sites, but it still doesn't mean you should use telnet for anything else than the TELNET protocol -- ie, real telnet servers and most MUDs.

netcat doesn't try to interpret data as commands.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Lanteran]

A mixed market of complaint browsers and the possibility of an IE version that conforms to existing standards instead of trying to write its own would be a godsend for web developers everywhere, and since we can finally use the more awesome features, the end users too.

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[magus_melchior]

"First, shalt thou takest out the holy shell. Then shalt thou telnet to 80. No more, no less. 80 shalt be the number of the telnet, and the number of the telnet shall be 80. 81 shalt thou not telnet, neither telnet thou 8080, except that thou should then telnet securely. Once 80, the number of the port shall be reached, then lobbest thou thy holy SYN grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it. Amen."

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[monkyyy]

is there anything emacs cant do?

(btw when is a emacs fps coming?)

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[lastman71]

of course you mean:

shall be spoken of with ncurses forever

Re:No real increase for firefox...

[Culture20]

shall be spoken of with ncurses forever

Sorry, I came from a Solaris world. curses is good enough for me.

Damn the latency!

[srussia]

Slashdot's timestamp should be offset by the average latency between their servers and the poster's IP.

Hold on

[musicalmicah]

The methodology question in the FAQ leads me to believe that all their stats are from sites that use this tool - "the best free web counter in the world." IE may indeed be below 50% market share for this population, but I bet it leans towards recreational rather than business browsing.

Re:Hold on

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd also trust Ars Technica over Network World, any day of the week. http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/10/ie9-beta-not-enough-to-keep-ie-market-share-over-60-mark.ars
Notice the 60 instead of 50.

Re:Hold on

[kgcurrie]

Possible sampling problem noted; however, all it implies is that over half of people who have a choice, choose not to use IE. That's just as damning toward IE as the statement, "business users have no choice."

Re:Hold on

[socsoc]

It's a reliable as when Quantcast provides traffic figures for sites that have never embedded Quantcast code. It's magic!

Re:Hold on

[pinkushun]

Also consider ad blockers, or Firefox add-ons like "Request Policy" which block certain domains.

Re:Hold on

[LoudMusic]

I believe it is quite the opposite. IE is the defacto browser in corporations using MS products - if the IT group installs an alternative browser that's one more thing to support. Chrome and Firefox are on computers where users actually have control of what gets installed.

Re:Hold on

[Anonymous Coward]

Arguable.

Your standard business users have no choice: IE: the people who need tech support when anything out of the ordinary happens. But there is a choice being made at the IT-department, with supposedly highly-trained experts deciding "Switching from IE isn't worth the cost, trouble, etc."... Which could just as easily be seen as damning for the other browsers.

What I'm getting at is this: We first choose what side we are on and then we can always find a way to twist the statistics to support our view.

Re:Hold on

[delinear]

Both damning, but neither help in the short term with the issue of how we dump IE and get on with building a better web.

Re:Hold on

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'd also trust Ars Technica over Network World, any day of the week.

Given how strong the Microsoft Hegemony still is in business, and given that Network World specifically caters to IT pros in the business world (unlike Ars) - I'd say when Network World talks about Microsoft's browser market share being below 50%, that indeed is news.

I still remember when Firefox first gained traction - Network World polled a bunch of CTOs/CIOs. There was a strong feeling among many that they'd love to move their companies to Firefox, but intranet apps (ActiveX in other words) currently had them locked in to IE. The writing was on the wall even back then...

Re:Hold on

[elashish14]

Interesting. And I bet it uses javascript too, no? So in all likelihood it doesn't take into account users that are running NoScript (like myself). So maybe it could also be biased back the other way.

Re:Hold on

[mbuimbui]

I run a top rated website (2m+ visitors a month) that runs Omniture and I'm jealous of these stats, and the internet averages that Omniture claims. They claim IE internet average is still 61.2%, ff 20.3%, safari 6.9% and chrome 6.9%. On our site though we are still seeing 79.8% IE including 6.2% ie6. I pray for the day when IE6 numbers are down to a level that we don't have to care what our site looks like for them.

Re:Hold on

[KiloByte]

On the other hand, users of Firefox tend to have such sleazy tracking sites adblocked way.

Re:Hold on

[clone53421]

Do you sell ads on your website? Seems to me that it might be in your own best interest to donate some advertising to Firefox.

You could probably find a way to get a tax deduction, too, for the amount you’d normally have charged for the ads. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit IIRC.

Google Chrome Frame

[tepples]

until IE 6, 7 and 8 are out of the way, it's likely still going to matter.

But what's the fraction of the audience 1. runs IE <= 8 and 2. doesn't have privileges to install Chrome Frame?

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[pahles]

The fraction is quite large unfortunately. Lots of companies still enforce the use of IE6! All because they heavily rely on 3rd party software (like SAP), which will not be updated.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[tepples]

Lots of companies still enforce the use of IE6! All because they heavily rely on 3rd party software (like SAP), which will not be updated.

Chrome Frame works with IE 6, but only for web sites that opt in using HTTP headers or HTML meta elements. So installing IE 6 + Chrome Frame would result in IE 6 for SAP and Chrome for sites that want Chrome.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[commodore64_love]

is pleased that Microsoft Exploder dropped below 50% share. It hasn't been that low since 1998 (when Mozilla Netscape was on top)

# 2 Mozilla Firefox
# 3 Google Chrome
# 4 Apple Safari
# 5 Opera browser
# 6 Amiga Origyn

Okay I made that last one up. ;-) And to answer your question: Lots of people still use IE 6 or 7. Last I heard it's around 60% of all MS Exploder users? Like me unfortunately, because it's the only thing that works with AOL Dialup or my workplace apps.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[Amouth]

the school system where my wife works - this past week just did an ie7 rollout.. and in January they are scheduled to do an office 07 rollout.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[SilverEyes]

Hilariously enough, my company just upgraded to SAP. We were stuck on IE6 before for an even older timesheet/accounting application.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[demonbug]

We finally got IE 7 about a month or two ago. Fortunately for my sanity I discovered Firefox Portable, which works great for everything except the one or two apps that require IE.

Still on Office 2003 (though I don't really have a problem with that - I like the tabbed interface in the newer versions of Office, but 2003 works just fine).

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[techwrench]

The fraction is quite large unfortunately. Lots of companies still enforce the use of IE6! All because they heavily rely on 3rd party software (like SAP), which will not be updated.

I am not sure what version of SAP you are running. We run IE 6 and 8 on systems that use SAP, without issue.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[Machtyn]

I have to echo the praises of Firefox Portable. I can have my shortcuts and plugins and eat them too! The only thing I can't have is Flash if it's not installed on the computer. But that's not that big of a problem.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[clone53421]

The thing I hate about Firefox Portable is its complete inability to sandbox itself properly. It loads any Firefox extensions it finds on the computer you’re running it from, so you end up with lots of extensions that you don’t want (even without Firefox installed, there’s probably at least half a dozen extensions just waiting for Firefox to find them)... and it is difficult and tedious to make the extensions that you do want portable in case you want to run it on a computer doesn’t already have them installed.

I love Firefox, but this is a major shortcoming in the portable version.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[commodore64_love]

I love this image (a Fox eating the "e" logo)
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w197/julianoeb/viva_firefox_eats_ie.jpg

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[Maxo-Texas]

My company is using SAP, HPQC, etc. and IE7.

SAP does not require IE6 any more apparently.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[gorzek]

To install Flash for Firefox Portable, follow the directions here: http://www.acidlabs.org/2006/09/05/installing-flash-in-portable-firefox-with-no-installer/

In case you don't want to go to the link, it's really simple:

Get this file: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/xpi/current/flashplayer-win.xpi

Put it in your "plugins" folder in your FF Portable installation.

Restart FF and you should be good to go.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[Anonymous Coward]

I decided to open up one of my Win98 VM's a few days ago and was surprised to find that most sites still cater to IE6. God help us all.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[jonadab]

> The fraction is quite large unfortunately.

It's falling. Rapidly.

The stats from my employer's site, for example, show IE6 falling, over the course of the last couple of years, from 18% to 15% to 12% to 7% to 5%. IE7, meanwhile, fell from 40% to 38% to 20% to 17% to 14%. These exact figures are probably not representative of the world as a whole (most of our patrons live in a relatively small geographical area), but the downward trend is unmistakable. IE6 market share is shrinking, fast, and IE7 is following. (And no, this is not a high-tech area where everyone lives on the bleeding edge. Quite the reverse, if anything.)

IE8, of course, is on the increase, which is what you'd expect for the latest stable-release version. People do occasionally upgrade, after all, especially when it's released in the automatic updates.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[Anonymous Coward]

My company uses SAP for a lot of things. I run Firefox and have not seen any problems.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Exploder

Oh my, how droll.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[the_womble]

Google Chrome Frame is not widely used, so no one bothers opting in, so you will end up with almost all sites still rendering using IE6.

IE6 has some weird bugs, beyond its age. I discovered yesterday that it sometimes (and I am not sure what circumstances trigger it) changes the size of a linked element depending on whether or not it has a background colour set (so text moves if you change background colour on hover). When did that every look like correct behaviour? Its not just not standards compliant, there was never any reason to see it as desirable behaviour.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[tepples]

Google Chrome Frame is not widely used, so no one bothers opting in

Then I'm lucky I work for a small business. We test our site on Firefox, Chrome, IE 8, and to a lesser extent IE 8's IE 7 mode. We use X-UA-Compatible to opt in to Chrome Frame, and we show a short blurb about Chrome Frame between the top navigation and the page body to users of IE <= 7.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[nobodie]

But another shockingly large number just hasn't a clue. I went to the head of IT last month because someone asked for my help with an office computer problem and they were still running IE6. So i took the time to tell IT that even MS is begging people to upgrade for free to IE8 for security reasons. They listened and have updated everyone to IE 8, including their ghosted version of winXP which they use (with a real site license i must add) to "repair" computer problems: that's "nuke and replace" to you guys, the standard windows "repair" function here in China.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[monkyyy]

firefox 4 logo?

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[Machtyn]

I tried that. Unfortunately, it failed in my environment. I'll give it another try at some point.

Re:Google Chrome Frame

[vlueboy]

We see some pressing need to "check out of the house" with IE on one random afternoon, but there is a particular annoyance: the site-specific invitation to download alt-browsers we already have. Webpages have no way of determining when you upgraded, and it feels like we're being policed for forgetting that the site is naggy when it sees the wrong browser.

I have no axe to grid, but cash-minded jerks might leave small businesses out there for the likewise displeasure. Large businesses already avoid most evangelizing and keep it random, or only based on some repeat threshold rather than every time I reload the pages that day (see Youtube's IE6 upgrade behavior). So far small sites haven't been PR-conscious in their warning's implementation, so it's permanent code with possibly deleterious effects on corporate users forced to use IE from work, for example

Also, IE's page-top yellow sliding dialog isn't an HTML API --they introduced it for internal ActiveX / security / zone warnings, and as more sites mimic that behavior with javascript, the more it will be ignored the same way as popups did.

Probable outcome...

[oranGoo]

...of this might be that MS will get its act together and fix the standards compliance and user experience. MS rarely goes away. When (and if!) they indeed fix it one might think - nice, the environment corrected itself; all is good.

However, if we stop to think of vast amounts of resources (money, time) that could have been saved and used for better purposes that was blown away in the industry on making internet work on IE, just because of MS attitude (would not go as far to call it strategy) and quality of its products. It would be great if business environment could fix that, too.

The IE interface has become awful

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

I liked IE but it is now a clusterfuck of bad design. The icons are tiny, illegible and poorly positioned... I'm sure it can be customized but why bother when there are other browsers that do it better by default.

Re:The IE interface has become awful

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I liked IE but it is now a clusterfuck of bad design. The icons are tiny, illegible and poorly positioned... I'm sure it can be customized but why bother when there are other browsers that do it better by default.

My question is why in IE7 and 8 are there two "Tools" menus with different items? Makes phone instructions interesting. "Click tools. No not that one, the other tools."

Re:The IE interface has become awful

[tibman]

haha, thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking "what is this guy talking about?" Sure enough, it's been there the whole time. Two tools menus.. geez.

not sure if I believe

[bishopBelloc]

Can anyone comment on the validity of this statistic? I've never heard of StatCounter. And while, "5 billion page views per month" and "3 million Websites" sounds like a lot, I have no idea how they selected those sites, and how many months they collected data over.

Re:not sure if I believe

[Anonymous Coward]

it depends on the site.
I look after quite a few sites and some had IE drop below 50% last year - the more creative business orientated sites - currently 30%!!!!
the last 30 days show (in analytics)
a large format printer - 52%
a dentist and a health and beauty are 63%
2 artists sites are is 53% and 50%
2 engineering sites is 63%

the trend is down and if the creatives site is anything to go by it could easily end up at 30%

Re:not sure if I believe

[Anonymous Coward]

Geocities.....

Their information is outdated...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where have these people been? It's been below 50% since 2008 according to:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

% of People consciously using IE is way lower

[fadir]

I assume that of those people that actually know what a browser is a does the percentage is far lower than the amount of 50%. If you deduct those that are forced to use the IE at work as well you probably reach a one digit area.
I cannot imagine why anyone that has some basic technical understanding would choose to use the Internet Explorer. You must be either forced or a technical illiterate (well, or maybe stupid) to use IE.

Re:% of People consciously using IE is way lower

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering probably over 90% of windows users don't know what a browser is, it's highly unlikely they have chrome or firefox or opera installed. I think the stats are wrong. IE browser market share on computers running windows is definitely over 99%.

Re:% of People consciously using IE is way lower

[fadir]

I'm pretty sure that a reasonable amount of those people have someone at hand to "fix" the computer for them, which often includes the installation of an alternative browser. I agree that the majority of the Windows users are clueless. But I wouldn't go so far to say that this is >90%.

Re:% of People consciously using IE is way lower

[delinear]

We run a pretty big consumer website (for one of the big thrift stores, so as you can imagine it certainly doesn't reflect an unusually high percentage of business users) with around 200,000 unique visitors per month and IE usage there is currently 59%. We also run another big site with a higher mix of business users, and that one is currently at 65%. I'd say that, while the stats might be a little lower than expected, they're not that far away. I'd be interested to know if there's a difference between the US and Europe since the EU ruled MS had to give new users a choice of browser, or if both sides of the pond were naturally trending downwards.

Re:% of People consciously using IE is way lower

[fadir]

Only have the statistics from end 2008 at hand from a webpage of a (smaller) mmorpg and even back then Firefox already had >50% share, IE around 40% and all the others in low 1-digit areas.

'll get the new data next days but I guess that the IE will be around 30%, Firefox still above 50% and Chrome near 10%.

Funny

[Deternal]

Clicked thru to the story and clicked the Avaya Flare banneradd and the page at avaya didn't display properly in Firefox (worked fine in Chrome tho).

Re:Funny

[clone53421]

Just went to check, and you appear to be right... I can’t find the banner ad anywhere.

One step closer...

[chemicaldave]

...to victory for web developers everywhere. Now if we can just get more people to use Chrome...

Re:One step closer...

[MBC1977]

How is this a victory, exactly?

Perhaps its just my observation, but just because something is technically superior, does not make it ideal. Betamax was superior to VHS, yet it lost. Why? Because most technical types can't understand a basic marketing premise.
It has to appeal (i.e. connect) to the consumer , not just function well. Microsoft understands this (even if as of late they've forgotten this simple rule).

The quicker more technical experts figure this out, the quicker you can a firm like Microsoft.

Re:One step closer...

[MBC1977]

The quicker you can beat a firm like Microsoft (apologies).

Depends on whom you ask

[asdfington]

Measuring browser market share is kind of a tricky task since any one site can only tell you who visits *their* site, or the sites whose stats they aggregate.
Check out the stats here:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table and you'll see that depending on whom you ask, IE has anywhere between 48 and 63% of the market share. Stats from sites that cater to developers (notably w3schools are skewed heavily* towards Firefox and Chrome, mainstream sites towards IE. Then there's the factors that lead to over-estimation, under-estimation... it's a sticky wicket for sure.

I say look at the aggregate results. Then I mention I have no idea how those aggregates are tabulated and weighted (Do W3Schools' stats have the same weight as WeTrack10mSites.com?). The only thing you can know for sure (more or less), is the traffic statistics on *your* site, which, to the developer, should be pretty much the only ones that matter. Pro tip: explain that last sentence to your clients.

*I don't really know if something can be "skewed heavily," but what the heck, you only live once, right?

Re:Depends on whom you ask

[maxwell demon]

The only thing you can know for sure (more or less), is the traffic statistics on *your* site, which, to the developer, should be pretty much the only ones that matter.

But your own site's statistics may be biased as well: For example, if you have an IE only page, that fact by itself will make IE the dominant browser on your page. However that doesn't tell you about the statistics you would get if your site would not be IE only. You cannot distinguish between hits you don't get because the user isn't interested in your site, and hits you don't get because the user can't access your site (or because your site looks ugly in his browser).

Re:Depends on whom you ask

[mooingyak]

Indeed.

I work for a high volume very mainstream site. I just checked our numbers for yesterday, and we had:
IE 58%
FF 22%
Chrome 7%

or roughly 9:3:1 as you move from browser to browser.

I didn't break it down any further than that. Our demographics favor women generally and moms in particular, and are mostly from North America, or so marketing tells us. Take that however you want.

As to your footnote, I've heard the phrase "heavily skewed" many times. If you're in the 'usage defines language' camp, then your phrase is just fine.

Re:Depends on whom you ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for interest sake, something can be skewed heavily.

While it doesn't apply to categorical data*, google the "coefficient of skewness" if you're interested.

* Such as which browser a certain statistic favours.

Re:Depends on whom you ask

[delinear]

You can work this out with some degree of success based on factors such as return visits. If you're only seeing 5% usage for FF for instance, and most users never return, you can see that it's likely you could net some new users by making the site work better in FF. Alternatively if you have 5% FF users but they're the same users constantly returning, you'll not get much benefit from a site redesign around FF. Of course, the best approach is always to build the site for standards compliant browsers and then add the fixes for IE on top and serve them just to IE (so the "fixes" don't break anything in the good browsers).

Re:Depends on whom you ask

[vux984]

The only thing you can know for sure (more or less), is the traffic statistics on *your* site, which, to the developer, should be pretty much the only ones that matter. Pro tip: explain that last sentence to your clients.

Step 1: Design a site that only works with IE
Step 2: Monitor traffic and notice that the stats for Firefox or Safari are way down.
Step 3: Advise management that there is no need to develop for alternative browsers based on the traffic to your site.

Re:Depends on whom you ask

[Bert64]

The problem with viewing the stats on your own sites...
I have encountered places where their sites only work with IE, and their stats say that only IE users ever visit their site... But the reason for that is that users of other browsers just assume the site is broken and go elsewhere.

No IE 9 for Windows XP. Promote switch to 7.

[tepples]

IE9 is good that I wont have to go to friends and family and talk them into the merits of switching

So now you've replaced talking them into switching to Chrome with talking them into switching to Windows 7. That can involve a substantial investment in hardware and operating system license, especially with multiple PCs in the household.

Re:No IE 9 for Windows XP. Promote switch to 7.

[commodore64_love]

Not really. IE9 will run on the old Vista PCs his family might own.

Re:No IE 9 for Windows XP. Promote switch to 7.

[tepples]

old Vista PCs his family might own

Of about ten PCs across three households that I've sampled, exactly one runs Vista. Two run Ubuntu, one is a Mac mini running Mac OS X, and the rest run Windows XP. Perhaps my family isn't a representative sample, but it's not unheard of.

Browser wars: the underappreciated candidates

[jonaskoelker]

A few browsers you may want to investigate further, if you feel Internet Firechrome Safoperari is a decent but slightly 'meh' browser:

w3m, links, links2, elinks, w3-mode, w3m-mode, surfraw: command line goodness. Especially the Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Against WWW (SURFRAW), how's that for an acronym.

Uzbl: a graphical browser (webkit innards) with highly customizable keybindings, designed from the Unix philosophy---a lot of its internal state can be poked at from shell scripts (or whatever works on stdin, stdout and files) and this is highly encouraged by the design of the thing.

Been using it ever since I heard about it and I'm only begrudgingly going back to firechrome whenever I need to.

Re:Browser wars: the underappreciated candidates

[Anonymous Coward]

Uzbl: a graphical browser (webkit innards)

Uzbl! Another catchy product name from the Open Source community!

They All Suck

[Lawrence_Bird]

Is the conclusion I have come to of late. Firefox is a pig with random slowdowns (even as I type this) and high memory usage. Increasingly it also locks up other tabs while waiting on ads or other links to load. Chrome unfortunately seems to still make use of parts of IE or windows - found to my displeasure when setting up a proxy and I got the Internet Settings box (note: changing here seems to change for all apps...b rilliant). Opera while generally quite good still fails to draw some pages properly and still has some UI quirks which will take a long while to adjust to.

I may finally make the move to Opera and use one of the others when a page does not look right. But I've grown entirely sick of firefox, and yes I've tried 4.0 as well. Seeing that I started with something like mozilla 0.92 I've given them a fair shake I think!

Re:They All Suck

[WhitePanther5000]

If "they all suck", then it's probably more like "non-compliant websites suck". Flashblock helps a lot, but I still run into sites that jack up my CPU utilization with javascript. For instance, the ticker on an eetimes.com article pushes my core 2 duo to 70%. A little absurd for a 2 page article.

Unfortunately, everyone wants a flashy website these days, and the people paying the web developers don't really care about how it effects the end user... as long as it's pretty and it attracts page hits.

Obviously that's not always the case... but still, blame the websites. At this point you basically wind up with the the decision to (SLOWLY) see everything as intended, or live with some quirks for a faster browsing experience.

Re:They All Suck

[delinear]

If "they all suck", then it's probably more like "non-compliant websites suck".

That or GP's standards are very high. I've encountered some of the same problems, especially with FF locking up (if I have a lot of tabs open, which I do, always, and try to load something new I'll often get the "not responding" message for a few seconds before it unlocks for instance), even so I wouldn't say they suck. Could be better, but they do what I want reasonably well, and when they fail they try and fix the issue (by giving me a list of previously running tabs with the option of restoring them all or just the ones I'm sure are safe for instance). There's definitely room for improvement, but compared to where browsers were five years ago I think things have moved on a fair bit.

Re:They All Suck

[man_of_mr_e]

While i can understand the argument that you might want to use different proxies with different web browsers, most people don't function that way. Most people use the same proxies for everything. As such, setting proxy information in one place, OS wide is more efficient. Chrome is doing this so they can take advantage of Group Policy settings

Re:They All Suck

[Lawrence_Bird]

I suspect it is the case that most people do not run proxies but perhaps you are right that those who do want it system wide. In my case, I wanted to set up a ssh tunnel for infrequent use and would like it on a browser I don't use all the time (in part so I could continue normal work on the regular one with normal routing.) However, I've since found out that firefox may be the only one whch will also route dns thru the tunnel.

Re:They All Suck

[Lawrence_Bird]

To clarify - I typically only have a few (5 or less) tabs open and have found the lock ups relate to how firefox handles links which are not responding (or not fast enough). The result is you are unable to switch tabs for anything from a couple seconds to well.. maybe never.. but typically it seems 20-30 secs. As to the slowdowns I have increasingly seen situations where comment boxes result in a non-symmetrical response - you start to type, you see what you type and then bam.. you are typing and nothing shows up... then 10 seconds later (if you have kept typing) it all shows up though sometimes you can see it printing a word at a time. This *never* happened in older versions of firefox and has only become an annoyance in the past 3-6 months. I've had this happen on extremely simple sites and extremely complex sites. Something is definitely fubar with firepig.

Re:Site bias...

[klubar]

It also has a strong bias for the types of sites that would use "the best free web counter in the world". It's unlikely that very many large commercial sites would use a a free counter, and want to share their stats with someone else. So not only is there a sampling problem, there is also a data collection problem. The numbers probably don't give an accurate value, but may be useful for trends. On the sites that we run, I've never seen IE (all variants) below 70% (and more like 80%). But then again, these sites are mostly targeting business users. (And the email client is almost always outlook, or a Blackberry.)
 

Even better

[maxwell demon]

In Germany, IE dropped below 25%.

Re:Even better

[Lanteran]

it helps having an actual choice not to use IE when you start windows 7 (browser ballot). For whatever reason, it also seems to be generally better in Europe than the states.

All this dispite IE always being pre-installed

[linebackn]

What I find most interesting about the drop in IE usage is that this is happening in spite of IE still pre-installed on every single Windows computer and not being truly uninstallable (Even if the icon and tiny iexplore.exe are removed, which is all the Win7 add/remove feature does, 99% of it is sill there and can be fully embedded by applications)

This means a huge number of people are going to the trouble of obtaining and installing a third party browser, and ignoring that a browser is already installed. It would be interesting to see some statistics on where and how people are getting them.

I also have a feeling that for at least the short term, IE 9's inability to run on Windows XP might bite into IEs usage share. Firefox 4 will still run under 2000 and XP (and unofficially apparently even Windows 98 using a special piece of kernel extending software)

Re:All this dispite IE always being pre-installed

[takowl]

Awareness of other browsers, particularly Firefox and Chrome, is certainly much better. It's no great surprise now to find non-geeks using them.

I'll have to take you up on the comment "IE still pre-installed on every single Windows computer", though. In the EU, while it may technically be pre-installed, users now have to specify which browser they want on first run (although I think OEMs can override that; I don't know how many do). It was even pushed out to existing systems, and people had to confirm that they wanted to stick with IE. I think it my sister tried Chrome.

Re:All this dispite IE always being pre-installed

[vlueboy]

I'll have to take you up on the comment "IE still pre-installed on every single Windows computer", though. In the EU, while it may technically be pre-installed, users now have to specify which browser they want on first run.

That happened only this year, amid a world recession unfriendly to new PC purchases, and only on Windows 7 (and after its November 2009 launch dates too, so you can be sure boxed copies everywhere were sold without the update.)

It doesn't affect the most popular Windows OS, XP, as confirmed by a recent /. story. These EU users will have little impace in world-wide stats unless they defied their economies and had a huge increase in sales we haven't heard about.

Hmm, please excuse me if the argument might have sounded harsh.

Re:All this dispite IE always being pre-installed

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this demotivational poster sums it up nicely:

http://www.demotivationalshiz.com/upload/g1c0li2i9x-Internet_Explorer.png

Re:All this dispite IE always being pre-installed

[takowl]

Well, as confirmed by, ummm, me seeing it, the ballot did appear on existing installations of XP. And as confirmed by my sister asking me about it, it also covered existing installations of Vista. This is from automatic updates, not anything the user opted into.

There are some caveats: if someone was already using another browser, it doesn't seem that they got it. It also rolled out gradually, so not everyone got it at the same time. And I think OEMs may have been able to override it on new PCs. But it's definitely not true that it was only for Windows 7.

Your argument seems positively mild by internet forum standards. Just wrong (at the risk of raising the temperature ;-) ).

Re:All this dispite IE always being pre-installed

[vlueboy]

Thanks.

I'm sorry to have been wrong. It's good to hear it's out on XP.

I wish the ruling had included the whole world, because it would me save lots of time.

I like Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

enough said. :)

Blocked?

[pedestrian crossing]

If it depends on the browser allowing javascript from statcounter.com, it would not count hits from browsers with NoScript.

Re:Blocked?

[delinear]

Across all of our portfolio of websites, we see the percentage of people without JavaScript as being below 2%, and since a portion of those are probably bots/search engine spiders, it's unlikely to be of much statistical significance (obviously sites with a higher tech following such as /. might have notably more users without JavaScript, but our portfolio tends to reflect a pretty mainstream userbase).

Re:Blocked?

[viperblades]

Agreed on that, unless specifically requested I don't design a non-JS user version of the a site.

Just in case someone replies with 'Then your clients lose all the business of noscript users' .... thats what, MAYBE .5 percent of web users?

IE6 share

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how much of IE6's tiny remaining share is taken up by the millions of web developers who still insist on testing their site in IE6 -- it has to be a hefty chunk.

Let it die developers - it's in your hands. No IE6 user working for a corporation with a archaic IT policy is going to buy products from your website -- it'll be blocked by their unpatched, insecure content filter anyway!!

Re:IE6 share

[HannethCom]

Hey, up until recently 17% or people accessing our client's web site were using IE6. I just checked and it is now fortunately down to 6%. Yes, we check in IE6 because at 17% of people using it and a very low number of bounces from those people made for good customer relations for our client. That being said, we only tested against IE6 on our staging site and it was computer we had to remote into. We don't have IE6 on any of our development boxes.

Optimistic

[Don_dumb]

I doubt it.
My large organisation (100,000+) will not use anything other than the minimum software. I imagine this is true of several similar orgs, the more locked down the software, the better, less holes and less to support (1000s of applications at the current moment) - or so the theory goes.
My employer is running IE6 and will upgrade to IE7 next year. Considering how critical the browser is to the business, they would never even think of using (and having to support) anything other than what comes out of the box, which is MS, regardless of the functionality of Firefox or anything else.

I can't say I agree with the principle but it certainly isn't in my power to influence.

Re:Optimistic

[Bert64]

The problem is that so long as IE comes bundled and is difficult/impossible to remove, the principle of minimum software will always prevent the use of any other browser on windows.

Now really this is a flaw which acts directly against the principle of minimum software, because you are forced to keep IE wether you like it or not, even on a system which is never intended to do any web browsing duties... However there is often a double standard, if anyone else pulled shit like this it would be declared horrendously insecure and avoided and yet MS can get away with gaping holes.

Look at any OS hardening guides, unix based guides will tell you to remove whatever browser (if any) comes installed and even to remove X11 if you can, whereas windows guides skirt around the fact that a gui and installation of ie are mandatory. And yet the results of both sets of hardening are considered on the same level by various government agencies and industry bodies (eg PCI regulations).

Re:Optimistic

[poetmatt]

Well, thats the point - they can't really lock down firefox if they allow it to be installed right now. Also the rest, the "less applications = better" concept.

Re:Optimistic

[monkyyy]

u cant get rid of ie so its not imposable but i`d agree id like to change the gui at lest ;ratpoisen ftw

Similar stats

[tokul]

98% windows users, not IT related audience
January 2010:
IE - 64%
Firefox - 21%
Opera - 10%
Safari - 4%

September 2010:
IE - 55%
Firefox - 27%
Opera - 8%
Safari - 8%

Jan 2008 - IE = 85%
Jan 2009 - IE = 78%

Statistics show steady decline of IE share.

Fuck 'em

[SteveFoerster]

IE6 won't die until XP dies; even though IE7 and IE8 run on XP as well, there will always be people who Just Won't Upgrade.

Fuck 'em. IE6 is nine years old. If the laggards are going to try to stand in the way of progress they should expect eventually to get run over.

Re:Fuck 'em

[Surt]

HTML5 is the freight train that is about to run over IE6. I see more and more mainstream websites dabbling in it every week.

Re:Fuck 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-nXT8lSnPQ

Posted anonymously because not everyone may think this reply is funny..

Re:Fuck 'em

[Merk42]

HTML5? Wouldn't that train run over IE7 and IE8 as well?

Re:Fuck 'em

[man_of_mr_e]

If by "about to" you mean "in 10 years".. ok... HTML5 isn't even scheduled for ratification until next decade.

Re:Fuck 'em

[Surt]

Probably, though MS has more power to dynamically update those.

Re:Fuck 'em

[Surt]

Who cares about ratification? If the modern browsers support it, and top100 websites are using it, who cares if it has been finalized? Are you imagining that all the people who are already deploying it are suddenly going to withdraw their websites?

Re:Fuck 'em

[man_of_mr_e]

Many people wait to deploy standards until they are ratified. They don't want to have things break because the standard changes.

Just because sites support some level of HTML5, doesn't mean their HTML4.x or xhtml support will go away.

Re:Fuck 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

Well most people i know that are working with websites are beginning to say exactly the opposite.

In the last few months quite a few devs who used to be enthusiastic about HTML5 are now saying that it is just a PR stunt, and that it's more marketing than IT.

As a markup language, i've always wondered what all the fuss is about...? Personally i don't like the idea of "this website is best viewed with [xxxxx] browser" and i know a lot of people agree with me on this.

Re:Fuck 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

For most businesses and organizations, the likely survival of IE6 means that support for the way it renders content is an important part of their approach to the web, whatever the impact on transient technologies and standards that everyone ignores anyways. Like it or not.

The fact that ie9 won't work on xp must be another blow to your precious dreams. Don't give up the fight though LOL!

Re:I've been using less FF and more Opera

[greyline]

I like how you have a plug for a Firefox extension in your sig.

One thing all stat counters seem to agree on:

[blind biker]

Firefox has been stagnating for longer than a year, now. Chrome is slowly but very steadfastly growing, and eating IE's lunch - but I wonder if we'll soon see the day that it'll eat into Firefox's usage share as well. I don't want to speculate about it, but if and when it does, all hell will break out in the Linux community, because Linux users have been extremely (no, really) loyal Firefox users.

Re:One thing all stat counters seem to agree on:

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has been stagnating for longer than a year, now. Chrome is slowly but very steadfastly growing, and eating IE's lunch - but I wonder if we'll soon see the day that it'll eat into Firefox's usage share as well. I don't want to speculate about it, but if and when it does, all hell will break out in the Linux community, because Linux users have been extremely (no, really) loyal Firefox users.

Did Linux users have any other options that work on commonly used web sites?

Re:One thing all stat counters seem to agree on:

[blind biker]

Sure: Opera. Excellent browser, in many ways better than both Firefox and Chrome.
As of recent, there is also Chrome for Linux.

Re:One thing all stat counters seem to agree on:

[Lanteran]

plus konqueror, epiphany, midori, etc. Also, how's that off topic? Firefox/Chrome fanboys?

Re:One thing all stat counters seem to agree on:

[monkyyy]

chromium works on linux and i dont think many of them care its in dev rather then a "official" release

Re:I've been using less FF and more Opera

[roman_mir]

Well yeah, I wrote a bunch of FF extensions. I am amused how my comments are rated off-topic or troll.

Better worry about the next step

[vlueboy]

Let's think about what matters, and not percentages. We have a rollout of HTML5 for which the other browsers are readier.

And I'd dare say my post isn't even about that. It's about the [apparent] lack of support for ipv6. I tested IE8, Opera 10.62, Safari 4.04 and Firefox 3.6.6 through a 6to4 tunnel to find that they will fail miserably parsing IP's in v6 notation.

The standard unicast 2002:c058:6301::0 was flagged bad because all sources list it using the shortcut 2002:c058:6301::. I have found even shells to fail to ping because the damn v6 abreviations aren't expanded internally. Since our mainstream XP supported v6 at its release, two OS's ago, router makers, browser devs and shell tool makers can't be excused after a decade just because the standard isn't finalized: think of wireless N having support everywhere WAY before there was a "standard."

The next 5 to 10 years IT pros worldwide must test bare ipv6 addresses like I did, confirming correctness in their DNS and DHCPv6 while eventually pushing ipv6 to their enterprise. Even if my tunnel were found misconfigured or something, I know others will find the same timesinks. Finding you'll have a hard time implementing v4-less environments for their pro infrastructure isn't a good thing. The browsers give clueless errors ranging from "internal communications issue" (opera) to "unknown webkit error" when I feed google's ip, even if I format it with brackets as suggested http://20014860800f00000093/

The bracket notation is NOT something I've read officially, and you cannot expect anyone to know that all sites need that --instead the browser should just stop assuming that colons in your address bars stand for port numbers. Safari said it can't find the port "2001:4860" before I was forced to find out about the brackets while researching. If laymen can't be expected currently to immediately board an ipv6 site in an ipv6-ready environment, then it's all for naught.

Re:Better worry about the next step

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashcode killed google's address above. It's supposed to have a colon separating groups of 4 numbers.

Re:Better worry about the next step

[RichM]

Since our mainstream XP supported v6 at its release

Not really, it was only there as a Developer Preview. Proper support was introduced in Service Pack 1.

Re:Better worry about the next step

[toddestan]

DNS over IPv6 in Windows XP is still broken. I seriously doubt that Microsoft plans to fix it.

Re:Better worry about the next step

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent and GP here. In hindsight, the slashcode failure is flagging yet another proof that ipv6 will have a hard time in its uptake: forums will either flag them as malicious code or improperly reformat them.

Proper HTML5 and ipv6 will be the new face of our decades old "use netscape v. x.y instead of ie v. m.n" That will likely happen after IE10, of course. There's plenty of time to prepare

11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[yuna49]

What browser do Android phones use by default? It's listed as "Google Browser" at Wiki, but does it identify itself as Chrome?

Given how long it's taken Firefox to reach its current market share, it seems either remarkable or implausible that Chrome could reach 11% in about two years just on the basis of word-of-mouth. This figure only makes sense if it's a reflection of other trends in the industry like the rise of mobiles.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[BlkPanther]

The numbers could be high, but in my opinion Chrome is the superior browser, thus has faster adoption. It's what I install on all computers I can. I rarely install Firefox unless it's on a Linux box. It's lightweight, extensible and the lowest barrier to entry (unless you count IE which has no barrier as it's pre-installed). Honestly, browse to google.com/chrome, you install it with just a few clicks. For the technically illiterate, that's a huge step forward. It may not seem like much to download and install Firefox, but it's markedly harder than Chrome. Plus Firefox only had grassroots behind it at the beginning (Chrome has a huge corporation behind it). Firefox was also plagued by memory leaks and general "heaviness" at its beginning and still, to some degree, has those problems today.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[jfbilodeau]

What's the ratio of iPhones to Android? Shouldn't that bring up the amount of Safari users?

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[Cidolfas]

Chrome gets the best advertising real estate on the web: it has a blurb on the otherwise minimalist google homepage.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[tokul]

What browser do Android phones use by default? It's listed as "Google Browser" at Wiki [wikipedia.org], but does it identify itself as Chrome?

Mobile Safari
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.0; ld-us; sdk Build/ECLAIR) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[leonem]

It's not entirely word of mouth, there were adverts on the tube (metro) in London UK at least.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[EvilBudMan]

Some use Opera by choice. Just think about all those Blackberries out there.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[m50d]

"Based on word of mouth"? If you left the basement you'd've seen the chrome billboards that were everywhere for months.

Another relevant factor is that it made it onto the first page of the EU settlement browser selection thing.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[SwedishPenguin]

I don't know, I've seen a lot of people migrate to Chrome in the past year, even relatively non-technical users like my sister (without my prompting I might add). From what I've seen it's been mostly at the expense of Firefox though..

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[Kjella]

Given how long it's taken Firefox to reach its current market share, it seems either remarkable or implausible that Chrome could reach 11% in about two years just on the basis of word-of-mouth. This figure only makes sense if it's a reflection of other trends in the industry like the rise of mobiles.

They track both OS and Browser, and that's not it. Chrome jumpstarted at a level far past what Firefox was, it launched with 1% market share almost instantly. It has huge name recognition as being Google's browser, and they can pick any ad space they want for it. Also it's much easier to gain market share now in the market where IE has 60% than when Firefox was trying to break Microsoft's 80-90% stranglehold. It's happening, the good news is like the story says that it seems to be eating into IEs marketshare, not just taking them from Firefox. I'm guessing Chrome is a hit with all the people that want a big serious company *rollseyes* behind their product like Microsoft or Google, the Mozilla Foundation just doesn't have the same impact.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[BZ]

> just on the basis of word-of-mouth.

Uh... Firefox was doing word-of-mouth. Chrome is having serious marketing money poured into it. See http://www.vijayforvictory.com/google/london-is-snowed-with-google-chrome-advertisements/2818/ for example, or http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/google-just-advertised-chrome-to-a-million-people-in-the-uk/ (that was around when the European choice screen was coming out, for what it's worth).

So this figure might make sense if it's a reflection of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars poured into advertizing....

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[Anonymous Coward]

My Android Browser has the words "Mobile Safari" in its user agent String.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[neminem]

> Firefox was also plagued by memory leaks and general "heaviness" at its beginning and still, to some degree, has those problems today. Yeah... it really does. I still use Firefox for my day-to-day browsing, cause I'm used to it. I like the look and feel (cause I'm used to it), plus there are a couple things I really need Greasemonkey for (and Chrome's GM support isn't 0, but it's not perfect, either). But anytime I actually care about the speed of browser rendering, I open up Chrome (notably, one not-real-time browser game where buffs are measured in real time, so the faster you can load pages, the more things you can kill in the 10 minutes you have a particular buff for). If Chrome supported Greasemonkey and a few other addons I use 100%, I'd probably ditch Firefox completely.

Re:11% for Chrome seems absurdly high

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the ads for Chrome plastered all over YouTube.

Year of the Linux Desktop

[Compaqt]

Raise your hand if you opened this thread, and started searching for "Linux Desktop".

Re:Year of the Linux Desktop

[man_of_mr_e]

I guess you're the only one.

I LOVE IE

[rgviza]

I LOVE internet exploder. It's CSS 3 implementation is unmatched for it's craptasticness. Microsoft should finish 8 before starting a new one. Better yet, they should just use WebKit and stop reinventing a second rate wheel.

Re:I LOVE IE

[Lanteran]

or just, you know, stop making IE altogether and just implement the browser ballot.

Poor IE

[iceaxe]

I felt sorry for the IE team, what with all their recent hard work and losing market share anyway, so I wanted to install their shiny new browser and give it a whirl.

But all my searches in Synaptic turned up nothing, despite having a number of non-standard repositories enabled. Does anyone know what repository I could find that in? Or will I have to get a tarball from somewhere and compile it myself?

Re:Poor IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I felt sorry for the IE team, what with all their recent hard work and losing market share anyway, so I wanted to install their shiny new browser and give it a whirl.

But all my searches in Synaptic turned up nothing, despite having a number of non-standard repositories enabled. Does anyone know what repository I could find that in? Or will I have to get a tarball from somewhere and compile it myself?

You need to upgrade your kernel first. ;)

Re:Poor IE

[Anonymous Coward]

We feel really sorry for all of you - all 0.3% of the desktop market!

- IE team

MS should use webkit or gecko

[zipherx]

This is so obvious, if Microsoft could just jump boat with either webkit or gecko, (or other open alternative) instead of developing their own crap.

Re:MS should use webkit or gecko

[Anonymous Coward]

... why? If they make a standards compliant renderer, why should we care if it is open? Its only job is to render an open format, after all. In addition, neither webkit nor gecko are optimized specifically for the Windows platform - therefore, IE9 will probably remain the best integrated with Windows's hardware acceleration and OS features than any other browser.

Re:quoted out of context

[b4dc0d3r]

Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde had more to fear from their society than from knowledge and facts getting out. You might as well have said that the Salem women accused of witchcraft would have appreciated the advice.

The context of the question, at least as far as I can see, was people treating Google as a friend, telling it secrets and trusting it. He backed up a little and said the famous quote "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." He went on to clarify that if you do need this privacy, you need to know that the information will be retained, and is subject to governmnet sniffing.

His statement in context, and the whole answer to the question instead of a soundbite, can be interpreted as "If you need more privacy than Google can provide, don't use Google." I see his comment in an holistic sense as a simple rephrasing of "Don't do the crime if you don't want the time." Or, if you don't want to get caught, don't do it. Taken in context, he was talking more about the kind of things that end up on Failbook than anything else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew

Still, I think he's right. *Maybe* you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, and *maybe* you should try to change society's attitudes towards what you're doing so you're accepted, and *maybe* you should do it as civil disobedience.

Market share matters

[westlake]

because usage like this stat is actually a important statistic, while market share is useless since market share does not equal usage.

Nonsense.

Web stats are built from the actions of users.

Which is why Net Applications numbers Apple, D&B, Microsoft, Nokia, Opera, the Mozilla Foundation, RIM and the WSJ among its clients.

Fundling for client-side apps goes to the platforms which are commercially viable.

Chrome Frame or Firefox port to Windows isn't an act of charity when AdSense pays your bills.

Neither can you crack through the "walled garden" when your platform has a 0.85% share of the mass consumer market. iOS tops Linux

 

So the definition really is becoming true...

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Explorer (noun):

A program provided for free with Microsoft Windows to download Mozilla Firefox (or another web browser).

Which version of non-released Firefox 4.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please clarify, try the nightly build and tell us if you also run AVG

Re:Which version of non-released Firefox 4.0?

[Lawrence_Bird]

I do not run AVG and I have used everything from released versions of the 3.6 tree to the various nightlies of 3.6 and 4.0.

IE 6 saved us Recently.

[CrashNBrn]

A long running site accidentally got the Joomla option "Enable Gzip Compression" turned on. Interestingly IE5 and IE6 were the only browsers that were still able to render the site -- and only IE6 was able to change settings in the backend, as IE5 didn't react/interpret the JS on [Save] [Apply] buttons.

All the other browsers we tried (IE7-8, FireFox2-3, Safari) showed a warning page that they couldn't display the content, except for Opera (9.64, 10.10, 10.62) which just displays binary garbage on screen.

Re:quoted out of context

[PCM2]

His statement in context, and the whole answer to the question instead of a soundbite, can be interpreted as "If you need more privacy than Google can provide, don't use Google."

Except Google has been pretty clear about the fact that it sees its role essentially as the world's largest Peeping Tom.

Just look at Google Street Views and the various controversies that cropped up there. In an earlier age, when we weren't so in love with technology and Google hadn't bombarded us for years with the idea that its mantra was "don't be evil," no way in Hell would we put up with a corporation driving trucks around our neighborhoods, taking photos of our property (and occasionally our persons), which would then be published for the entire world to see. No way.

If I want to use Google Reader to browse RSS feeds, is it really reasonable to assume that Google will be using cookies to track my behavior around the Web, and will then sell that data to parties unknown for data-mining purposes? Really? Or have we just been conditioned to put up with such a gross invasion of our privacy?

Platform?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this desktop or does it also include mobile? My guess is millions of droid devices with the chrome user agent and relatively few win mo devices sporting the ie user agent.

MS' lack of attention to the Mobile space may be biting them in unexpected ways in the browser war.

Re: IE9 is the fastest!

[BronsCon]

Are you sure? I replied to your post before you even posted it, using Firefox.

IE9 is the fastest!

[Anonymous Coward]

EAT THAT!

Re:Site bias...

[Bert64]

By contrast, i run a site called spamdecoy.net which provides anonymous readonly email (for when websites demand an email address for something)... The users are primarily privacy conscious and Firefox accounts for 70% while IE (all versions) accounts for about 5%.
I also run websites with adult content, and IE usage is around the 20% mark (because very few people would browse such sites from work)...

FF was spread heavily by techs, Chrome by ads

[PPalmgren]

Virtually every tech I know will replace IE with Firefox every time they work on someone's computer and tell them to use it instead, solely because they don't want to keep coming back for stupid IE fails. Chrome on the other hand has gotten lots of publicity and has an ad on one of the most popular sites on the net.

While we're on this topic, I need some answers people: Why in the hell does *everyone* call it foxfire? What in gods name can get those two things reversed from more than 50% of the computer illiterate population? Help me people! Is it just my friends/family/clients or is it a common problem?

Re:FF was spread heavily by techs, Chrome by ads

[crazybilly]

Mod second paragraph up +1 hysterical.

Re:FF was spread heavily by techs, Chrome by ads

[vlueboy]

Only heard "foxfire" once, and probably from an old female professor who wasn't technical. The university has about 1000+ staff/professors and so, and we even got our share of 10k+ students, and I worked there more than 3 years.

Two more years after that, but no. I'm on the East Coast of the US, if that will help.
I can only reckon that Firefox sounds too much like firefly. Er, NVM that, google says that besides some small company at foxfire.com whose only webpage states they're not firefox, approve of it. A better guess is that the second search result points to a Novel by Joyce Carol Oates and a 1996 film that earned 50% ratings at imdb.

not the end of the world

[ILuvRamen]

Approximately 100% of people don't use Microsoft's built in "Sound Recorder" program in XP and you don't see Microsoft crying over it. They barely make anything off either piece of free software. It's all intangible, sign up for Live or use Bing and maybe see some ads sometime eventually type stuff. I bet if they were realistic, they're losing money in IE. I say just keep redesigning it as needed and who cares if they're #1. Btw in a couple months, Firefox is going to crash and burn hard when all the viruses start targetting it. They don't seem to understand that their "secure" browser is so secure because nobody targets it for anything.

Re:quoted out of context

[the_womble]

May be you should do it as civil disobedience, but you should not be forced to.

It is not always possible to change society, and every society has some political view, or religion, or sexual behaviour that attracts severe discrimination. This is true in established democracies, even for views/practices that are not intrinsically nasty (by intrinsically nasty I mean fascism etc.): would you care to be known to be a socialist in the US, for example?

50% my arse

[PSdiE]

< 50% my arse. This is headline grabbing from a stats company that fails to represent the corporate user market, IE's home turf.

RTFA: "Another Web measurement company, Net Applications, last week said its research shows Windows IE had a 59.7% share during September, though it did say IE's share is declining."

True

[asdfington]

I'm not saying I know the REASON e.g. your site gets a lot of I.E. traffic, just that without thorough analysis, it can be easy to misinterpret / misunderstand / mis-act-upon data like "MSIE dips below 50%." I guess you all made a good point, which is: It is just as easy to misinterpret the data collected on your own site.