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

[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

[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.

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.

% 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.

Even better

[maxwell demon]

In Germany, IE dropped below 25%.

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: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.

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.

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.

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.