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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."
You sure? I posted this so fast in Chrome my head is still spinning.
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.
It's hard to be fast when you only speak troll.
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?
Sure: Opera. Excellent browser, in many ways better than both Firefox and Chrome.
As of recent, there is also Chrome for Linux.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.