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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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
In Germany, IE dropped below 25%.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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)
Uzbl: a graphical browser (webkit innards)
Uzbl! Another catchy product name from the Open Source community!
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.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
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.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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.
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.
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.