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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.
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.
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?
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.
Sig?
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)