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IE9 May Not Be Enough To Save IE
An anonymous reader writes "The October market share numbers are in and Net Applications' numbers show a surprising drop in IE8 market share — the first time since the browser was introduced. Strangely, IE9 has not gained much and IE7 as well as IE6 are losing as well. The only two browsers gaining are Chrome and Safari — and both browsers have hit new record market shares. The frenzy around IE8 may have subsided already, and Microsoft is under tremendous pressure to roll out IE9 soon. StatCounter's numbers indicate that Firefox is close to surpassing IE in Europe."
The frenzy around IE9 may have subsided already and [...]
What frenzy? :-)
Seemingly not!
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
IE9 might not be gaining market share, but thank the diety of your choosing that IE6 is losing market share. Microsoft should probably throw an office party for the occasion.
Since when was IE9 actually launched? Are we seriously predicting the doom of IE because not so many people downloaded a browser that isn't even released yet?
There are legitimate concerns for web developers about how widely IE9 will be adopted, not least the operating systems it will run on (or not), but for goodness' sake, this whole story is just premature.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm saving my judgement until after IE9 is released. Caring about which major browser most people are using is as rediculous as voting for the winning candidate just because they are winning.
I just hope they fix the issues with text looking like crap when GPU acceleration is enabled. Firefox 4 has some of the same issues as IE9 in this regard.
I would prefer it if there is no clean winner. Competition is driving the companies to put serious efforts into the browser market. The result is everyone benefits from faster, more robust and frequently more secure browsers.
I like having Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE and all the others out there, at each other's throats.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The pressure to release IE9 was internal to MS. MS is concerned in part that Chrome is making so much noise with their rapid release schedule that it makes the competition look like they are falling behind.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Gee, I wonder why a beta browser from Microsoft isn't gaining market share. Don't predict any death knells for the browser until it's actually, you know, released. Geez.
The larger the usage share of the browser you use, the more likely web developers will be to test their sites in the browser you use, and thus the more websites will work properly in the web browser you use.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What's that, they aren't releasing software for a platform that's a decade old? Jerks! Are you equally pissed you can't get firefox 4.0 for Redhat 7.2 from Redhat? Not to mention you haven't been able to get an update in how long? It never ceases to amaze me how unreasonable people are.
Talk about jumping to conclusions:
This is not the result Microsoft would have hoped for, but the writing was on the wall when we heard last week from CEO Steve Ballmer that IE9 was downloaded only 10 million times within 6 weeks after launch. That is a big number, but given the expensive marketing campaign, Microsoft surely needed much more. We remember: Apple got 11 million Safari 4 downloads within one week and with a simple press release.
Err, that's 10 million beta downloads according to the linked article, making it the most popular IE beta ever(according to Ballmer). That's in contrast to the Safari number which was a regular version launch.
And the drop in IE8 numbers was:
This trend is even more puzzling as IE8 shed market share for the first time in its history and fell from 29.06% to 29.01% (a number that does not included shares of IE8 fragmented versions as Net Applications recently decided not to publish this data anymore.)
A drop of 0.05%? That seems to be well within the margin of error and might have to do with the non-inclusion of IE8 fragmented versions.
The article is bad and the title and summary of the Slashdot are even worse. Lets save the news of IE9's death after it has been released(in Spring 2011), okay?
This space for rent.
It's the passive-aggressive way to say "you're probably wrong" without doing any of the legwork you demand that your target perform. It's not lazy, it's annoying.
In informal discussions, it's pretty traditional to respond to claims with questions, or to challenge it with ideas of why you don't see how it works/makes sense. However, in informal discussions requiring a citation is just dumb. No one's going to go read the citation anyway.
Can slashdot accommodate vigorous debate? Sort of. Kind of poorly. Is that really what it's good at? No.
-josh
A legally mandated ballot screen. http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/19/windows-7s-european-browser-ballot-screen-revealed-rolling-out/
But if you look at the graph, Firefox is holding its own, or seeing slight declines in market share while IE is bleeding users. It appears that Chome's growth has come at the expense of IE, not FF. Mozilla will recapture some market share with the release of FF 4.0, but the question remains if Microsoft can do the same with IE9.
Large IT shops are scrambling to update internal portals and apps that rely on IE6. I fought the good fight on standards with a big5 accounting firm in the early 2000's and lost. However now, the proliferation of blackberrys, iPhones and Androids is forcing this as much as the Windows XP end of life. Once they start the move to standards based internal apps, are they going to repeat the mistakes of the past and develop "for" IE9, or will they develop standards based, cross browser apps that also support their burgeoning mobile users?
Personally, I think (hope) IE9 will get a bit of a dead cat bounce and then slowly decline into irrelevance.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Citation-demanding is just an easy way to filibuster a discussion. You aren't entitled to a citation.
It's a conversation. You know, casual talking about stuff. If someone says something, and you think they may be full of shit, say "I think you're full of shit", and if they care, they may cite their source.
They probably won't care.
My guess would be that it is the iOS version of Safari that is boosting the numbers.
Microsoft didn't launch Internet Explorer to take over the lucrative browser market - they gave it away free, competing with Netscape who gave it away free, and older browsers like Mosaic, some of which were also free, or even because it helped them take over the web page development tool market, which they could charge money for. They did it to save Windows, and to save their products which depend on Windows, like Office and Mail.
The threat to Microsoft was the combination of Netscape, Java, and AOL, which were enough of an application platform to make the underlying operating system irrelevant, plus a distribution system that had people willing to feed dubious coasters into their home computers and a popular enough email system to compete with MSMail/Outlook. If the market got committed to that platform, and to compatibility with those standards, then it wouldn't matter if the underlying OS got replaced by Linux or Solaris or whatever.
By giving the public IE, and making sure that it wasn't quite compatible with Netscape and taking advantage of its proprietary or non-standard features, Microsoft was able to take over enough of the browser market that Netscape/Java/AOL couldn't displace them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks