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."

Comments

Hmm.

[tenchikaibyaku]

The frenzy around IE9 may have subsided already and [...]

What frenzy? :-)

Re:Hmm.

[jd]

Sharks go into a feeding frenzy when things are being ripped up.

Re:Hmm.

[JWSmythe]

    I'm pretty sure it was more like a tasteless odorless chunk of chum was thrown into the ocean, and there was no reaction. There was no interest at all.

    More importantly, it hasn't even been released yet. It is available as a beta, but you have to implicitly install it.

    First, go to Google, and search for msie 9

    The first link takes you the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive

    Which the download button doesn't download, but takes you to the Explorer9Beta page

    (Does Ford know that they've hijacked the "Explorer" name?)

    The download button does actually download.

    And no, I'm not a fanboy. I was just curious. Don't ask about performance though, all I got to was the download page. I didn't actually install it. :)

Re:Hmm.

[Z00L00K]

IE might have had a better response with version 8 if they just hadn't started to mess around with those startup questions and halting the installation to ask stupid questions.

I can't find any reason to actually provide Microsoft with my web usage statistics, so when they ask for it I always answer NO, and that is something that puts me off too - because that means that they do track people on the web in unclear ways. And when I answer NO, it also means that most other security-minded persons will do the same thing. The result is that it's only the unaware, noobs and fools that they get statistics from - which also explains why it seems like their software seems to be more and more adapted for dummies for every generation.

Re:Hmm.

[JWSmythe]

    Actually, go to about:config in Firefox, and put in "http" as your filter criteria. It can (and does) send information off-site. Try changing the filter criteria to "safe", and see what it comes up with. It should be a more discrete list places that every request is sent to, like "http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/report?".

    I'm not paranoid. If you're going to information so private that no one should know it, you shouldn't be playing on the Internet.

    I was working on a project once, where it was a stand alone machine (like an kiosk with no Internet connection), and we built a browser based application for it. It saved a lot of hassle of making a custom GUI, managing graphics, layout, etc, etc. It also made it easy to hand off to another developer, who would only need to know how to make a web page. :) Without an internet connection, it suffered a speed decrease, because it was trying to resolve and then request things like the safebrowsing URLs. I believe there were about 25 entries to remove to get rid of all functionality like that. Other pesky ones were ones like the automatic update checks (we disabled them). It became very speedy on very slow hardware.

    But, these are just the ones that we can easily find. Is there such a resource for MSIE or Chrome? I know Chrome has a very primitive configuration interface by design, so we have to trust that Google is following the "do no evil" motto. I trust Microsoft will not only record and send the info somehow, but they'll deny it to the end.

Re:Hmm.

[Beat The Odds]

(Does Ford know that they've hijacked the "Explorer" name?)

You do know that the Ford Explorer is not a web browser, right?

Re:Hmm.

[daremonai]

You were sending mixed signals. Your button-clicking said "no," but your lack of mashing the keyboard in frustration said "yes."

Re:Hmm.

[dryeo]

(Does Ford know that they've hijacked the "Explorer" name?)

Actually I think it was more hijacking WebExplorer, the browser that shipped with OS/2 in 1994.

Is it worth saving?

[sempir]

Seemingly not!

Silver Lining

[rakuen]

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.

Re:Silver Lining

[gad_zuki!]

Naww, EU regulators just have more teeth and US "regulators." The 'anything goes' version of American capitalism is sub-optimal.

Hang on a minute...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:Hang on a minute...

[Spad]

Oddly enough, the only people downloading IE9 *beta* seem to have done so within a few weeks of it being made available and so it's reached saturation. Regular users aren't going to download a beta version of "the internet" and techies grabbed it, installed it, tried it and forgot about it pretty quickly.

I eagerly await the article a couple of weeks after the IE9 RC is made available trumpeting the massive increase in IE9's market share.

Save?

[saleenS281]

They've to 60% of the market! Are they losing market share? Definitely. But to claim it needs to be "saved" is ridiculous. When they're at 2% market share, then we can discuss whether or not the product will actually die and possibly go away. I realize this site likes to hate on MS, but can we be just a *BIT* less biased in the story summaries?

Also, they're under tremendous pressure to release IE9? By who? The public? You can't say people are fleeing because IE9 isn't a big deal, and then turn around and say they have to get it out because all these people are waiting for it. Reality is, the average Joe has no idea that IE9 is in development, has no idea when it will be released, and *DOESN'T CARE*. They click the blue E, and they get to the internet. And every couple years, the window looks a bit different and they don't really know why, but it still works so that's good enough. *THE MAJORITY OF WORLD ARE NOT TECH GEEKS*.

Re:Save?

[ElectricTurtle]

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.

Re:Save?

[LWATCDR]

Frankly I fear that Mozilla's stand on H.264 will help IE a lot. I mean why download Firefox if it will not play a large amount of video on the web. If IE9 doesn't suck you will see a lot of people stick with it instead of Firefox.

Re:Save?

[k8to]

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.

Re:Save?

[QuantumBeep]

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.

IE is dead in Germany

[Nimatek]

http://ompldr.org/vNjA3aw

Re:IE is dead in Germany

[DarkXale]

Should check out Russia as well. IE is loosing both to Firefox and Opera. (24% vs ~32% for both)

IE-only websites

[Toe, The]

And yet just last week, a friend told me he couldn't make a filing with the Georgia Department of Revenue because "his browser was insecure." Nevermind that he was using the latest version of Safari, which is likely more secure than any version of IE.

What they actually meant was "we are too lazy to program for anything but IE... but that's OK, because 99% of the world uses IE... right?"

Re:IE-only websites

[causality]

And yet just last week, a friend told me he couldn't make a filing with the Georgia Department of Revenue because "his browser was insecure." Nevermind that he was using the latest version of Safari, which is likely more secure than any version of IE.

What they actually meant was "we are too lazy to program for anything but IE... but that's OK, because 99% of the world uses IE... right?"

Now that's interesting because they are making a positive claim about browser security. They are not merely saying "at this time we only support Internet Explorer," which would be completely different.

Since we like to solve problems with litigation in this country, to the point that there are often few or no effective alternatives, I have an idea. Why don't the makers of Safari and other browsers sue the State of Georgia for libel? They are making a claim of insecurity. As evidence, save the snippet of code/markup that checks the user-agent string and produces the message stating "your browser is insecure". Claim that the message is libel because it is based on merely not being IE, not on any rigorous study of browser security, and therefore cannot use "truth" as a defense. In fact it would not be hard to come up with evidence contradicting it. Therefore, intentional or not, it amounts to an attempt to coerce users to use IE and therefore Windows for no good reason.

The point is to make it more expensive to defend such a suit than it would have been to make a standard, browser-agnostic site. A government agency in particular has no excuse for not making their sites as accessible as possible. They are not like private companies where you can just go to a competitor if a given company refuses to be reasonable.

IE9 hasn't gained much? Really?

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Re:IE9 hasn't gained much? Really?

[Tom]

It's not about marketshare, it's about user numbers already declining.

That means people have tried the beta, and gone back to whatever they were using before. That is not a good sign, especially for the 50% or so that are going back to an older version of IE.

Re:IE9 hasn't gained much? Really?

[shutdown -p now]

It's not about marketshare, it's about user numbers already declining.

IE user numbers have been declining for the last, oh, 6 years or so? It's not news. IE9 is supposed to change that, but it's too early to tell.

That means people have tried the beta, and gone back to whatever they were using before.

Your typical IE user won't ever bother trying a beta (he doesn't know what a "beta" is, and doesn't hang out in places where it was announced). The people who tried the beta are mostly web developers, or just curious techies. In the grand scheme of things, they are a tiny part of IE's current 50% global market share.

Re:IE9 hasn't gained much? Really?

[Piata]

That's because any good web developer will check to see how their sites work in IE9 and then return to their browser of choice. Your average consumer is not going to try the beta, nor will many people stick with a beta indefinitely until it's released. I have Firefox 4 installed on my computer but I only use it to check out major updates to the beta; otherwise I'm using Firefox 3.6 or the latest version of Chrome.

This article is pretty irrelevant in regards to how well IE9 will do once it launches.

Hi Miss Interpret, this is Captain Obvious

[VGPowerlord]

FTA:

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.

FTA's other article, that the quote is from:

According to Ballmer, 10 million IE9 Betas have been downloaded in the six weeks after launch, making it the most successful beta browser in Microsoft's history.

See a difference there? If there were 10 million downloads of IE9 after it's launched wouldn't be surprising (it's usually not pushed out on Windows Update then), but that is actually a LOT of betas, even if people were just downloading it to see if the hardware accelerated rendering actually worked.

Who knew that one word (Betas) made that big a difference.

Re:Hi Miss Interpret, this is Captain Obvious

[Arancaytar]

Who knew that one word (Betas) made that big a difference

Looks like MS learned from Google on that point.

For me, IE = work only

[gstoddart]

I only ever use IE for work machines, because far too many web sites I use at work are Microsoft stuff that doesn't always play well with other browsers. For most stuff at work I use Firefox.

I just don't trust IE -- for years it was one of the worst vectors for exploits, malware, and all sorts of annoying shit. If there's an equivalent to noscript for IE, I might consider using it.

Until then, IE is a "when all else fails, and you have to trust the site", otherwise, it's something I stay away from as much as possible.

Re:For me, IE = work only

[gstoddart]

Don't you mean, "for years it was the only browser worth attempting to exploit"?

No, I don't mean that at all. I love how people on Slashdot think that they know what I mean more than I do. Firefox and Mozilla have been around for a long time, it's not like they're brand new and nobody is aware of them.

I mean IE ran with a security policy that more or less was wide open, and that you could set to "allow everything" or "allow nothing" -- invariably some %^$#^& POS web-site the company I worked for would force us to use basically expected to be able to run everything. When it didn't work, HR would say "oh, just turn down your browser security".

Basically these shitty IE specific sites would only work if you ran in the most unsafe mode that existed. The solution was to keep IE as an insecure browser because the stuff I was required to use it for demanded it.

Perhaps with a greater market share we might start seeing exploits (coughFiresheepcough) for other browsers.

I have no idea that people are going to work on exploting Firefox -- though, the example you give isn't an exploit against Firefox, it just uses it.

Things like NoScript allow me to turn off the most likely vectors of attack, or at the very least, get rid of some of the annoyances. While it doesn't stop all of them, it at least gives me better control over what I'm willing to run. I am not aware of a tool in IE that allows me to selectively say "run this, don't run that" -- I can go through the nuisance of setting a site as a trusted site, but for a one-time thing, it just doesn't work.

Re:For me, IE = work only

[Late Adopter]

Firesheep is an exploit against ALL browsers, if the *site* being browsed is vulnerable. Firesheep is coded for Firefox for the *exploiter* to use, not the exploitee.

Re:For me, IE = work only

[gstoddart]

One would think that "work" usually being the most anal about "security" it would be the place where IE was seen least.

At my old company, HR were among the worst offenders -- regularly requiring us to go to survey sites or various 3rd party sites to do various stupid tasks. Sometimes Finance did this as well.

Several times I tried to tell them "why the hell are you sending me to a 3rd party site when we have something that does this in house" or pointing out that the sites were requiring way too many permissions for what they were doing for us. Unfortunately, the tedious people in the beaurocracy of some organizations just don't understand why you're objecting to being sent to a 3rd party site that needs to install an ActiveX control.

Not visiting these sites for the stupid reasons cited was something which would get you in trouble.

In many cases, requirements from HR and some of the other groups more or less meant you couldn't have your IE set to the level of security IT mandated. So, they essentially forced us to run IE as an insecure tool, and only use it for very limited things.

It really does come down to stupid and lazy outranking sane and careful in some cases.

Re:Who cares?

[bunratty]

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.

Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try

[saleenS281]

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.

Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try

[0123456]

Have fun as more and more software says "Fuck you" and you can't run it on your fancy-shmancy XP Pro any more, because you think using a decade-old OS is a great idea.

At that point it will presumably be a good time to upgrade to Linux.

Frankly...

[jd]

...I'm not impressed with any browser right now. Chrome still has privacy issues (and also has standards conformance issues), Firefox is getting very slow and will occasionally leave zombie processes, IE is as naff as always, Opera and Safari don't support the plugins that I actually do need.

And NONE of them support scripting using LaTeX or Metapost (HTML is becoming an inferior typesetting language rather than the presentation language it used to be, with virtually nobody implementing the complex standards anyway). Seems to me that if people want CSS and HTML to let you typeset, you'd be better off with a browser supporting LaTeX 2e and the A tag natively, then emulating HTML. The results can't be any worse and would add all the features people wanted in HTML5 and will doubtless pester for in HTML6.

Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try

[jimicus]

Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!

It isn't, the OEM license is tied to the motherboard. New motherboard, new license. The only exception is a like-for-like replacement in order to effect a repair - if there's no like-for-like on the market, then it sucks to be you.

Interestingly, this means that Microsoft are essentially forcing small PC shops (which can't reasonably be expected to keep a good stock of spares for every PC they've ever built, not when motherboards seldom stay on the market that long) to either break the terms of the license or absorb quite a bit of additional risk over the large OEM - the customer can't very reasonably be expected to fork out for another Windows license when their motherboard failed under warranty.

for those too lazy

[__aatirs3925]

For those too lazy to search you can check out the w3c browser statistics here and you'll notice that the stats are:
IE: 31.1%
Firefox: 45.1%
Chrome: 17.3%
Safari: 3.7%
Opera: 2.2%

Those are the estimates for September and I'm assuming that's from all of the doctype fetching. Though, I predict that Firefox will lose numbers to Chrome soon because FF isn't what it used to be, rather Chrome is what FF used to be to IE back in the day IMO.

Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try

[TheRaven64]

Calling XP 'a decade old' is misleading. Until very recently (i.e. this year), it was still shipped by MS OEMs - if you bought a Netbook in January, for example, it probably came with XP. Supporting a product that you were shipping less than a year ago is very different from supporting a decade-old product. Your comparison ti Red Hat 7.2 is misleading, because Red Hat 7.2 wasn't being sold by Red Hat early this year. You could still get updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (including updates of third-party software), which was superseded by RHEL 5 in 2007, until 2009.

Using FireFox in your example is also misleading, because it's not made by the same company, and no company has any obligation to support another company's products. A better example would be Safari on OS X, as both are made by Apple. Last time I turned on my PowerBook, running OS X 10.4, it had an update to Safari 4 waiting, which contained a back-port of most of the features of Safari 5. Apple stopped shipping OS X 10.4 long before Microsoft stopped shipping XP.

When did Microsoft stop shipping XP? I just checked on their site - apparently it was one week ago: October 22, 2010. Not quite a decade.

Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try

[bunratty]

I've never heard of Mesh. Perhaps you could think of popular applications that will not run on Windows XP? Besides, it looks like Mesh is also from Microsoft. Any popular non-Microsoft applications that will not run on Windows XP?

Reports of IE9's death greatly exaggerated.

[recoiledsnake]

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?

Re:Reports of IE9's death greatly exaggerated.

[shawb]

And using the phrase "may not be enough to use IE" is a bit hyperbolic considering that IE is still used over 50% of the time. That's twice as much as the current second place browser, Firefox. Which has twice as much usage as the third place browser, Chrome.

Re:Reports of IE9's death greatly exaggerated.

[tbannist]

Apparently you didn't look hard enough.

From the article:

"IE is now a 39.53% in Europe and Firefox at 38.65%."

Unless you're using some new fangled kind of math, that's not double.

Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try

[Colonel Korn]

Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!

For well under $300 you can get about a hundred Windows 7 (10 for each version of 7, spread over the many versions) licenses for your family's computers via Technet. Or you can buy a single license for $100. Or you can buy 3 in a Family Pack for $50 each. Even the non-upgrade retail license is $170, not even close to your $300.

And there are no versions tied to a disk. The closest is an OEM version of the OS, which is tied to a motherboard. But even then, if you want to change motherboards you can just call MS and they'll happily let you reactivate provided the 5 word explanation, "I have a new motherboard."

Nice things going for it

[Enderandrew]

The browser has nice things going for it, and I still won't use it.

Microsoft has done this to themselves. They two have two groups. One are the enterprise environments who drank the Flavor-Aid way back in the day and wrote all their internal web apps to rely on IE6 specific features. Since Microsoft spurned compliant HTML/CSS rendering, their newer browsers have trouble handling IE6-specific sites. These shops refuse to upgrade to IE7/IE8/IE9, and thusly refuse to upgrade to Vista or 7. The only reason Microsoft hasn't really hurt themselves with this has been selling Vista and 7 licenses to these customers, but allowing them to downgrade to XP.

The second group of users care about web standards. They care about speed and security. They realize that IE is dead last in standards compliance, speed and security. So even when Microsoft rolls out some neat hardware acceleration features, they aren't worth all the other massive trade-offs involved.

Honestly, how many people are there that will want to use IE9 as their primary browser?

Re:Why is Europe more hostile to IE?

[doktor-hladnjak]

A legally mandated ballot screen. http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/19/windows-7s-european-browser-ballot-screen-revealed-rolling-out/

Hey now...

[yoshi_mon]

We need IE dammit.

How else I'm I supposed to download Firefox on a fresh install?

Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try

[DarkXale]

None, yet (that doesn't exist modified/simplified in some ways for XP) - because XP still has a too large userbase - and most standard programs just aren't sensitive enough to care.

What can kill XP however are 64-bit programs. Now you don't need to point out that XP has a 64-bit version; i know that; but what does need to be pointed out is that the 64-bit version of XP is poorly supported. Tons of missing drivers, and outdated drivers, results in a OS that regularly doesn't behave that nicely compared to the NT6 OSs and XP 32-bit.

This however is still likely some ways off.

Re:Why is Europe more hostile to IE?

[jurgemaister]

If that's how fragile IE customer loyalty is it's obvious that IE/msft has as much as a credibility issue as a technology issue.
Not that it surprises me. Every person I know with more that average insight in computers has been advocating anything else as long as there has been a real alternative.

Facts versus interpretation

[kstahmer]

The above October browser market share facts are correct. Their interpretation is subject to debate. Here are the facts without interpretation.

Re:This is the news?

[shugah]

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.

Re:Who uses Safari?

[Angostura]

My guess would be that it is the iOS version of Safari that is boosting the numbers.

Re:Why is Europe more hostile to IE?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The ballot screen provided a few extra downloads for the other browsers, but didn't change much, if at all. Early reports were encouraging for IE competitors, but it turned out that the balance didn't tip as much as some had anticipated.

I don't really think the results of the ballot screen will be noticeable for some time. Given average turnover rates only about 6% of people in the EU in an average sales quarter would even see the ballot. So we need to wait at least a year to get numbers outside the margin for error of the studies I've seen. It will be four years or more before we can accurately judge the level of impact the ballot is making. Note, I'm not saying it is effective, just that trying to draw conclusions at this point is just bad math.

IE mattered because it saved Windows

[billstewart]

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.