Slashdot Mirror
Internet Explorer Market Share Drops To Almost 15%
glitch0 writes "Internet Explorer used to be the most prevalent browser with a market share that peaked at 88% in March of 2003. Now they're down to almost 15% due to stiff competition from Google, Mozilla, and even Apple. What implications does this have for the future of Microsoft?"
at this point, they should just exit the browser wars
what about Opera?
*goes back to sit in the corner*
Yes, IE is losing marketshare but w3 schools statistics says nothing about the general population. Of course people who are studying web technologies are going to use other browsers. I would have more confidence if a site like Google or Yahoo published statistics.
That is statistics FROM THEIR WEBSITE.
Worse, it is statistics from a website that technically literate people visit!
Why this managed to reach the frontpage is beyond me.
This isn't indicative of browser usage in any realistic manner.
Hell, they even said so on the page. It is their own user logs.
I would love IE to be irrevelant- maybe it would mean proprietary apps would finally work cross-browser in the future if the companies behind them want to remain relevant...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I know a lot of businesses that have still standardized in IE. I can't believe that it could be that low. Also, with all the Macs and iPhones, Safari should be higher. I know many people have switched to Firefox and Chrome, but I don't think they have killed the others yet.
Why does this table keep getting posted, as if it's some sort of accurate measure? FTFA:
"These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.
Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over many years, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends."
It's browser usage on W3Schools' website.
I'm no Internet Explorer fan, but let's be fair here... The statistics are from visitors of w3schools.com, a site that people go to for web development. How many web developers or people interested in web development use Internet Explorer? I imagine it would be an easy point to argue that most of these individuals decidedly do not tend to use Internet Explorer. Claiming IE use is down to "almost 15%" sourcing nothing but a single web site's logs seems hardly trust worthy.
Oh, I mean still accounting for almost three fourths of the OS market share won't save them? Let's remember what OS those browsers run on...
the Opera user base really doesn't change much uh... even though It's such a good browser that has everything you could possibly want from a browser and more... I guess that fact that it is not heavily advertised like firefox and chrome means a lot uh
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.
Statistics Are Often Misleading
You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.
Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers.
Also be aware that many statistics may have an incomplete or faulty browser detection. It is quite common by many web-stats report programs, not to detect the newest browsers.
(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures).
Quotes
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
Oscar Wilde
"First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure."
Mark Twain
First of all, it's closer to 17%. With the current rate of decrease we'll hit 15% in something like four months if nothing happens before that. More importantly...
(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures)
Audience of W3Schools is people who are trying to learn the basics of certain web-related technologies and don't yet know that W3Schools is hardly the best place for that. Whether you like W3Schools or not, it's hardly representative of general population.
Maybe, though, what M$ did wasn't all that bad, after all, once they used their monopoly power to crush the competition despite offering a demonstrably inferior product, using FUD and leverage... they spurred the creation of FLOSS projects that might never have had reason to come into being without them. Remember, at one point, if you wanted a copy of Netscape Navigator, it cost like MONEY! Microsoft destroying their company by being able to undercut them since they also had an operating system that they were selling for NOT free, caused the folks at Netscape to give their product away for nothing, which has benefited us all immensely. Netscape, (in the form of Mozilla Firefox,) crushes Microsoft's comparatively crappy browser from beyond the grave. Pretty cool, when you think about it.
Whenever I think about this situation, I picture the scene from Star Trek II, with Netscape as Kahn, and Microsoft as Kirk, with Ricardo Montalbán saying "From Hell's heart I... STAB at thee... for hate's sake, I spit my last BREATH... at thee...." except in this case, the Enterprise doesn't get away in time, and now their market share is approaching 15%... I assume that means it's over 15%, and dropping. Great news for web developers who now have less reason to have to worry about whether or not M$'s non-standards-compliant browser will properly render their webpages, I guess. Microsoft continues its inexorable slide into irrelevance.
In my free time I run a vegetable gardening website - so a very non-technical, home-oriented audience. Looking at the entirety of 2012, Google Analytics reports the following (everything else is at 1% or less):
IE 34.19%
Firefox 22.52%
Safari 21.38%
Chrome 14.80%
Android Browser 4.42%
For OS I see
Windows 65.68%
Macintosh 15.57%
iPad 5.24%
Android 4.53%
iPhone 3.95%
iOS 2.09%
Linux 1.23%
#DeleteChrome
Listen, Microsoft did popularize the optical mouse. So at least there is one positive thing they have done for technology. And the second thing is, um, er...
I suspect that a lot of that 15% are corporate users that are told they must use IE for their internal applications. Keep in mind that a lot of companies are still using IE 6 and IE 7 because of vendor lock in on browser standards. Also, ASAIK SharePoint won't run on anything other that IE. Perhaps Firefox with the appropriate plug-ins but not Chrome or Safari. The other group to consider are the newbies whose PC came with IE installed. For many people, they think the only way to get on the internet is to use IE. As far as sophisticated users go, I know hardly anyone that uses IE by choice. My preference is Chrome. I haven't used IE in a non-corporate setting in years and I use computers every day.
What implications does this have for the future of Microsoft?
It means they failed to pwn the internet, thank all the gods
But after Netscape withered it was Apache + BSD servers that kept them from it, not Firefox. If Microsoft had won on that front, they could have easily forced a MSInternet on us.
It was a close thing, but settled quite a few years ago. This story is about a symptom of *that* failure, not a failure in its own right. No need to use Microsoft products, if Microsoft doesn't pwn the infrastructure or file format.
They haven't given up pwning the PC yet, though. (New "secure" boot loader - mostly secure for Microsoft.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
invest in office chair companies.
windowsupdate.microsoft.com reports 99.9% IE user agents. IE is on a comeback!
(What? It's just as useful a metric as TFA.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
From TFA itself:
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.
These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.
Glitch0, please submit your résumé to CNN. They greatly value your kind of selective reading skills.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.
These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.
Net Applications collects stats for 12,415 clients the size of Disney, Apple, Microsoft, Roche, the Moz Foundation, CNN, the WSJ, the New York Times and so on. The guys paying for these stats don't give a damn about the geek. They do give a damn about what is happening in their core markets.
Desktop Browser Market Share
Statcounter exposes more of its stats --- and there can be some big surprises:
Top 12 Browser Versions In China
Mobile vs. Desktop in China
You mean to tell me that making a non-cross platform browser that's only available on the latest version of your OS is a BAD idea? ;)
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
http://gs.statcounter.com/
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0
But you know, another anti-MS article. Whatever floats your boat I guess.
The link shows the browser stats ONLY for visitors to w3schools.com, which is notoriously skewed away from IE due to it being a techy site for people who tend to use other browsers 'cause they're web developers who use a variety of browsers. This is not news by any standard. Even the text below the chart says "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user." & "These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser."
Back in that time, Gates et al discovered the internet and its potential. At that time almost the only way to use the internet was via a web browser inside a PC (remember the AOL disks, trumpet winsock, etc?) Nowadays we have access to the web in many other ways. Now, if you tell me that xbox live usage is going down, then this is something to worry about.
just like apple did in the 80s with xerox and does now with patents?
Look people, let's all step back and look at what's going on here. /. is an anti-MS site. From the Bill Gates Cyborg, to the inherent bias of the articles published, it's not a fanboi of MS. Let's get over that.
/. would be a lot more fun to read if everyone would just get off their high horse already. Goddamn.
Linux/OSS Fans: Take the feather out of your cap, it doesn't mean anything. It's probably not even valid (just like it is invalid here).
Windows Fans: Stop getting butthurt about these types of articles. The OS market share is there, and that's the revenue generator.
I'd figure the optical mouse would popularize itself with people who don't like cleaning gunk out of their electronics. That said, I wish I could find an optical mouse that I liked as much as this ball mouse I've been using for the last 14 years...
In my free time I run a vegetable gardening website - so a very non-technical, home-oriented audience.
You haven't told us the number of visitors to your site or its location.
No one who posts stats like yours to Slashdot ever does.
So we don't know how representative you are when compared to Burpee Seeds, Better Homes & Gardens...
The 4-H, Cornell University, Cooperative Extension (broken down by state and county) and any of the other 15 million or so "vegetable gardening" sites that will be exposed in a search through Google.
Logitech M-BA47 forever!
(with rubber sides, not plastic ones)
So why would Microsoft care? I can think of one reason -- as has been pointed out by others, the more time people spend in a browser, the less they care about the underlying OS. When the user community is not dependent on a browser that's locked to a particular OS, the OS becomes less important, because you can run Chrome or Firefox or Opera on a lot of different platforms. Unlocking the browser from the OS is the first step -- causing a movement en-masse to a different operating system (or systems) is the next logical step. I would argue it is already happening.
So for the long term, if Microsoft isn't scared, they should be. I would expect over the next couple of years many attempts at embrace, extend, extinguish to get ...something... that everyone uses, locked into their one platform. I mean, how else are they going to compete?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Microsoft will die if they don't drop Windows 8, Internet Explorer, Windows Phone, etc and focus on what they're GOOD at; that's making games and game consoles.
Although I think that if Valve (blessed be their holy name) decides to enter the console arena in a big way (Steam Box, anyone?) the Xbox's market share will crash, too. Microsoft just doesn't know how to compete with a real contender. It can claw it's way to the top of the food chain when all it has to deal with are Sony and Nintendo, but if Valve gets serious, there's no hope for Microsoft whatsoever (and we can waive goodbye to Sony, too).
Internet Explorer. A technology developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, by NCSA staff programmer Eric Bina, improved by undergraduate (David Thompson, Marc Andreessen) and graduate computer science students, renamed Mosaic, was licensed by Spyglass (Spyglass Mosaic) and later licensed by Microsoft Corp. (Internet Explorer).
Yet again.
Microsoft Corp. had nothing to do at all with the development of the internet and neither the world wide web. They with little effort licensed a technology given their dollar reserves at the time. And true to form Microsoft Corp. could not and did not posses the necessary intelligence nor even comprehension to understand the technology which they had bought with their inflated dollars at the time.
Thus we have as exhibit A the Microsoft Lost Generation.
Who is the Father of the Microsoft Lost Generation?
LoL :D
I know this is slashdot but to quote that site as representative? why not the FSF's to get a bit of balance? Or the Firefox developers'? Actually I'm shocked that 15% of their visitors do use IE given the antipathy to Microsoft. When Google's stats show something similar then that will be another matter.
They're better than nothing. Truth be told people should be wearing similar helmets to the ones that motorcyclists use. But, what you're suggesting is dangerous, what about the times where the helmet would have helped but the person wasn't wearing one? A helmet isn't a license to behave recklessly, it's there for the times when you get hit on the top of the head. You should have something that protects the face and the back of the head, but it's still better than nothing.
What's more the reason why 98% of the population doesn't own one is that many people don't have a bike and others can't afford to buy one. Around here I'm not even sure where I'd go to buy one if I owned a bike.
1 . consumer using IE
2 . ?????
3 . profit
I imagine its more important that it exists , then how many people use it.
Sure, 15% of that website's users. Most definitely not 15% of global market. That number is closer to 54% on the desktop. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/firefox-fights-back-holds-on-to-second-place-in-world-browser-shares/
Several apps we have *require* it. Ones we will use for the foreseeable future, and they have no plans on rewriting it. ( heavy OCX stuff )
Rather frustrating actually.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Safari has almost 100% on iOS excluding opera mini and other "browsers" which are just webkit wrappers.
I saw a beta of it run on a EEE netbook with 1G ram. It was crazy fast. Loaded office, outlook, explorer... boom boom boom. But the interface was from Star Trek TNG without the curves. Then there is this whole locking the machine to the OS business. Talk about turn off.
I stopped using windows years ago because everything was office office office. Most people type, spellcheck, then print/email. Or they make ugly powerpoints and the most advanced feature used is to import a graph from excel. This is not what MS should have based their entire company on; and if it truly was the core of the company they would have put office on Linux long ago.
I don't think MS knows what it is and while that is going on the Office section has mostly dominated.
To contrast it with Apple's success; They know they are iTunes. Google mostly knows it is searching mass amounts of data and ads. And facebook knows it is monkeys standing under the tree looking at the shiny thing.
So I suspect that the new Windows is a good idea at its core but it will end up soaking in a caustic bath of Office until it is brittle and smells funny.
Windows 9 will be an attempt to compensate for the Office induced stink by wrapping it in steel bands to reenforce the structure. I am willing to bet that if the OS programmers at MS were able to tell the Office people to bugger off and even go so far as to sandbox their whole suite that Windows might regain the crown. I was so happy when Firefox walled out crap from MS putting itself into FF. It is this sort of thinking that has dogged MS for over a decade.
I remember when NT was really popular with programmers and I think one of the main reasons was that it wasn't tripping over itself to push other MS products. They had designed it to be a server OS with a thin GUI and the office people left it largely alone.
I don't know if SharePoint is innovative or simple to manage, but it's pretty darned useful. Same with SQL Server: yes they bought it from Sybase, but have continued to add new features while seeing it dig deeper into corporate data centers.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
About 80% of the time the customers calling for support are using IE. That might be because customers that still use IE are the least tech savvy and require more support than the average ff/chrome user, but its still a very high percentage.
How many web developers or people interested in web development use Internet Explorer?
Anybody who develops web sites intended to be used by the general public. Do you really want to turn away customers that use Internet Explorer with a site whose style sheet appears broken?
Compared to here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
StatCounter, W3Counter, and Wikimedia all report IE at ~30%, +/- a couple of percentage points. Only W3Schools has a 15% number.
That alone makes me dubious of its accuracy.
Classic Microsoft Reward System:
- Application Flops
- Promote PUM to VP
Great work, Dean!
Actually I don't plan to "upgrade" to Windows 8 until they release SP1 or SP2. Windows XP and 7 are enough for me. Also who cares for MSIE? Is only needed for official and lame websites. The world moved ahead and MISE got behind (no ad blocker, lame HTML support, tons of patches, etc).
Probably would have saved the guy who fell off his bike during a protest ride against helmet laws.
Then again, that would have prevented him from earning a Darwin Award.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Thats a web techy site for people who generally use alternative means for browsing, so of course the standard/staple for browsers will be low because those people dont want the "normal" browser.
Thats as stupid as a report saying "The sales of unhealthy foods is down" because some all natural health food store stated their sale of fatback was down like 95%
Besides, I still love IE9 and its my primary browser. I like it because it works well, has the features I want and I havent run across a website yet that it doesnt run perfectly for me. Its a no nonsense browser and I like that.
I see numbers saying 15%. I see others saying 35%. I see another saying 49% (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/firefox-fights-back-holds-on-to-second-place-in-world-browser-shares/). It isn't likely that any of them are right. Let's just agree that browser market share is complicated and all anyone can really say is that some people are still using IE. Just like some people are still using Opera (although I just love the comment above saying that Opera is becoming the X axis.). It isn't possible to guestimate with any degree of accuracy on browser share. At least we can say they are all coming up with the same order of magnitude...
According to that chart IE hasn't been in the lead since 2008. However, NetApplications and others show IE with a much larger percentage. The HUGE gap in numbers make me doubt all of the numbers.
I wonder if that made them really mad.
The last two stories timothy posted were assertions of facts based on meaningless statistics (Objective-C Overtakes C++ based on TIOBE Index) and now this. Is it naive incompetence or deliberate provocation of a circlejerk? I'm not sure which is worse.
And I'm going to burn down Redmond. I'm going to start with Steve Ballmers office and burn a 20 foot tall IE. Then I'm going to poop in every single office. I've been building up a massive shit and plan on depositing 1 golden nugget in each office. That's my plan.
Hooray for me.
Sharepoint useful? I think its a crime to inflict any body with that. But I notice that companies that dont bother implementing anything that actually does content management, their users THINK sharepoint is good.
They just dont know any better.
Maybe if they drop the price low enough, somebody might actually buy Microsoft Word instead of downloading LibreOffice for free.
Well, there are a lot of things that Microsoft can do now, but pretty well all of them come with the disadvantage of earning less money. Not that I would shed a tear.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It's almost as bad as using MidnightBSD.org. I just checked Google analytics and it's showing 54% use Firefox, 26.59% on chrome, 11.59% on safari, 7.78% on IE and 4.92% on Opera. Any site that caters to technically savvy people is a bad indicator of general population.
If we based this magic percentage on hits to my BSD project site, it would look even worse for Microsoft. It's just not fair to do so.
Interestingly 47% of visitors are using Windows on my site and the second highest number is Linux at 31%. Are we going to assume Linux has 30% marketshare in desktops now too?
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Could it be that Chrome prefetching is actually generating enough traffic to skew the result?
I once had a signature.
What a webmaster cares about is ugly hacks and weird sh*t that you have to do with IE 6,7,and 8 like not adding methods to elements in javascript, no pixel formatting, only using css properties on a per div basis etc.
IE 9 has just a few minor things if you get dirty and heavily into custom code but generally identical to everything else. IE 10 which will come out automatically acts like Chrome and FF like a real standard browser should act.
I care about IE 6 and 7 marketshare as they are ... no words to describe them. IE 8 sucks and has no HTML 5 or css 3 support at all due to its age of 3 years. All the comment boxes on slashdot do not even have curved edges and are squared with on IE 8 for crying out loud! Curved boxes have been w3c standard since like 2001.
http://saveie6.com/
Recently I saw a TV ad for Internet Explorer. I thought it was kinda strange that Microsoft (or any company) would have to spend that kind of money to promote something that's free and already included on your target market's computer.
Bad for public areas. The sensor is very vulnerable to white out.
No where near as reliable as a ball mouse with the cover superglued in.
Mind you it generally makes for an extremely poor computing experience.
I'd love to know how you have a ball mouse working for 14 years. I never got more than 2-3 years out of one. I'd clean them every few months, but cleaning it would never get it back to 100%. I'm still using my first optical mouse though, which is about 10 years old now.
Internet explorer is the only browser that comes with windows and yet they still somehow manage to mess up so badly.
Those statistics are based on w3schools.com visits. Who visits w3schools.com, anyway? Only hobbyists and tech people. Does your mother go to that site? Your teenage children? Your coworkers, if you don't work for a tech company? Artists? Politicians? Travelers browsing the Web in airports and train stations? That assessment is deeply biased. As for Opera, I don't know a single person who uses it. Chrome, on the other hand, is quite popular but few people stop to think that Google make their money by knowing what people do on the Web. The Chrome start page asking you to log in should be a flag. Have you noticed that YouTube shows you the videos you watched last, although you didn't log in? Next time you log in it will "know what you did last summer". Anyway, you know what they say, people deserve their fate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1zxDa3t0fg
Bringing an IE to a browser gunfight.
I wish I had points to give you, sharepoint is painful. Also the most useful features only work on IE with Windows.
"Don't Panic!"
Well, if by stealing you mean buying for quite a lot of money, then sure.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
or is it '00
> Because they need to demote Windows 7 / .NET & COM to essentially a hosted
> operating system to force change. They reason they need to force change is because
> they want to support much more diverse hardware like phones and tablets. And that
> means in particular moving to vector not bitmapped based interface standards
> which effects all windows applications.
WTF??? Look, I agree that the desktop UI paradigm might suck on tablets+smartphones. That does *NOT* justify putting a tablet+smarthphone UI on desktop PCs, where it'll suck just as badly. Different horse for different courses, etc.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Oh, that summary hurts me in so many ways.
- They're at 16%. I know that's "almost 15%", but why not just type 16%? It's not like you saved any time!
- Stiff competition from Apple? Safari is at the same 4% market share it's been at for several years.
- Implications for the Future of Microsoft? I'm sure dropping to third place in the browser market is really going to be the straw that broke Ballmer's back...
Market share... on what? Total web surfers, which includes smart phones?
Doesn't it seem like Slashdot is using statistics to lie? IE is a PC product. So what's it's market share on desktops and laptops?
Pretty low point for Slashdot. I know they hate Microsoft with the burning passion of a thousand suns, but it's kind of sad to see them being dishonest like this.
It's sad that so many "smart" people are using Chrome that has so many privacy concerns. The following information is from Wikipedia but you can find this information all over. Google fanboys need not reply.
1) Suggest - All text, searches, and URLs typed into the address bar are sent to Google
2) Downloads - Chrome sends the URL and IP of the host and other meta data, such as the file’s hash and binary size, to Google when downloading files
3) Page not found - All URLs and text typed into the address bar (Upon receiving "Server not found" response) is sent to Google
4) Google Update (Windows) - Information about how often Chrome is used, details about the OS and Chrome version.
5) Bug tracker - Details about crashes and failures (including information about the machine and software being used)
6) clientID - Unique identifier along with logs of usage metrics and crashes.
7) Installation - Randomly generated token included in installer. Used to measure success rate of Google Chrome once at installation.
8) RLZ identifier - Encoded string, according to Google (if you trust Google), contains non-identifying information how Chrome was downloaded and its install week, and is used to measure promotional campaigns. Google provides the source code to decode this string.
This is the reason for products such as SRWare Iron that remove all the privacy concerns from Chromium:
"Google's Web browser Chrome thrilled with an extremely fast site rendering, a sleek design and innovative features. But it also gets critic from data protection specialists , for reasons such as creating a unique user ID or the submission of entries to Google to generate suggestions. SRWare Iron is a real alternative. The browser is based on the Chromium-source and offers the same features as Chrome - but without the critical points that the privacy concern.
We could therefore create a browser with which you can now use the innovative features without worrying about your privacy."
To me, it's just disappointed at the sheer number of sheeple who couldn't care less if Google tracks everything they do on the internet. Which also gives support to them tracking everyone else - including their own family members. Oh wait... but Google can be totally trusted, right? I mean, they would never do anything evil with all that data since they are an advertising corporation who's sole purpose is to make money. Ya, sure.
IE7 is down to 1.4% according to StatCounter; check the dropdown at the bottom. Presumably even IE6 is down even further. There are now more Opera users than IE7 users.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I run 3 sites, each catering to a different audience
site #1: IE has 42.6%, FF has 19.6%, Chrome has 15.4%
site #2: FF has 33.8%, IE has 26.4, Chrome has 21.6%
site #3: FF has 23.8%, Chrome has 20.2%, IE has 9.8% (the bulk on this site were web crawlers)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Logitech M-BA47 forever!
I prefer a mouse with a usable middle mouse button, and from a company that doesn't crap on Linux users.
TBH, I prefer PS/2 for both mouse and keyboard. No "best effort" and unpredictable latency like USB, no extra layers of software to go through, and no need to turn on "legacy USB support" in the BIOS.
THANK ${DEITY}
Microsoft who? Don't they make game consoles or something?
Microsoft's goose is cooked anyway. People do 80% of their online work with their smartphones and live the other 20% on a tablet.
The only people who NEED a full blown PC with Windows are people who.... You know, I'm not sure anymore. Developers? IT people? Engineers? Video editors? Beats me.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Hardly seems like a disaster for Microsoft. Everybody will still use Microsoft. People will just skip that "upgrade."
Timothy, twat, if you're going to post a fucking story on browser stats, take 5 seconds to tab over to your stats page and copy paste the fucking slashdot stats in.
Cunt.
Great news. However, corporate users still love these dinosaurs as corporate sites typically do not use Statcounter. IE 8 while not as picky still has many issues and many corporations who have learned to lock down their browsers for 10 years will be using that with Windows 7 until 2020 until support ends.
It is far from over but great that you can now ignore IE 6 for all but hte most corporate users and by this time next year ignore it as they will be about done with the transition to Windows 7.
http://saveie6.com/
Yes, Corporate is different. And definitely isn't the same as looking at W3Schools. W3Schools is for the newbie webdeveloper.
The folks at NetMarketShare (who count marketshare by visitors):
Internet Explorer 54.02%
Firefox 20.06%
Chrome 19.08%
Safari: 4.73%
Opera: 1.60%
Other: 0.51%
http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=0
They also claim IE6 has a bigger marketshare than IE7:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 5.92%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 3.10%
http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0
Statcounter (who count marketshare by pageviews):
Chrome 34.61%
Firefox 5+ 21.75%
(it does not tell us about Firefox 4 users)
Firefox 3.6 1.22%
(it does not tell us about earlier versions of Firefox)
IE6 0.46%
IE7 1.05%
IE8 11.55%
IE9 17.03%
New things are always on the horizon
Microsoft commissioned several studies which all show (every one) that microsoft has over 99.5% of the broswer share. 99.5% and there is an error of .5%, likely to show internet exploder low. So let microsoft bob help you with encarta on your zune ok? Use the bling search engine to help you find the results! SO THERE!
"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.
These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.
Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over many years, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends."
The tag for this article should read "Only 15% of people visiting w3schools.com use Internet Explorer". Credulity of /. trending down. Yes, /. credulity as this tag never should have made it in it's current form.
...to realise that IE just sucks?
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
...(and arguing about how trustworthy the stats are).
Has anyone else considered that this now means that no one browser rules any more. This is a good thing! Someone above posted the Wikipedia browser share link (this), and basically Chrome/IE/Firefox/Safari are all roughly equal (my guess on Safari is probably more Apple's portable iOS devices than OS X). This means that there are three web engines competing healthily (with webkit in the lead), and it's forcing all of them to be standards compliant.
(Also, yay for Firefox rising from Netscape's ashes just in time to stop the one-browser-rules-all scenario we nearly had with IE, and making it possible for other browers to exist...)
If I remember correctly my M-BA47 came with a "USB-to-PS/2" adapter. I'm guessing its electronics are PS/2 compatible.
As for the unusable middle mouse button, I use it so rarely that most of the time I don't even remember it's there.
Besides, which company out there makes good mouses and doesn't crap on Linux users?
Only one good use I have found for IE, to download another browser.