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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?"
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.
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.
http://gs.statcounter.com/ is my goto site for this. It has IE at 32% http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120702-20120708-bar
Global Statistics from StatCounter is more holistic. 32.76% for Chrome this month, vs. IE's 32.31%. Not shabby, but hardly the landslide w3schools is reporting.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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
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
i just checked and wikipedia paints a different tale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
i consider wikipedia as a pretty common denominator of who uses the web, google cheats, and some web based spyware is commonly blocked by advanced users (with ghostery or the like)
android users are 4% of the browser marketshare at wikipedia.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Indeed. I have access to logs from entirely non-computer or technology related sites, and on average IE is still well above 50%, in many cases closer to 70%.
However, that could be because our sites appeal mostly to older users, and few technically literate people visit them (sort of the inverse of w3schools).
Certainly, if you add in Mobile browsers, IE's market share is probably more realistically in the 30%. However, since Mobile browsers are not really in the same competitive field, that means you need to remove a large percentage of safari and chrome/android browsers from the statistics.. otherwise you're not comparing apples and oranges.
What I want to know is how far IE usage ON PC'S has dropped.
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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.
If I had posted a link, then I'd be accused of being a shill or trolling for page hits - there's no winning either way. But here's the info from Google Analytics since 1/1/2012:
Visits: 138,719
Unique Visitors: 117,592
Pageviews: 237,555
Traffic sources:
72.08% Search Traffic (99,994 Visits)
16.11% Referral Traffic (22,344 Visits)
11.81% Direct Traffic
URL: http://westsidegardener.com/ - There, now I'm a shameless shill.
#DeleteChrome
People use IE in the business environment because it's the default and IT departments frown on (and in almost all cases prohibit) individuals from installing FF or Chrome.
Even though, since I telecommute and so have admin rights on my company-provided laptop, I've installed and primarily use FF, sometimes I still must use IE for some stupid intranet app or other that only works with IE.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You forgot the timothy factor.
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.
Quoting http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp:
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.
How well did that work out for vista?
In the consumer space? Fine. Consumers bought Vista at a good clip, not a great clip but there was no massive drop off. The resistance was from enterprise and no expects enterprise to like Windows 8.
There are a few areas where Microsoft tablets could be compelling.
1) Enterprise tablets. Both Google and Apple don't even really try for enterprise they are gaining traction by accident.
2) Medical tablets. Most of the people who know how to design electronics for medical are windows OEMs. The Android OEMs don't have a clue, yet.
3) Tablets for sales / presentation.
4) Tablets as a way to consumer enterprise content i.e. light editing of office documents, citrix....
5) Educational tablets for schools that are already Windows centric.
etc...
It worked out pretty well. They sold at least 330 million copies. I would love for my software to be such a flop.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
"Browser","Market Share % 8 Jul 2012"
Though I have no personal experience with 1.03 (only 1.01, 3.1, ...), I don't think that 1.03 had a start menu. It had a "File"-menu, but the purpose of that was completely different from the start menu, except that you could use it to turn off your computer with.
The start menu arrived in win95, released in 1994, which was about 18 years ago.
This is /., stop bragging about how long you have used stuff if you don't know it yourself.
"If customers, because of 20 years of practice want a start menu... why not just give it to them."
20 Years? 26 for me. I began with Windows 1.03 and I really don't like new crap.
First thing I always do with a new version is to disable all the visual gimmicks, like aero, menu shadings etc and install the classic scheme. Lately I also had to install utilities to get a decent menu.
Went to LibreOffice because of that damn Ribbon as well.
It's a fucking tool that I used for over a quarter century, I don't have the patience to get slowed down every couple of years because some young moron thinks some new gimmick is 'cool'.
But the start menu was introduced in Windows 95. (To never ending jokes about "to shut down, press the 'Start' button and...")
Just to add to you're point, I literally just bought a laptop from System76 that came with Ubuntu pre-installed.
It works great. I do have one problem, which may be my fault more than the machines. My older other laptop is an HP that came with Windows XP, was upgraded to Vista, broke horribly crashing and blue screens just about every day, then had Linux Mint installed and it's run with no issues for the last 5 years. It's primarily my MineCraft/Media server now, which seems to absorb all of the memory on the machine. I was able to get some games I had bough from GOG to run on a XP VMware installation on the old machine. The same games will not run on an XP VirtualBox installation on the new machine. I've only had the new laptop for a week, but I suspect it's one of two issues. It could be differences between VirtualBox and VMWare that are causing the issues. Or it could possibly be the cheapy Intel graphics card that came with the new machine. I won't know for sure until I have a chance to install VMWare and try running the same games under that instead of VirtualBox.
Long rambling point short, System76 is a great place to get a Linux pre-installed laptop if you're trying to avoid getting one with Windows preloaded.