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IE Drops To Single-Digit Market Share
New submitter fplatten writes "I think this is all you need to see to know what legacy Steve Ballmer has left at Microsoft, where its IE browser market share has collapsed from a high of 86% in 2002 to just 9% now. I guess this is just another in a long list of tech companies that failed to maintain its dominant market share. Also, IE may be the one product that never really deserved it, but just piggybacked on Windows, and users left in droves once decent (more secure) alternatives and standards became popular." Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though -- browser choice is a pretty small arm of the octopus.
W3Schools has a very skewed demographic, I wouldn't take their figures to be a true representative across the board.
My companies websites (Insurance) have an IE share of about 40%.
The stupidity of this is just breathtaking.
w3schools.com really? That's best data set OP could come up with??
May his noodly appendages bless thy browsing!
Chrome is quickly becoming the next IE anyway
9%... out of the user agents connecting to w3schools. I guarantee you that Chrome is not the majority browser among the public (yet), either.
The only surprise was the 82% in 2002... those IE 6-only sites back then didn't seem to designed with any open standards in mind.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Seriously, we've had an explosion of mobile devices over the last few years (hundreds of millions) and none of those are running IE. That would explain a lot of the drop.
Microsoft stockholders can slowly and carefully suck my dick. I care about browser market share.
It's a good thing there are websites out there like W3Schools that just about everybody visits on a daily basis. How would we get these statistics otherwise?
What's funny is that IE11 on Win8.1 is finally fast, at least as fast as Firefox/IceCat and Chromium. And it is stable and actually compliant with standards.
Not that I'd use it voluntarily, but it's the least horrible it's ever been at the same time it has the lowest market share.
9.0 + 26.8 + 55.8 + 3.8 + 1.9 = 97.3
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
(collected from W3Schools' log-files over a period of ten years)
So, a site that hosts HTML advice and tutorials is getting fewer hits from IE, and in December, less than 10% of those page requests came from IE.
An interesting data point, but not enough to warrant the title or summary.
55% from Chrome, I wonder how much has to do with Crome's "wonderful" default value to preemptively download every page linked to any page you intentionally visit?
Following the link referenced we get: "From the statistics below (collected from W3Schools' log-files over a period of ten years), you can read the long term trends of browser usage."
So this data set really shows only the behavior of access to the w3schools.com site. Don't make inferences across the general population.
9.0 + 26.8 + 55.8 + 3.8 + 1.9 = 97.3
0.7 = Lynx :)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though
He joined in January 2000 when according to that link, the stock was at 48.94. Today the stock is at 36.50. Managing a -25% return over 14 years is not a good thing.
The statistics are "collected from W3Schools' log-files..." So an English-language site for people interested in web development is now considered an accurate proxy for browser usage? I think not. Predictably, the results are way out of line with, well, pretty much everyone:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/...
http://gs.statcounter.com/
http://www.w3counter.com/globa...
http://browsermarketshare.com/
http://clicky.com/marketshare/...
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
IE at 22.82% and falling
chrome at 43.67% and rising
firefox at 18.88% and falling slightly
safari at 9.75% and rising slightly
there is a strong correlation between chrome and IE in both gains and losses
15% of my customer base uses IE6 or IE7.
not just IE but superbad IE... of course we are business oriented software, which for some reason explains it all... corporate organizations are insanely, dangerously slow at upgrading.
Sometimes our site is run on cash registers and other ancient POS systems... but our "cloud" solution is accessed by IE more than any other browser, and IE6/7 more often than you could possibly imagine.... and it is no simple matter of forcing the customer to upgrade... what are they going to do, re-flash Windows CE and somehow get a decent browser to run on 256 meg of memory?
It is actually less shocking (though still really annoying) that people still use IE6 when you realize how much "modern" stuff you can still do on it. Almost everything in jQuery works, so even fancy active ajax pages are fine, as long as you account for the lack of JSON.stringify and JSON.parse and don't try to use a decent CSS layoyt.
a bajillion mobile devices and home computers that don't make anybody any real money run the latest stuff, but a tiny and extremely profitable segment of the userbase are Microsoft for life, and often, some old and horribly dangerous incarnation of Microsoft...
Statistics Can Be Misleading
You cannot - as a web developer - rely ONLY on statistics. Statistics can be misleading.
Note: 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 use the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.
Tip: Global averages may not 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 computers.
Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over many years, clearly shows the long term trends.
What I do mind is old IE and wanting that to go down to single digit marketshare.
Why can't we all have nice websites that look as good as your apps on your phone? IE the fact that users never ever upgrade!
Shit IE 8 is 5 years old now and we can't have HTML 5 outside our crappy tiny phones. Inexecusable. Let this dinosaur die and I hope the intranet developers die a horrible death who still do not know what ECMA script is and think Jscript is javascript. ... and that statistic is BS. If IE 9 and early hits single digit it is time we stop making business sites that work in HTML 4 and CSS 2. They wont upgrade until websites stop working and websites wont stop working until users upgrade. Now it is 2014 and we are living 10 years in the past due to the same old BS.
http://saveie6.com/
wget, curl, bots, spyglass, seamonkey, ...
Same thing happened when Netscape made it's debut long ago.
IE survived and I suspect it will again..
(As Winston Churchill once said.)
Numbers look ridiculous. I pretty much rule out those are from random sampling.
Could be because they only included the major browsers. There are more things on the Net, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
For this one site. Not the most honest headline. I don't think w3schools is a representative sample of all of the sites on the Internet.
A biased submitter found a statistic to support their claim that IE is no longer relevant. I agree IE may be losing relevance but the w3school log files only show that people who want to learn how to write a webpage from w3school are likely to use Chrome. I suspect if I looked at the log at Microsoft's developer network I would come to the conclusion of IE being preferred by developers, and if I went to Apple's developer site it would show that Safari being preferred by developers.
The other red flag being that the statistics are presented as percentages with no absolute numbers given. This could be a site serving a very small demographic with very low volume. In fact the site discloses some of these caveats in the "Statistics can be misleading" section of that page.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
But does it really matter to Microsoft anymore?
They sunk costs into IE as a way to maintain their monopoly in the 1990s. They were really scared shitless that a browser could become the OS for all intents and purposes and then people would move away from a microsofty world.
The problem is that for small businesses that already occurred. I know people that use quickbooks online and other such services and their OSes don't matter for shit.
And almost nobody in the west will dare to make IE only websites anymore, just nothing to gain. And pushing possible IE only standards (like Silverlight might have become) is also out the window.
So what is in it for Microsoft anymore? They could dump their browser team into other projects and save the money imo.
Humm, as a developer I feel a bit idiot because I never really ask myself the question... and always think it was the same thing. After a quick look it seems I'm right, both compile and run the same way... it's different name for specific version of ECMA Script. http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
"News for chumps --shit that never happened".
Time for everyone to dust off and fire up their copies of IE. Then visit the site - let's see what they say next month.
W3Schools is a site for web developers and does not represent the web despite the three W's in the name.
Net Applications(which measures visitors instead of page views like Statcounter) has it at ~50%.
Story brought to you by the same geniuses that brought you the following stories:
"Draconian DRM Revealed in Windows 7"
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
"Microsoft to abandon Windows Phone"
http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto...
(As an aside, the above story was submitted by the zealot megalomaniac symbolset).
Milking views by trolling only works for so long.
Thanks to zealot posters like bmo, symbolset, Zero__Kelvin, LordLimeCat, Jeremiah Cornelius, UnknowingFool, rtfa-troll, binarylarry, MightyMartian, drinkypoo, pieroxy for karmawhoring the groupthink and slowly ruining the site by spewing lame shill accusations. Oh and thanks to moderators for marking them insightful and modding down any posts that go against the groupthink.
When the beta lands and is the default without a way to go back to the old layout is the day I remove Slashdot from my bookmarks and unfollow on twitter.
Last one out turn off the lights.
This space for rent.
...it's a canary in a coal mine. And it's almost dead.
I was hoping Linux would take over the desktop, or Haiku, or something. IInstead, this is happening because everyone is switching to Chrome on their PCs and everyone has a goddamn locked down we-are-borg fucking appliance in their pocket that tracks their every move, and a slightly bigger version that they call their PC replacement that can't even boot anything but android. This is not progress. This is skynet.
See, the thing about progress, is that it's supposed to be an improvement. And I still miss netbooks! Fucking iPad. People bought it because it looked cool. People are stupid.
People just switched from one spying browser to another. Nothing changed.
It is, but you have to make sure that you have the latest SP1. If you installed a pirated Windows 7 or for any reason are unable to upgrade to SP1, then you're stuck w/ IE9. To go to IE10 or 11, you have to have the SP1 update
I believe this. I myself use all 3 browsers for different sites, but most people I know seem to prefer Chrome to IE. Contrast that w/ the Netscape days, where simply bundling IE was enough to toss Netscape out of business.
I am sure at w3schools they're dealing primarily with devs, who do in fact prefer another browser over IE. but on my site of 3000 unique visitors per month, I'm seeing... what others are seeing at sites other than w3schools.
The breakdown is :
Firefox 27.3%
Google Chrome 26.1%
MSIE 16.6% (down quite a bit from a few years ago)
Mozilla 10.6%
Opera 7.7%
Safari 6.5%
Unknown/Android/iPhone/etc make up the rest.
Most of my IE users are IE6.. o.o
On my other site with a seeding of 1500 unique users, IE sits at 29.5%, Chrome at 33.7%, Firefox at 17.9%, everything else, who cares .. It makes me wonder what more Windows orientated sites, mainsteam news sites get - Yahoo, Rage3D, Tomshardware, etc. These are the sites I think most of the IE users are on (my site here gets most of it's users from the AMD graphics card camp, doing 29.5% IE).
I noticed that Chrome's introduction was exactly when IE fell to below the 50% mark in 2008. Jan 2009, Firefox passed it again (I'm counting Netscape in Firefox) and April 2011, Chrome did. Chrome ultimately passed Firefox in 2011
Statistics, fun for the whole family, and apparently small children.
So clearly the type of web browser used at ONE website, that specializes in programming, is ideal for extrapolating the technology trends for the entire world.
1) I have to use IE at work because of so many applications that will only work with IE.
2) I took an online course (not at W3Schools), and the tool used required me to use very specific browsers for the same broken reasons as #1
Anyway, some interesting values, but please.
Also when I did a bit of js, I intentional used firefox, not because it was a better browser (or that I used it personally or at work), but because it had FireBug a decent js debugger I could use.
For all the things that it couldn't do (or neglected to do) properly, Internet Explorer has deserved all the negative criticisms it has amassed over its lifespan. The software was slow to adapt to a rapidly changing environment and in some cases it seemed as if it was stubbornly resistant to such adaptation. With that said, recent versions of IE are good browsers, much improved, just not enough to give people a reason to switch back. The brand had taken such a beating that using IE evokes an immediate negative response for most of us. All hands have abandoned that ship, and we've all grown comfortable with our Chrome/Firefox/etc. browsers that swooped in to save us.
Nearly every time I do cross platform testing, it is Firefox-yup, Safari-yup, Chrome-yup, IE-NOPE. I don't remember the last time I made a browser conditional if statement for the first three but nearly always I find that with IE I have to resort to the awfulness that is browser conditional javascript.
Now with IE10 things are pretty good but due to the huge prevalence of 7, 8, 9 (and in some corporations, even 6). But this has been years of being smashed in the teeth by IE, So I am not glad to see it go away because of any problems with IE10/11 but like the wall street bankers past actions, MS had it coming.
W3Schools is visited by developers who don't know better.
Developers who know better shun it since 2002 and 'till now for being often outdated, incorrect or showing bad practices in examples.
PS: It's not "w3" and has no relation to actual standard body at w3.org. HTH, HAND.
...which I only use myself, Firefox market share is 100%.
And that means iDevice share is 0%.
Suck on that, hipsters!
Although you probably haven't heard of it...
I want to start developing all my web sites for lynx. That way i don't have to fuck with CSS anymore.
The buzz kills at m$ choked what was at one time a fine browser. 20 years ago. By Win95, IE was a threat to one's sanity.
Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though -- browser choice is a pretty small arm of the octopus.
Yes and no. I remember the days when not having Internet Explorer (the Windows version specifically) was a big reason not to try another platform. Corporate sites and banks would require the use of Windows IE or wouldn't function properly with anything else. Now that IE's market share is so low, all of those sites are forced to support Firefox and Chrome (at the very least) which function the same on Windows, OS X and Linux.
Years ago browsing the Internet on a Mac or Linux PC made you a second class netizen. The irony is that it's IE users on older versions of Windows who are second class now.
So what I see is people who go to their web development site (likely Web Developers) don't use IE. Never knew a web developer to prefer it. I am actually surprised that number is so high.
but some of the game launchers for MMORPGs rely on the Internet explorer browser engine to display news and updates on Windows.
I hardly use Internet explorer because it is slow on my single-core computer. I use Google chrome instead.
Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though -- browser choice is a pretty small arm of the octopus.
Microsoft's stock is 20.89% higher than it was on this date in 2002. That is an average yearly increase of 1.74%. US Savings Bonds had a greater return over that time period! So, if their shareholders aren't upset, they should be.
Yes, but an accurate chart would at least have an 'other' category with the remaining 2.7% of the market share represented.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
As much as I loathe Internet Explorer, this sort of response is unproductive. A lot of people are forced to use Internet Explorer who are neither idiots nor prey on them. Public access computers in libraries, computers in businesses and non-profits that have limited IT resources, and schools in lower income areas are also large users of Internet Explorer.
Such blind, fanboyish hatred doesn't serve those users at all.
12% at wikipedia, which is probably pretty representative. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm
No, only a limited number of Apps are HTML5 + Js, unlike what Steven Sinofsky had envisioned. .js files. YOu need to take ownership of the folder.
Even the Photos App that was originally HTML, has been rewritten in an update.
You can see for yourself, in %ProgramFiles%\WindowsApps, look for apps with
Anyone else want to go check out w3schools.com using IE? Every day in February? Let's see we can get their IE usage over 50%.
Be careful, that's 12% of total pages, including those accessed through mobile devices. If you look at the share of pages accessed by non-mobile browsers, it's 15.7% (12%/76%).
... the fact that IE usage there is below average suggests that IE users are on average smarter than the web population as a whole (so they know to avoid it).
That off-topic remark aside, why do people think that this matters? 10 years ago it made a difference, but now? Not so much.
There are really two different types of web developers. CSS or Canvas. I'm a canvas developer. IE is completely lacking when it comes to canvas but roughly equivalent when it comes to CSS, relative to Webkit anyways. When it comes to HTML5 canvas, I just basically ignore IE explorer. Non-Canvas on IE stuff seems to work as expected.
0.07 = emacs?
Obligatory xkcd, for non-systems people who've no idea what I'm talking aboutl:
http://xkcd.com/378/
So why does NetApplications have all versions of IE at 57.64% ? Link.
There are apparently extreme and profound disagreements about how to measure this.
Electronic Design Automation company here. Our figures for the last two months of website visitors are:
48.33% Chrome
23.64% Firefox
17.94% Internet Explorer
5.31% Safari
1.35% Android Browser
1.06% Opera
0.75% Mozilla
0.38% Maxthon
0.38% Opera Mini
0.16% Safari (in-app)
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I don't know who they got these stats from but they're a joke. Back in reality, Chrome is at 17%, Firefox at 38%, IE at 34%, mobile and other making up the rest. That's what the last and much more accurate slashdot story said.
Just last week I called the Social Security Business Services Online for help setting up an account to electronically submit a W2 for a household employee. I was told that the errors I was getting was because I wasn't using Internet Explorer which is the only approved browser. My observations that IE isn't even supported for the Mac and that surely Chrome or Safari should work were met by the live service representative with mindless repetitions of 'you have to use Internet Explorer'. Any ideas about how to upgrade a government?
Those stats do not match real use, on our company's site IE is more like 60-70% of the total usage.
The Slashdot Beta is clearly a failed software project in every single sense. It's technologically inferior, basically everyone who has been subjected to it absolutely hates it, and it will indeed drive off many long-time Slashdot users.
Keep in mind that we're comparing it to the current site, which itself is a shitty reworking of what was once a much better web site. So the beta isn't just bad, it's extremely bad.
The only sensible thing to do is to cancel the Slashdot Beta project, throw away the code, and learn from the mistakes that have already been made. Pushing it live, however, will indeed destroy what's left of Slashdot, in my opinion. It'll be like Digg v4 all over again. The most valuable users will be driven away due to a really shitty web site "update" that only serves to make things far worse.
Please, Slashdot, cancel the beta project now. Throw it all away. It can't be saved. It can't be salvaged.
http://finance.yahoo.com/echar...;
Fixed it for you. He took over it was trading mid 50's, now it trades mid 30's. I think businesses using MS tech have more to thank him for. SQL Server, .Net, and Windows Server all were created/made huge gains under his leadership. Actually turning that into money in shareholders pockets? Not so much.
I use IE exactly one time a week, because I am required to. My company uses a vendor whose B2B website is straight out of 1997 and freaks out if you don't use IE. Once in a great while I submit an order from home, in which case I use Firefox with the User Agent Switcher extension on Linux to trick the vendor's site into believing I am using IE, which actually works fine. I don't do this at work because the machine I use to access this particular vendor's site is shared and I am not permitted to install Firefox (LOL). A few times I have forgotten about this and used current versions of Firefox and Chrome, causing the vendor's site to suggest (demand, really, since it is supposedly optimized for IE and won't allow me to use anything else) that I "upgrade" to a more recent browser, like IE 6. That always cracks me up.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
about:mozilla.
IE is shit, It also makes them no money and offers little advantage. It was considered necessary in the 90's to counter a possible threat to the desktop (mainly java and Netscape).
By making their browser free they killed netscape and limited the browser as a platform for their competitors. It also removed any incentive MS had to innovate in the area.
It took Mozilla, a very odd organisation, a NFP organisation based around software that uses Open-Source as a way to reduce the limitations that traditional software houses encounter (I.E. making money) to break the stagnation.
The world has moved on, ways to compete with free have emerged and the desktop market has cemented, mobile platforms are a big stake and MS has a very minor piece of it.
MS should take chromium, add their own stuff (MS accounts, Bing, Outlook.com and other "value added" stuff) and ship it with windows. It works for Google. it would likely slow (perhaps stop) the migration to chrome .
Come to think of it, they should do the same thing with android too.
Not to mention anything that uses a non-standard user agent string.
Only one more digit to go...
Requiem for the American Dream
Only a "contard" would say something like that.
taking w3schools as the site for the report is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.. That site is mostly used by webdevelopers, and those are more inclined to use the other browsers..
So take this story with a big barrel of sault... It's just BS...
Hey Dip Sh!t, guess what? Tablets and phones count for designing web pages and not sitting on the MSIE short bus... Time has moved on, the desktop is NOT the focus anymore.
Your Average Joe
That's the required baseline on internal builds. To be fair the real browser is FF24 ESR or something like that but in terms of actual 100% applications compatibility - IE10 is the new go-to when all else fails. This is a new thing, as they relied on IE9 until about a month ago. But hey, if you can even get them to pay for it, MS Office 2003 is the rad new office suite. There's Lotus Symphony that all workstations must have installed but no one actually uses it. Symphony is based on Apache Office 3 so it's got all the golly gee-whiz features of that, and it also has all sorts IBM add ons which means it takes about 90 seconds to start up unless you have it autostarted in the system tray.
Smarter Planet.
I almost fell for these statistics a few weeks ago until I realized they're just logs for the WC3's website which obviously represents a very niche audience. If you do your research, the real numbers are just under 50%. This article should have never been published.
You know, if you look at their performance numbers, as well as those for reliability, standards compliance and memory footprint, they come in second-to-last, with Opera last; of course, when you compare IE to the chromium-based Opera Next, and not plain Opera, then IE still is 2x worse than the others.
All the webpages contain the same content when viewed in Lynx:
Oops! it looks like your javascript is disabled.
"Also, IE may be the one product that never really deserved it, "
post ie6 perhaps....but ie5, ie5.5, and ie6 were quite innovative and the rest of the web enjoys technologies and successes built off those....so, your biased opinion doesn't take history into account.
Scroll down the page and you get this section:
But hey, this is Slashdot after all... where RTFA is a four-letter word.
Hey Dip Sh!t, guess what? Tablets and phones count for designing web pages and not sitting on the MSIE short bus... Time has moved on, the desktop is NOT the focus anymore.
Wow, that's a lot of hostility you have going there. Clearly, desktop share is shrinking, but it's still 76% of Wikipedia page views.
W3schools usage is not fully representative for three reasons: most of their usage is from personally-owned computers rather than work computers, their user base skews toward tech-savvy people, and they don't get a lot of mobile usage (evident from the poor showing by Safari; if substantial numbers of iPhone and iPad users were hitting their site that number would be larger). But it does show notable trends in desktop browser usage; because of the bias toward techies it probably leads the general population but we can expect to see the same patterns play out in other populations over time.
The lack of mobile usage of W3schools isn't really surprising. Mobile platforms are not very useful for development of code or content, and development is what that site is all about. You can't code for iOS on iOS. It is possible to code for Android on Android but few people do it because mobile form factors aren't well suited to the task. You can develop for mobile Windows systems on mobile platforms that run full Windows 8 rather than Windows RT, but users on Windows 8 platforms won't show up as mobile users in statistics.