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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.com really? That's best data set OP could come up with??
it's because insurance companies prey on idiots.
Who cares? It portrays M$ in a bad light and that's all that matters!
I will hazard a guess that you own neither a car nor a home, and that you don't have to worry about anyone being supported until they're 18 in the event that you get hit by a bus before then.
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/
It's a vicious circle. At my former employer we were on IE6 because several of our critical Web applications only worked correctly with it. And since we were locked into IE6, any new Web applications had to work with it as well which removed any pressure to update. The only way we'd've gotten resources allocated to update those few ancient Web apps would have been if some other business-critical Web app had abandoned IE6 support entirely and said "IE 8 or later or we don't work". Which they won't do because they don't want to risk losing their IE6 user base. And round and round it goes, like a pair of orbiting black holes.
Yes. Don't trust one website's stats. Always look at your own stats before deciding you can afford to not support a particular browser. Of course, you should always use progressive enhancement, so that even if people do insist on using ancient browsers, they should still be able to get the basic content. (It's a pity more people don't take the view, but considering the web was intended to be a universal, regardless of machine or software, medium, it's the view that is more inline with the intention of the web.)
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
My first job out of school was in the insurance industry.
There is no better example of clueless IT. The whole industry is run by and for the benefit of the commissioned salespeople.
Because of that (and the simple computer problems faced by insurance) they get the bottom of the barrel of techs, programmers and engineers.
Your users are so dumb (insurance salespeople) that whatever came on the machine is going to be what they use.
Get out. The grass is greener, just about anywhere. Even banking.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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...
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.
Looking at logs I have access to, I see
Between 50% and 65% for a series of education related sites.
6% for a highly technical site.
Clearly what the site caters to has a big impact.
I bet apple.com is even lower ;)
Netscape existed before Internet Explorer.
StatCounter's 24.91% is a much more impressive decline to me than W3Schools' 9%.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
How are you confusing Windows 9 with a browser?
All of MS's nice profitable products are still pretty tightly coupled with Windows. They could and probably should change that, but I'm not holding my breath. Until they do, it's pretty important that they sell a version of Windows that people actually like on the traditional/corporate desktop. Today Win7 is that version (and I'm a fan of it), but if they stop selling Windows 7 when Windows 9 comes out, well, Windows 9 had better be well received.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How is this insightful?
Because /. moderators live in their moms' basements and get their mom to drive them to the computer shop when they need parts. They have no need for insurance themselves.
Firefox was built on Netscape so given the equally terrible experience of developing for Netscape back in the IE6 days I would be surprised if you didnt hate Firefox as well. Both Netscape and IE were terrible to develop for with their proprietary non-standard extensions, Netscape just had the decency to die and be reborn under a different name to make people forget its horrible legacy, IE should have died and been resurrected under a different name around IE10 when Microsoft finally changed tact and brought standards compliance to the forefront.
Contrary to Steve Jobs' comments the Internet Explorer of those days was *not* a very good browser, but >=IE10 is pretty decent.
Firefox was built on Netscape so given the equally terrible experience of developing for Netscape back in the IE6 days I would be surprised if you didnt hate Firefox as well. Both Netscape and IE were terrible to develop for with their proprietary non-standard extensions, Netscape just had the decency to die and be reborn under a different name to make people forget its horrible legacy, IE should have died and been resurrected under a different name around IE10 when Microsoft finally changed tact and brought standards compliance to the forefront.
Contrary to Steve Jobs' comments the Internet Explorer of those days was *not* a very good browser, but >=IE10 is pretty decent.
One difference is that Netscape's "proprietary" extensions included stuff SSL, cookies, and javascript. They created a lot of what the web is all about, and were successful enough to scare microsoft into retaliation for having a better idea, which led to the anti-trust suit. Netscape didn't so much die, as was stabbed in the back by a wannabe. IE10 might be good somewhere, but it sucks out loud on android, osx, ios and Linux (my preferred platforms). At best, its a niche product.
Your description of Netscape being "backstabbed" appears to conveniently forget that Netscape didn't ship anything useful for for FIVE YEARS. As stated by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Communicator_.28versions_4.0.E2.80.934.8.29):
Netscape released the final version of Netscape Communicator [4.x] in June 1997.
Netscape 6 was not yet ready for release and it flopped badly
Netscape 7.0 (based on Mozilla 1.0.1) was released in August 2002
lol, why would i hate firefox, it's the first browser that actually made MS stop pissing in their users' mouths and work on IE. you should fucking LOVE firefox, cause otherwise it's possible you'd be still using IE 6 right now.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.