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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%.
w3schools.com really? That's best data set OP could come up with??
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.
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?
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
"mobile devices over the last few years (hundreds of millions) and none of those are running IE."
Well IE is the default browser that comes with Windows Phone so that's like... the 5 people that bought a Windows Phone.
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/...
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"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...
They sold 5!?!? That is one for Ballmer, and one for Gates. Who bought the other 3? :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
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/
Ballmer bought one to use and three to throw. Everybody else just bought one to throw.
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.
Doubled last year? So it's you and Ballmer now.
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...
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...
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%.
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http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
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http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto...
(As an aside, the above story was submitted by the zealot megalomaniac symbolset).
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Last one out turn off the lights.
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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).
Netscape existed before Internet Explorer.
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.
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.
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.
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
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%).