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Microsoft Browser Usage Drops 50% As Chrome Soars (networkworld.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the living-off-the-Edge dept.

An anonymous reader quotes Network World's report about new statistics from analytics vendor Net Applications: From March 2015 to February 2017, the use of Microsoft's IE and Edge on Windows personal computers plummeted. Two years ago, the browsers were run by 62% of Windows PC owners; last month, the figure had fallen by more than half, to just 27%. Simultaneous with the decline of IE has been the rise of Chrome. The user share of Google's browser -- its share of all browsers on all operating systems -- more than doubled in the last two years, jumping from 25% in March 2015 to 59.5% last month. Along the way, Chrome supplanted IE to become the world's most-used browser...

In the last 24 months, Mozilla's Firefox -- the other major browser alternative to Chrome for macOS users -- has barely budged, losing just two-tenths of a percentage point in user share. [And] in March 2015, an estimated 69% of all Mac owners used Safari to go online. But by last month, that number had dropped to 56%, a drop of 13 percentage points -- representing a decline of nearly a fifth of the share of two years prior.

8 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Vendors no longer require IE by mprindle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In years past to use some web based software supplied by vendor you HAD to use IE or it wouldn't work. It's more and more that vendors are not requiring IE and have gone one additional step. They now recommend a different browser like Chrome or FireFox. I have run across a few packages that almost refuse to render correctly in IE.

    1. Re:Vendors no longer require IE by Octorian · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In years past to use some web based software supplied by vendor you HAD to use IE or it wouldn't work.

      Since Google chose to split their code base off from WebKit, my fear is we'll start seeing this with Chrome if it becomes too ubiquitous.

      I'm pretty sure its already happening. Chrome is basically becoming the new MSIE. I see plenty of "internal" stuff that doesn't work well in Firefox, and there's a common attitude of looking at you funny for not using Chrome when you complain. I also see plenty of "check out our newly refreshed site design!" that's an unusably broken or sluggish POS if you're not using Chrome.

  2. Edge is a disgrace by geek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since MS replaced IE with Edge and Edge isn't even remotely feature complete, buggy and extremely crash prone, it's no wonder people are rushing to alternatives.

    Firefox has all but given up trying to improve. That leaves Chrome and a plethora of browsers that use the Chrome rendering engine. We're going to see a one browser internet here pretty soon.

    1. Re:Edge is a disgrace by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I love the "alt facts." Firefox has never caused me a hint of trouble on my computers unlike Chrome that eats up ALL available memory and slows things down to a crawl. Firefox IS improving. Some people just prefer to let ignorance rule their life view.

    2. Re:Edge is a disgrace by reboot246 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It still does. Right now Firefox is using "only" a half a gigabyte of memory, but if I don't restart it within a few hours, it will go to 1 GB, then 1.5 GB, then 2 GB. The machine starts slowing down and it's time to restart Firefox.

      I actually use several different browsers depending on what I'm doing online. For example, one is secured down tight for doing banking and buying online, another one is for shopping (but not buying) online (because it's faster), another one is for news and weather (without ads), etc.

  3. Safari sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Mac users need to stop using that deficient POS. It doesn't render modern styles properly. But what's worse is that there is no way to perform any compatibility tests because Apple has long stopped making a version of Safari available to users of competing operating systems. Don't use Safari.

  4. Re:Edge for battery power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    /rolls eyes

    Yea, okay, because websites are *totally* what's using all your battery and not the display brightness and flash/video plugins.

  5. Chrome == IE6 by Frankie70 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Chrome is at a position which IE6 used to be. They don't care.

    They first killed NPAPI plugs so that Java Applets don't work. So we moved to JNLP. Then they have a bug by which JNLP cannot be autolaunched in Chrome like it can in IE & Firefox. So if it's a weblaunched JNLP, users have to save the JNLP file & then run it which is troublesome for a lot of lay users. This bug exists for 4-5 years & there are multiple bug ids for it. But it never get fixed. Then there is another bug by which when you save the JNLP files after 99 JNLP files - no more can be saved & or run.

    Chrome doesn't care to fix these bugs because what do they lose if they don't fix it.