Internet Explorer drops below 60% market share Less than two thirds of surfers are now using Microsoft's browser on the web as Google's Chrome continues its northward assault. Internet Explorer slipped below 60 per cent of the market in April - 59.95 per cent, to be precise - according to the latest figures from Net Applications. That was down from 60.65 per cent in March …
Without Firefox, (and Apache) we might have an Internet which only works on Windows.. or at least better with MS.
I work for one corporate client recently & found that they had standardized on Firefox a few years ago as there web based replacement for the corporate terminal happened to run faster/better on Firefox than IE6/IE7. Now, even with new boxes arriving running Win7 (they skipped Vista & still mostly run XP), the IT dept (and individual users) still out of habit drop Firefox on new machines even though IE8 is probably good enough browser to use (though still a little slower).
Even in slow moving corporates I have noticed that IT departments are happy to quickly switch browser such as to Chrome; its free and little training or impact required compared with say switching from Office 2K3 to Office 2K7. Personally I am finding myself using Chrome as it does seem more robust & light-weight when running Flash apps; anybody else notice that Firefox does not cope with webcam streaming via Flash for extended periods of time?
I deleted IE a few weeks ago. Some of my applications that were tied into IE fail to work properly now.
I don't think the virus is fully gone but I know it's seemed to of broken applications that never said they required IE to be functional.
As much as I agree with browser choice, what companies are doing today with search engines are just as bad.
It's complete sh*t that my smartphone has bing as it's search engine and that firefox has google.
There is absolutely no need what-so-ever for search engines to have anything to do with browsers. If I want to go to a search engine i'll type the freaking URL in.
Time for some browser anti-trust lawsuits.
You can remove a few shortcuts etc, but IE is tied into the Windows OS far too deeply to be removed.
As for search engines - you can actually change those; you know that? And if you want to type the URI in, you can do that too.
Also with browsers, there is actually a choice. Something MS does not give you (because, as I stated initially, it is not possible to completely remove IE).
"You can remove a few shortcuts etc, but IE is tied into the Windows OS far too deeply to be removed."
So, it's a house of shit, built on a pile of shit, using shit for bricks and you can't even knock it down and replace it because it's become inextricably attached to the shit-soaked land it was built it on...
... do you jack off to Linux mags?
I'm a Windows user. I'm a Linux user. I use firefox for everything except the corporate network (cos it don't play nice with anything other than IE6 (and this is a multinational IT firm???). Beyond that, IE doesn't involve itself with my day to day life.
I've played with IE 7 and IE 8 and to be honest, they really are not that bad to use, however firefox gives me consistancy when using the web in the same way HTC Sense covers android and WinMob and therefore wins.
IE does not define Windows to be rubbish. MS provides a very useable OS for hundreds of thousands of different configurations and may suffer from "Jack of all trades master of none" syndrome. But it works, where Linux fails in userability (though Ubuntu 10.04 makes one hell of an impact on this front) and Apple control both the platform and the software so they have more control on stability/userablity etc (Safari for Windows is shit BTW).
...defaults to Google, true (then again, Google does provide an income source for FF)
However,
the search engine area is to the right of the very large space for entering a URL (helpfully for you)
there is also a drop down box offering a variety of search engines and you can both change their order and add more
I'm not sure how it works with MSIE as I never user it. I do know that if one mistypes a URL in FF I get "webpage not found" whereas I understand that in corporate editions of MSIE (at least) it fires up Bing.
So, bring on the anti-trust (again, BTW, in case you've forgotten or didn't know) but who would you point it at?
Shame really, just as its finally turning into a browser that's almost painless to develop for the masses start to drop it.
Irritatingly, the same stats still have IE6 @ 17.5% - which works out 5% more than Safari, Chrome and Opera combined.
So not quite the bad news for Firefox's 25% you paint compared to the opposition - and if you look at the raw data rather than %, numbers are increasing well - its held its own against 100Ks of new Safari Browsers running on iDevices for a start.
"Shame really, just as its finally turning into a browser that's almost painless to develop for the masses start to drop it."
No reason why an HTML5-compliant version of IE couldn't take its place amongst the population of "acceptable" browsers. If it is painless to develop for it, I doubt anyone here really cares what its market share is.
The real gripe was always against IE6, which was not painless but happily appears to be almost dead. The 17.5% figure is probably almost entirely "business" machines and justified by some crufty *intranet* site. The figure for domestic machines is probably tiny and so *internet* web-sites could almost certainly drop IE6 support even today without losing customers. (I believe El Reg has, in the past, posted browser-stats over the course of the working week that supports this hypothesis.)
Actually, I can safely say companies are already starting to roll out W7. I know a VERY large entity that has just upgrade the servers to a 2008 domain in prep for a huge W7 roll out, we're talking thousands and thousands of pc's, not a few dozen.
Most skipped Vista and now the machines are getting old an creaky and XP cannot do everything some businesses need now.
It assuredly will, since MS will stop selling XP and businesses typically make far greater use of wierd and wonderful (and sometimes home-grown but we've lost the developer) applications that require Windows. Next time that business buys a PC, they have no legal choice *but* to "upgrade" the seat to Win7, because the XP licence on the machine being replaced is almost certainly one of the non-transferable OEM ones.
At that point, IE8 will probably have a new user to boast of, since IE is easier to lock down with group policy than its rivals, and that sort of thing matters to businesses.
Unless, of course, that "group policy extension for Firefox" (that various posters here have mentioned) starts to pick up *its* market share.
"Windows 7 rollout is starting for BT...."
Says it all really. On this years budget for BT:
100 miles of crap quality aluminium phone cable
1 new datacentre designed to burst into flames and flood on the first warm day of the year
1 million Windows 7 licences
Now all they need is a horse and the bucket for it to crap into and they'll have everything they need.
If the clowns over at Redmond are wondering why IE is losing market share, JUST USE CHROME FOR 5 MINUTES then compare with IE 7/8. See the difference???
Ugh, IE is the absolute worse browser you can use. Each time I see a friend using IE, watching the pointer stall and stall, I ask them if they have ever tried Google's Chrome browser. Usually, they have never heard of it. They usually let me install it on their machines and a few days later, they will get back to me as to how much snappier their browsing experience is.
I'm sure MS has some smart cookies working for them. Why can't they put out some slick software like Google?
"Why can't they put out some slick software like Google?"
If Microsoft made their software slick an army of semi-concious Windows support people all over the world would lose their jobs, costing the economy billions a year.
The kind of people who are trained to sit in the server room doing not-very-much except reboot the servers every 5 minutes when a patch comes in. Those assholes.
I'd guess to the point where most IE users are businesses (all the 'big' companies i've worked for are currently using IE6 and will probably upgrade to 8 or 9 when they go to windows 7/8) plus a few - 10%? - of consumers etc. There's probably enough (justified or not) FUD around to dissuade most 'home' users from IE and toward Chrome, Firefox or Safari (or Opera if they somehow manage to hear about it!)
This can only be a good thing for though; look what happened when they had 90-odd% share - NOTHING. Well, OK, Mozilla did pretty well out of it!
Lets not forget the PCs running unlicensed copies of Windows, that's the norm in places like China and other Asian countries. Apart from that continue your conversation about the browsers, I agree with an earlier post that it doesn't matter too much what browser you use. Opera seems the best for me, but don't mind IE or Firefox.
but I don't see how wider uptake of Win7 (and therefore IE8) is going to help IE's numbers, since the 60% statistic is for all versions of IE combined. Users migrating from IE6 to IE8 aren't going to change the overall market share. For IE8 to help, users would have to switch back to IE from Firefox or Chrome. Now *that* is unlikely.
Gimme an 'E' Gimme an 'R' Gimme an 'A'
Whatya got? -well besides some dodgy propositions with Os Ps and Es -before I get any sarky comments:-)--
OPERA
OK OK I'm an Opera-tard but the attempt in the article to link Winows (7) sales with IE popularity is exactly what they[Opera] just fought over -and won- with the browser ballot system.
The ballot has ensured no accidental re-defections back by alternative browser users and picked up a few others making a sane choice at last. This story highlights the ballot's success and doesn't have that much to do with Windows 7's claimed sales.
Stuart
-I only had to mention Opera so much because it had zero article references! Go Opera Go!
"This would suggest that either Windows isn't puling in the surfers or that the OS sales numbers are not quite what they seem."
Firstly, why does it suggest Windows isnt pulling in surfers? Surely a large proportion of the Firefox & Chrome users are running Windows still, just not using IE as their main browser?
Secondly, It's all well and good equating sales of Win7 to using IE8 but having visited many domestic customers since the EU enforced the "Browser Choice" on European and UK users, most of the IT illiterate seem to see the word "Google" on the screen and automatically think that is the one they need because its the only one they've heard of, not realising they are actually installing Chrome as their default browser.
I wouldn't be suprised if a large number of these Chrome installs are as a result of this, whether thats a good or bad thing...
The public could stop using IE tomorrow, but it still wouldn't matter. IE6 is *THE* standard browser because it is what is used in the corporate enterprise. It's a pain in the ass, I agree, but that's the way it is. We may see uptake of IE8, but that still won't really help. It'll be running in "quirks" mode to support all those sites coded for IE6 that people are too scared to change (or can't because they don't have the code, it's all proprietary and the vendor has gone bust - this is why you need to buy open source!).
FF, Opera et al are pissing into the wind if they thing they will get anywhere in the corporate world given there current support for roll-out etc. And why would any corporate install another browser when Windows comes with IE "for free" and IE can never be uninstalled? The likes of FF don't even make it easy for corporate roll-outs or to respect group policies etc. They just don't care about the corporate world - the first browser to actually address this *may* have a chance; but I am not holding my breath for someone to create such a thing.
I displike IE for its lack of standards compliance and I utterly despise IE6. But I know the reality of things, it will be here for a long time yet.
Since when have enterprise users defined what the standard browser is? For intranet systems and business to business sites yeah, fair enough, but for the other 70%+ of the internet why would any developer bother targeting a browser whose users generally aren't even supposed to view their sites. The IE6 market share alone should be enough to tell you it's not the standard browser.
There's stats, stats and then there stats. Every website I have done must support IE6. Every customer I have worked with, uses IE6. Every solution I have seen must support IE6. Every...well, you get the idea. I don't like it, but that's the way it is.
As for Window 7....if it can't run IE6, corporates will not upgrade. Too risky. I really wish I was joking.
So you're saying your personal development experience trumps the results from every major stats provider then?
If you work primarily on systems intended for enterprise clients then yes, you'll have to support IE6, but my point was that the relatively small number of sites aimed at people using enterprise networks to access the web doesn't define the standard browser. How can a piece of software with less share than 3-4 (depending on who's counting) of the other products on the market be defined as the standard? It's simply the lowest common denominator, and when a site as ubiquitous as youtube says it's going to stop supporting it then you can safely assume plenty of other consumer facing systems will definetly be worrying less about it as well.
it works. I can browse the web, etc....
What more do you want?
I recently tried using firefox after getting sick of having to remove the atdmt cookies when using IE. I found the number of tracking cookies increased significantly using firefox, even after adding-on additons supposed to stop them and increase security.
It doesn't really matter what browser most of use.
The atdmt cookie seems to be particularly virulent in that if is the only cookie that makes through my defences, and it usually 'infects' sqllite.cookies. It is very annoying when AVG keeps popping up windows to tell you that the cookie has been found.
I don't really understand how this cookie keeps getting added to my system as I have set my browser not to accept third party cookies etc. But then it is a MickySoft advertising cookie, so I suspect a devious delivery method.
In the best traditions of an evil empire the atdmt cookie is an opt-out cookie. Now where have I heard that phucking BS before…..
"it works. I can browse the web, etc....
What more do you want?"
I never had a problem with feet, they got me exactly where I wanted to go.
Until I wanted to go somewhere quickly...
Unfortunately, the analogy ends there - my feet have never crashed or allowed criminals to access my bank details.
somehow the CSS was being borked, and a panel wasn't showing which had an input field in or something ... I know it prevented me logging in.
Anyway the point was I went into my local branch (because the website had no proper "contact us" feature, or rather the "proper version" - where they can reply to you - was only available when you were logged in [keyboard error, press F2 to continue]) to complain, and a week later got a *letter* back telling me that I should be using IE under windows, and anything else was my bad luck, or words to that effect.
If car manufacturers tried to insist their customers only use BP petrol, or TV manufacturers only guaranteed their sets to work with BBC, there'd be an outcry.
"Oh yeah, Internet Explorer!
I used to use that one..."
So did I - because my boss made me.
Fortunately, I was a web developer at the time and was allowed to install every browser under the sun.
Experience has taught me not to touch IE dev with a shitty stick and to avoid using IE as a browser whenever possible. I've managed without it for the last 6 years...
Large corporates demand you use it - PCs are locked down. One excuse is that Sharepoint works better with it. The other is they don't want to "support" two browsers.
So, until those corporate types who have the attitude "no one ever got fired for imposing Microsoft" are in control, share will not drop below 50%.
OTOH - who else has a Windows 64 bit browser !
Of not wanting to pay to fix something that isn't broken. Even if you don't change a single line of code, you still have to pay to test all of your web apps to make sure they still work properly.
Certainly where i work, even if there was a change, and IE6 stopped being used, we certainly wouldn't switch to a browser other than a newer IE, as all the web apps have interfaces to other systems, those interfaces are generally in the form of activex controls. Browser based applications weren't chosen to be portable, they were chosen because, at the time, they looked better than native windows applications.
Without a significant rebuild of the overall software estate, there's no way anyone would take the risk of re-writing huge swathes of code without a damn good reason.
I think the browser choice helped the demise of IE 8, letting none techies realise the different browsers in the wild. If nothing else opera and safari will see someone take them up. (Chrome have billboards advertising their stuff)
Now if FF could just get their new mobile browser on my phone to run flash, I would be a happy boy. Instead of their "hardware reasons" for not having it.
My workplace has finally dragged itself out of the 12th century and installed IE8 instead of the tortuous IE6 we suffered under for so long. I was initially delighted, it runs about twice as fast (though still about a quarter the speed of Chrome which I use at home).
But the user interface is still really clunky. The Close button on each tab is so small you have to really think about where you're moving the mouse, unlike Firefox or Chrome where you just think "close" and your hand does it by itself. Also the various menus and toolbars encroach on the viewing area, meaning I have to spend a lot more time scrolling.
Glad to hear the masses are starting to come to their senses.
Paris because she wrote IE.
> "Microsoft has claimed Windows 7 is its fastest ever selling version of Windows"
>
> Could that be because their last effort was so abysmal that there was a pent-up demand?
It's because there are now more IBM-compatible PCs out there, so if 100% of them bought Windows in 1995 then that would be less than if 25% of them bought the latest offal^H^Hering.
...there was an overwhelming backlash against vista, yet it turned out not to be shit (it was nothing like what it was hyped to be, yet it was better than XP, which is all that matters if you're choosing which to get
and yet idiots continue to say it's shit, just because the media tells them to ;)
'Firefox, once the biggest threat to IE, has hit a plateau'
I honestly don't think it would have if they had sorted the stability issues that have plagued recent releases. Of the people that I know that run Firefox most of them suffer regular crashes now (whereas it used to be solid). I would rather run FF, but the continuous problems with it have recently driven me to Chrome, much as I hate to feed the Googlemonster.
I and several others have raised the issues on the Firefox forums only to see our posts deleted without explanation and I have hopefully installed each new release only to find the random crashes persist.
I guess it's my heap of shit computer, too--the one on which applications other than Firefox happily run for several months at a time without incident, interrupted only by hardware upgrades, power outages, and the occasional powering-down and unplugging to avoid lightning damage (we get a lot of good zappy fun here in the summer, so much so that there's a lightning laboratory within driving distance).
Many a time I've sat down to have myself a nice cup of internet only to find that Firefox has disappeared from my desktop. Where could it have gone? Oh, look, a corefile! There's where it went and hid. You silly thing, you. Let's see what part of you caught fire this time. Eww, what a mess. Let's not show this stack trace to the houseguests; they've just eaten.
I don't have all that many plugins (NoScript is all I bother to install), because I usually don't go more than six or eight months without blowing away my .mozilla directory to resolve some obnoxious problem, like the "Save As" dialog crashing. Often it's because some stupid extraneous XML file needed to be deleted. Firefox excels in destroying itself in the course of just sitting there undisturbed while I sleep.
And, yes, I am using Firefox 3. I had hoped, naïvely, that it would behave better than Firefox 2. It sucks a tad less memory, but is no less buggy.
Personally, I am wondering whether browser market share is still relevant - especially on the desktop. As browsers become more standards compliant and web sites/applications become more standards aware it really doesn't matter which browser you are using. How do MS care whether you look at Facebook in Firefox, Chrome or IE? As for tweeting: I believe everybody does that through downloadable apps outside of the browser anyway...
No, I think Google is the real winner out of all of this. Because whilst the world and it's regulators have been running after MS for the last 15 years Google has snuck in there and ensured, that with the exception of IE, all other major browsers default to the Google search engine and no one so much as raises a tweet about it.
Google IS the new MS, but worse, because they are much better at hiding that fact!
[Where's the Evil Google icon?]
"Google IS the new MS, but worse, because they are much better at hiding that fact!"
Google software hasn't yet exposed the contents of my hard-drive to world+dog.
Yes, they've had some security scares and accidentally given data away but they're still amateurs compared to Microsoft. It's not so long ago that a colleague of mine demonstrated a Win exploit that allowed him to effectively wipe the hard-drive on the test machine...
I won't touch IE again unless I have no choice (ie at work) it's that simple.
"Yes, they've had some security scares and accidentally given data away but they're still amateurs compared to Microsoft."
Privacy with Google worries me far more than that of Microsoft.
But my point wasn't about privacy, but abuse of market position.
.... I can then type format c:
ZOMG Windoze is so unsecure.
Most of these "exploits" are either proof of concept that are so hard to reproduce in the wild that they are no threat or they require an idiot in order to be effective (hey, I don't run anti-virus, I have no firewall and I install all these cool apps that I get from dubious porn sites to make my machine run better)
@AC if you want respect for this world ending exploit ... links please
"This would suggest that either Windows isn't puling in the surfers or that the OS sales numbers are not quite what they seem."
All recent PC's we've installed have come with Win7 licenses but have been downgraded to XP. Simply because the applications used do not work on Win7.
Given how many PCs I see come with Windows 7 onboard, I'm not necessarily sure "sold" is the correct word here.
Is it a Win7 "sale" if you buy such a machine, take it home, format the harddisc, drop Ubuntu on it?
I believe the Windows7 licence verification is quite a bit more agressive, so it would be within Microsoft's capabilities to say, to an exact number, how many machines have ACTIVE licences. But they don't appear to, preferring instead to refer to sales. Is there a message here?
Yes.. Your Ubuntu install is still counted as a Windows sale unless you demanded a refund for the unused license. So get phoning the place where you bought the PC.
Microsoft have been able to account for pretty much every licensed and activated copy of Windows for ages. Just as Apple have been able to tell the exact number of iPads that have been sold to end users. But shipped figures are always much bigger, so those are the ones that get publicised.
"Microsoft has claimed Windows 7 is its fastest ever selling version of Windows, with 100 million licenses."
Perhaps something to do with Vista being crap and support for XP having been EOLed, along with a lot of the hardware running 95/98/2k finally giving up the ghost (I still see a fair number of these)
As others have said, it'd be good to see the number of _active_ licenses. Consumer agencies stomped on various websites claiming XYZ users without indicating activity levels a long time ago.
When will consumers figure out that the toy in their happy meal is not free.
The toy (IE) costs money just like everything else in the bag. But, fools continue to buy the happy meals thinking they get a toy for free.
Instead, consumers should be insisting upon a $35 discount to leave the toy there. Fools don't.
Starting with Windows XP:
1. Open explorer.exe in a hex editor.
2. Get various drunken friends, disgruntled ex's, family pets and farmyard animals to take turns mashing the keyboard with a pineapple.
3. Click save.
4. Sell the rights to use whatever you just made for £150 per user (don't test it yourself because it's probably crap/broken and you don't need the stress of finding that out)
First off IE 8 is a fast browser I have had more crashes with Firefox then with IE 8. Now as for Vista the problem with Vista is Microsoft waited too long to release it and further more companies that supply hardware,and software never got on board with driver and software updates for Vista. Also moronic customer's felt there old crappy XP based PC's would run a system that was 7 years behind Windows Vista. In short Windows XP was just out to long and people got to comfortable with it and when Vista came out 7 years later (January 30, 2007 retail release date) there old pc's should of been scraped.
Now Vista SP 2 is stable and more secure then XP will ever be, Windows 7 is Windows Vista with extra bells and whistles but the core the guts is still Vista. Now 2010 Windows 7 comes out and to be honest maybe it should not but now Microsoft understands the mistake of leaving a system like Windows XP out to long. Maybe Microsoft should follow the linux way and just provide distro updates like Ubuntu did.
I currently run Vista Business SP 2 on a AMD 620 quad core and I have never ever had one issue with this system it runs almost 16 hours a day everyday.
Sometimes people who are technical just talk out of their backsides to much.
"Sometimes people who are technical just talk out of their backsides to much."
Irony alert.
You're saying that people should replace a PC that they are perfectly happy with ("comfortable" is the word you used), just so that they have the tech specs to run a new operating system?
Now I may be dangerously insane here, but I thought the purpose of an operating system was primarily to provide an abstraction layer between hardware and software. The software that you run being the most import part of the system, to you.
Now if XP and Windows 7 are both capable of running that software and you already have XP (which you are comfortable with) - please tell me why you should spend a bunch of money upgrading all your shit just to run that same software in a new and unfamiliar environment?
Reasons like "better security" are just a bunch of dick waving. Every OS ever has had better security than the last one. Who cares. Take some basic steps to protect yourself and you won't get owned. It's not hard. (And if you ever want real security you can always switch to Linux which doesn't insist on artificially inflated tech specs - but that's another debate)
If you need more speed, replace the hardware not the OS, stupid. Oh wait? Licence agreement got you trapped? TS, should have gone with Linux.
The best MS can do is sit on their hands until the cracks in the walls have advanced to the roof coming down on their heads, and then they steal all the ideas from the other people who have put them into their browsers...
And call it their own great innovations.
Dropping below 60%...
While I have no intention of getting or finding out much about Win 07 - if you have not noticed - that Microsoft have kept the very same text editor (Notepad) and the same shit calculator that came with Windows 3.11.... right through to XP....
And the same "innovative stupidity" came with their browsers - that was until Firefox made significant inroads... so they copied everything from Firefox... including an MS version of the fanbase app's sites....
Microsoft is so shit, that after Opera and Firefox had pop-up blocking, it took MS another 5 - 7 years after this, to put it in their shit hole browser....
And as a complainer about the issue, the people in MS were too stupid and too heads up their own arses to act on the complaints...
So their browser is plummeting in the user stakes?
Hmmmmmm If they treat consumers with gross contempt and pure arrogance, and bullshit their way out of it with the most barefaced spin and lies, well so be it; corporate arseholedom always comes back to bite them.
"One day the cock of the sewerage pond - next day face down in it".
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