IE market share plummeting! (Or is it?)
Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share is absolutely falling. The question is, by how much?
I've reported before that Internet Explorer (IE) drops 5 percent market share points each year, while Mozilla Firefox gains 5 percentage points per year. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that IE's market share may be dropping more precipitously than previously reported, falling to 60 percent share in June 2009 instead of the 68 percent share expected.
Or is it?
The answer may depend on the source of the information, and the reliability of its data. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler uses StatCounter data to discern a 60 percent share for IE but, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, this data may not hold up.
For Microsoft's sake, it had better hope not, as this chart compiled by Dotzler shows:
Internet Explorer market share falling faster than reported?
(Credit: Asa Dotzler (Data from StatCounter))That's not the sort of chart with which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to sweeten his coffee in the morning.
Net Applications, the other big source of browser market share data, still hasn't posted its results for June 2009, noting that it is trying to make sense of "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics."
Given that market share data isn't a one-month phenomenon, it's not necessarily helpful to celebrate or fret over the June data, especially since much of the market share share data is going to get skewed in the summer months, anyway. For example, given Firefox's disproportionately large following in Europe, coupled with Europe's disproportionately long holiday season in the summer, I'd expect to see Firefox drop some percentage points against IE through August, only to rebound strongly in September.
Regardless of short-term variations, one thing seems clear: Firefox is gaining on IE. Microsoft spent too long enjoying its browser dominance, and not enough time innovating. It's starting to pump R&D dollars into IE again, but it's not yet clear whether its monolithic approach to browser development can compete in the long term with Mozilla's community-developed Firefox.
Microsoft needs to compete again, or risks seeing even StatCounter's data understate just how quickly it's falling.
Mozilla, for its part, faces a host of new challenges. It can't afford to waste much time with back slaps and high-fives. The browser has become the center of computing. Microsoft isn't going to give up easily, nor will Google or Apple.
Game on.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
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- performance (e.g. JavaScript)
- standards compliance (e.g. acid3. Try on IE & compare to other browsers: acid3.acidtests.org)
- new web functionality (e.g. HTML video)
Hopefully, the migration away from IE will continue, until IE catches up (if it ever does).
As of now, when I tested, FF 3.5 shows 70/100 on acid3.acridtests.org
and HTML Video is still being worked on as part of HTML5 with many competeing directions and currently plugins like flash and silverlight are here to stay and fill that gap much better than native html will ever will...
I don't have that much space here. :)
Let's be honest. IE 8 is better, but still not nearly standards compliant. If you're a conscientious web developer attempting to be W3C compliant, you still have to make accommodations for IE. What IE does to graphics and text that appear fine in other browsers is embarrassing. Plus, it is slow in comparison to other modern browsers, despite the claims they try to make on their info section (or from puking women).
It won't be possible to show all of them because most sites have been hacked up to work in Tridents terrible rendering engine (IE engine if you don't know)
Standards-wise, a lot of sites would not show up correctly in IE without all those lovely hacks we have had to develop for the past decade+
Reason this happened was due to MS monopoly in browsers in the first place, and which led to vendor lock-in because they HAD to support the terribly buckled renderer.
Thankfully Microsoft were smart (stupid) for designing conditional comments.
Now i can provide a basic version and advanced version all in one! Huzzah!
You are seriously defending IE8?
Not only does it LOOK ugly, it functions terribly.
If only everyone would actually force people to use another browser.
If everyone done it at once, IE really would die, besides those stupid sites that still use ActiveX.
Just a simple message would do.
"You are using an unsupported browser, please download one of these:"
Then have a list of browsers. (detect OS as well)
I know people say it wouldn't work, but it WOULD work, it really would, if people wanted to access their favorite sites and got this message, they WOULD update after seeing it about 5 times in a row.
We can dream... death to IE... one day.
ACID3 isn't a standard recognized by any standard bodies like the W3C and should not be treated as such. I'll let Mike Shaver of Mozilla speak to it's value for driving useful platform features for browsers : http://shaver.off.net/diary/2008/03/27/the-missed-opportunity-of-acid-3/. In fact, Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the W3C's CSS 2.1 test suite than any other browser at time of launch (note : I haven't checked if FF 3.5 has caught up). CSS 3 is not yet a ratified standard and will change before it is finalized.
Performance : In Internet Explorer 8 we focused on improving page load times which are a much more meaningful measure of browser performance for users than focusing on benchmarking a single subsystem like JavaScript. You can see how we perform against top sites in this video : http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/videos.aspx?mname=IE8_Perf_Test2 and our methodology in this whitepaper http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cd8932f3-b4be-4e0e-a73b-4a373d85146d. Script processing accounts for about 8% of the time spent rendering the top 25 sites worldwide, focussing only on script doesn't help users. We also looked at AJAX (i.e. script heavy sites) and learned that still only 25% of the rendering time is spent in JavaScript. We'll see more and more script heavy sites over the next few years but the reality of the market we released Internet Explorer 8 into is one where script is important but not the only thing that needs to be performant.
New Web Functionality : Like CSS3, HTML 5 is not a complete standard yet and will continue to change until launch. For example, just last week the recommendation that OGG formats be the default for <audio> and <video> was brought into question. It's risky for a browser vendor to support a standard before it's complete because if it changes and other browsers implement the changed version, the earlier browser becomes incompatible. IE8 introduced a number of new web functionality including Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search (made available under creative commons licenses) and also implemented HTML 5 features like DOM Storage and Connection Events where we felt that we could offer functionality that would be genuinely useful to developers today.
James
James: you said it was risky implementing some CSS3 and HTML 5 features because they might be moving targets, yet you said you implemented some HTML 5 features as you felt they would be useful for developers... I think that's a bit inconsistent... There are a number of CSS3 features, for example, that -- in my opinion and experience -- would be useful to a lot more developers/designers than the HTML 5 features you did develop (for the current market -- which, as you also noted, will change). For example, box-shadow, text-shadow and CSS gradients, rgba to name a few. That doesn't take away the usefulness of the HTML 5 features that were added to IE8; it just makes your point a bit inconsistent...
All in all, I really hope IE6 and, to some extent, IE7 vanish really quickly. Can't see that happening, but if it could, web development would be a lot more fun and productive...
Or even have an embedded IE6 engine (plus the sandbox) so they can still use the apps without the need to modify the documents in any way.
And in the main options, there could be a rules page to specify which websites will be rendered in IE6 mode with ActiveX enabled.
Also, the usual interfacing with policy manager, ability to disable it completely, or disable changing the options, etc.
You could even go as far as auto-detecting ActiveX and asking to switch over to IE6 rendering mode. (with a tickbox to remember the decision)
Also, agreed on ACID3 and HTML5, it is a huge mess at the moment. Hopefully it won't take too long to fix it all...
I'm beginning to think W3C are losing grasp of what they are meant to be doing...
It would be very nice if IE8 were not awfully slow (like in "watching paint dry") when configured for 125% scale ("large fonts"); check for example www.woodcentral.com or http://blog.woodworking-magazine.com/blog in such mode; try to scroll. It will eat memory like crazy and freeze while loading http://blog.woodworking-magazine.com/blog. Oh, and when I forced it to 100% scale, it switches to 125% momentarily when going to another page (after clicking on a link; you can see that when click on google search results, and in other pages, such as http://www.woodcentral.com/cgi-bin/handtools.pl).
Also where I work, all of our programs that we use function with only IE and no other browser so we have to use it. This is the choice of the company that makes our software not us, also in business most companies still use IE as the main browser.
IE is so embedded in society still that it would take a long time for change to set in. I personally like Chrome over the other browsers but some things work in IE that do not work in Chrome.
As a web developer if you do not develop for IE at the moment you are really alienating your potential audience. IE still holds the greatest majority in number of people that use a certain browser at the moment and looks to be for a long time yet.
Web applications shouldn't be written to ANY browser. They should be written to standards, with the understanding that very minor quirks might pop up eventually because no programmer is perfect and there will always be some minor non standard issues that are legitimate mistakes. As long as those quirks are treated as bugs and the companies producing the browser works to minimize them from version to version. IE has WAY more non standard issues than fall into that category.
I am glad Chrome and Firefox are taking market share. I'm glad about Firefox because it forced Microsoft to start innovating. I honestly think the greatest thing open source has to offer to the software world is turning basic software into a commodity and thereby forcing the proprietary versions of those programs to becomes more than a commodity to compete. Long live competition.
Google, and Drupal, and any other number of web application companies have proven you can write wonderful cross browser web apps, and companies that choose not to support standards should be shoved out of business. Sadly the same laziness and focus on short term profit over long term expense that drove so many people/companies to only support IE 6 when they could get away with it is preventing businesses from moving these platforms to a more robust code base, and shame on them.
The point is that when all was said and done back in the middle to late '90's Internet Explorer had became *the* "standard" to code against and continued to be so for several years after as there were no real competitors in the browser market at that time. I'm not saying it was right to continue this practice well into the first decade of the 21st century but it does explain why companies and to a certain point, many web developers, have stuck with IE as the main browser to code against. As long as business world requires IE to render their proprietary and sometimes non-proprietary online programs then IE will survive.
And, of course, the USA is always the last to adopt to "new" and better standards of any type (said by a tried and true American). ;)
A fine example of how difficult it is change the way people (mostly spelled "companies") do things.
The logic goes something like: 1) These many payroll, HR, sales, etc applications are working well and will be expensive to modify, upgrade to use more modern browsers. Thus these companies are going to keep IE6 for this purpose. 2) More and more public web sites are going to not work with IE6 or other outdated browsers. 3) There is no official or 'safe' way to install two different versions of IE on a workstation. This could very well lead to a future where cooperate works are going to need two browsers on their system, one for the legacy IE6 applications and one for the rest of the world that can be equally necessary for their jobs. And the only way for a conservative IT manager can do this is to use an alternate browser for the second.
And in response to Quasi. IE 2.0-4.0 didn't trouce Netscape at all. I was an avid net user and an avid Netscape user back then. IE's market share was abysmal till 5.0. 4.0 was the first browser they produced that even teetered on usable, and 5.0 was the first browser where they made any meaningful gains on Netscape. 6.0 was a solid browser when it came out, and Netscape was stumbling horribly under the care of AOL/Time Warner. When 6.0 hit the point where 7.0 should have come out there was literally no competition left. It didn't happen nearly as early as you state though, and while the W3C was by no means tightly organized in those days there was a lot of decent standard they published that MS completely ignored. Even de facto standards like Java they intentionally changed. This is not a situation of everyone choosing to code for IE 6 because there was nothing else and oh well that's not really MS's fault. IE 6 could have been much closer to today's standard than it is, even Redmond didn't have the information necessary to hit the target perfectly they could have gotten in the same zip code with what was available at the time, and they didn't even get in the same state. From the sound of it they're paying for those choices, and I say thank goodness.
I am not one of those people who thinks Microsoft is the evil empire and should topple. I however do think they are a company started by individuals of questionable moral makeup to begin with (I hold the same opinion of Apple by the way), who were then given enough unilateral market power to corrupt St. Thomas. Needless to say the results were predictable. I don't want to see Microsoft to go away, but I want them to loose enough market share and market control to force them into more competitive customer oriented business practices. That shift is starting, but some old guard need to be shaken out of their belfry for them to get much farther.
I don't remember that there were standards when IE6 ws released....
and many companies still use IE6 becaue they have a cetain level of control and their web apps and some internal apps are build on IE's engine just like a lot of windows apps that makes use of ie's engine. it would cost a boat load of money to rewrite those apps. it still works for them. IE8 has been released with dual engines, and it's a good browser.
There is NO reason to do that.
W T F ?????????!!!!!!!
Quite a lot of were originally developed to IE4 & 5, when there weren't many standards. Enterprises preferred IE for several reasons, number 1 was that Microsoft were an incumbent supplier of desktop software. Netscape started charging for Navigator, they didn't maintain backwards compatibility, they didn't adhere to the standards that did exist and their product was slower than IE. Then it was purchased by AOL, that destroyed whatever corporate loyalty it might have still had. Migrating IE 4->5->6 is/was fairly straightforward, but going to 7 is/was not so easy, that's why corporates have stuck with 6.
63% IE
26% FF
11% Other
This is for a website with 250,000 visitors a month.
I have no insight as to why I see these kinds of numbers, but it seems that Firefox is hot among the techies, but not with the general public. More importantly, it suggests that Firefox might even be on the decline among non-technical users, while business users are increasing usage of IE.
My statistics are certainly no more valid than the next person's, but these are what I am seeing. What I think it important is that folks have to consider that the browser statistics cannot be reported as a single number. Different sites attract different kinds of users and, in my own experience, the type of user dictates which browser is used.
That's not to say that IE isn't losing significant share over the long run.
Matt, this is a chart I trust much more : http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/historical_view.html
It's time to kick Microsoft out of our Web life. Permanently.
Riveting journalism.
I can see why the other browsers are competing to replace IE, but I can't see why MS should be concerned about their internet browser. They're not making a dime off IE and in fact *spend money* on it, even though it's free.
To me, it makes more sense for MS to stray from their browser department and focus on the things that make them money -- their operating system, for instance.
In IE's case, it get's to set the default homepage and search engine to Bing, and the more people that use Bing, the more money it makes on add revenue, increases the chances of Bing's success, etc.
And just because something is free doesn't mean it's not a market. Would you say that NBC, ABC, CBS don't have market share or don't compete in a market because OTA TV is free?
Whom pays the browser companies a fraction of a penny? The advertisers? They do not get paid unless you click on the banner. Just simply searching a web search engine doess not make the search company any money. If I am wrong, please provide proof, other wise quit talking out your ass.
As for IE, I can set the default search page to anything and I have only gone to Bing once just to see what it was like. It is by far inferior to Google.
IE is installed (currently at least) by default on Windows. Windows has a 90% or so share of the PC market.
For FF to take so much share means users are positively *choosing* to go and download something to *replace* what they already have.
It really says something when Jo Public, is prepared to go and replace their free browser. It also means their eyes are now open to the possibilities of other really "Free" and Open Source Software.
That's what is scaring the sh*t out of MS.
What would be good to know is the percentage of FF vs IE on non-corporate machines. The Enterprise are - as was already mentioned - stuck in a time warp on IE6 in many cases, but at least a version of IE almost completely. I bet the percentage of FF usage where the user *can* choose is far higher than the general statistics suggest.
So long as Google is raking in billions in search and using that to fund projects that compete with Microsoft, Google and the browser are a threat to MS. The browser should be very important to Microsoft so that it can "tame it" as much as possible. Microsoft's business is not at risk for the moment, but they do not want to get blind-sided one day when dozens of major companies drop Office and move to Google Docs.
All that said, I just wonder how real the threat is. Bing definitely has the potential to steal users away from Google. I've been using it and, quite frankly, it's pretty good, though I still give Google a higher rating in search accuracy. But for Google to really hurt MS, it must eat into those Office profits. Office is expensive, but I've used it for years and really love the product. I've tinkered with Google Docs and it's at a stage that reminds me of "Word Pad" or "Write" on Windows -- nobody standardized on those feebies. Google Docs might have the potential, but it has such a very long way to go.
Perhaps the biggest challenges Google has is the fact that the only programming language available to them is JavaScript. The notion of using the right tool for the job just went right out the window. JavaScript is the only tool for the job, which is why Google is working so hard to improve performance. But, so what if performance is improved? OK, Google Docs runs better, but writing tons of code in JavaScript is a nightmare, which is why Google introduced tools to allow conversion of Java code to JavaScript. Now, this all works... but my head is hurting. Developing for the browser is still a big pain and it needs to become a better development platform.
I'll give credit to Google for really making some great advances, but the browser really needs an overhaul to be an application platform, it needs support for more languages, ... well, I'm not sure we will ever see browsers perform consistently. Since when have I ever seen the various browsers perform consistently?
It really does benefit application developers knowing that when they write Windows code, it can run on 90+% of the desktops on the market. It's a huge market. The browsers, including the versious releases of each one, is a moving target that is very frustrating. That's why we hear calls for getting rid of IE, for example. It would not matter whether we get rid of IE or firefox. What is needed is a single browser, like we had a single operating system. Until that day, programming for the web browser will remain a chore.
I'm sure the Firefox usage on the cnet site is over 40%, while on yahoo it's probably 20% (or maybe less).
If IE = Win for Win aquires updates only through IE, then has Win also gone down in usage? Interesting... where is every one going? Mac? Linux? or has usage gone down because everyone is getting laid off and no longer using computers?
Very insightful. ;)
Well the answer to that is NO because Windows automatic updates only uses IE's engine, not the browser itself. These are two different things, although IE also relies on the engine. Windows does not need the .exe known as IE to update itself. Why do you think there can be a Windows 7 E version in Europe and still maintain updates?
The reason that market share is important can be derived from those earlier comments about business applications that only work with IE. If all browsers were compatible with all web sites/applications, then the only benefit that Microsoft would derive from having IE on Windows is that it would make Windows a more complete system for users. But, because there are compatibility issues, i.e. some sites only work with IE and IE is only available on Windows, this provides a way for Microsoft to extend and protect their desktop OS monopoly.
Personally, I refuse to do business on web sites that only work on IE, and take my business elsewhere.
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable - download link would not work in 3.0.11, was OK in IE 8 & its OK Firefox 3.5 (I just checked)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227111.400 - can't recall problem, seems OK in 3.5
http://www.keating.org.au/main.cfm - drop down menus don't work in Firefox 3.0.11 nor in 3.5. Works in IE8 native and compatibility modes, but not in Fx 3.0.11 or 3.5, not surprisingly its OK in a Firefox tab rendered with Trident via IETab -- the construction of the site is a bit "unusual"
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable - download link would not work in 3.0.11, was OK in IE 8 & its OK Firefox 3.5 (I just checked)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227111.400 - can't recall problem, seems OK in 3.5
http://www.keating.org.au/main.cfm - drop down menus don't work in Firefox 3.0.11 nor in 3.5. Works in IE8 native and compatibility modes, but not in Fx 3.0.11 or 3.5, not surprisingly its OK in a Firefox tab rendered with Trident via IETab -- the construction of the site is a bit "unusual"
While that is true for many companies, and I bemoan this fact, it is not true for many. For example, in my case, I have historically been _forced_ to use IE in some areas not by my own corporate I.T. policies per-se, but because the _entire ecosystem_ has had IE-goggles on for so long, I have to adapt to their stupid decisions.
I can't tell you how many software and hardware products have been produced by "enterprise vendors" which were never designed or tested with anything other than IE, or maybe IE and one other (now defunct) browser.
The whole thing is a catch-22. What has to happen (and is FINALLY now starting to happen) is that ALL the vendors, developers, webmasters, webhosters AND corporate entities have to stop thinking as though IE is the only browser in the world. EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY - they also cannot think that everything is fine just because they start testing with Firefox!!
Web designers and any vendor that produces a product that has an HTML/HTTP/HTTPS interface have to stop thinking the world revolves around a specific browser implementation(s), start educating themselves about standards, and write to the STANDARDS.
<rant> It's always tempting for any browser vendor, once they get some marketshare, to start thinking that the world revolves around them, and that they can start calling the shots. Netscape did it, Microsoft did it, and pretty soon Apple and Mozilla are going to do the same thing. Stop being a bunch of greedy self-centered SOBs and start acting like we're all participating in an interdependent COMMUNITY, instead of just your little proprietary playground to profit off of! </rant>
IE6 got 12 score out of 100. Fail
Firefox 2 Build 15 got 51 out of 100. Fail
Seamonkey 1.1.17 got 53 out of 100 Fail.
Test on Pentium 4 with 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM. Computer running 9 years old. My old computer born in year 2001 still going stronger! Solid DELL computer come with first Pentium 4.
But good news for Seamonkey is pretty stronger than Firefox 2. Both FF and SM equip with addons are Flashblock, Adblock Plus, and NoScript will help reduce processor pressure to low from high when load Java or Flash object. I stick with FF and SM. Yeah IE is too far sucks!
I will test my another computer for someday come with Dual Core. No need Quad Core due to highest price and one problem is overheat. I know so far. Stick with Dual core.
Hey Mozilla team please make SeaMonkey(SM) more strongest and fastest because more light than FF when new SM version come out something like SeaMonkey 2.x. Please speed up for SM. SM look like Windows 98 theme for good old times.
- by Nicholas_Bedworth July 11, 2009 6:43 PM PDT
- Many readers seem to have overlooked the fact that roughly 90% of Firefox's operating cash comes directly from Google in various ways. Community based? Hardly, at least not in terms of capital.
- Reply to this comment
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(53 Comments)See http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10028096-93.html for the details. Firefox can stay in business until the end of 2011, and they're entirely dependent upon Google for their existence. No Google subsidy, no payroll.
To me, using high-performance modern PCs to deliver poorly-designed analogies to book pages (illustrated books having been around for, say, a thousand years) that often require 6-8 feet of vertical scrolling (scrolls have been around for roughly 5,000 years) makes one wonder about the core metaphors behind the online UX.
James' (MSFT) comments about ACID 3 compliance are well-taken, along with the observations of the relatively minor role JS (or any script) performance has in a particular real-world scenario. The overall balance of features almost always most important. One other point, both IE and FF do a great job rendering text (especially on high-resolution displays). Some of the other browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, Web-Kit-based, put up significantly blurred text, and even digging into the settings to improve the rendering for LCDs (rather than, ahem, CRTs, anyone using CRTs out there?) only improves things slightly.
If a browser doesn't render type well, what's the point of all the other features? Web Kit is barekly OK on, say, 1024 x 768, but at typical consumer laptop resolutions these days, it's rather hard on the eyes.
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