IE Market Share Drops Below 70% 640
Mike writes "Microsoft's market share in the browser dropped below 70% for the first time in eight years, while Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history. It's too early to tell for sure, but if Net Applications' numbers are correct, then Microsoft's Internet Explorer will end 2008 with a historic market share loss in a software segment Microsoft believes is key to its business."
3 options (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Layoffs (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft won't be alone in that. Disappearance of microsoft will not be a happy event for nerds : it will be a disaster.
Hopefully consumers remain accustomed to paying for software even when microsoft dies, or the market that pays our salaries shrinks by 90% or so. Even if companies continue to pay it will still be a large portion that dies.
It will not at all be a happy event.
Re:Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
God, this article must be one of the crappiest in a long, long time. The december figures are already up!
Browser trends [hitslink.com]
MSIE 68.15%
Firefox 21.34%
Safari 7.93%
Chrome 1.04%
Opera 0.71%
Operating system trends [hitslink.com]
Windows 88.68%
Macs 9.63%
Linux 0.85%
iPhone 0.44%
The two line summary:
Firefox and Safari both take lots of market share from MSIE which is now way below 70%.
Macs have a huge one-month (0.8%) and two-month (1.4%) rise while Linux is flatline.
Re:Opera's low percentage. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Opera's low percentage. (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of us surf with Opera set to report as IE to bypass unintelligent browser compatibility tests...
But Opera has one drawback which is Java/javascript handling. It often doesnt handle sites that both firefox and IE handle fine. I dont know which is at fault but it is a pain >.
All in all though it is a dang nice browser :)
Re:Layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
The number of programmers employed to write shrink-wrap software aimed at consumers is a tiny fraction of the number of programmers writing software for use inside their own company.
Re:Layoffs (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, Microsoft would be delighted to hear about the browser stats for Game! [wittyrpg.com], then...
Based on unique hits to the front page:
Re:Opera's low percentage. (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering Opera's install base on mobile devices I would expect that number to be much higher. Considering its common configuration to mis-identify as IE to avoid website misbehavior, I predict that that number is seriously under-representative of the true marketshare. Also, never use statistics that are not explained. What does "70%" mean on this chart? 70% of visits (define visits?)? 70% of hits? 70% of unique IP addresses? 70% of traffic?
Re:For fucks sake people... please... (Score:5, Interesting)
Get over yourself already.
Used to be web *was* IE and people were reduced to fool web pages with bogus client ID to get working IE web code instead of terrible buggy netscape 4.x code or just simple "get IE" -banner.
2/3rd is still a lot but it was 90% a little while ago and it could be perfectly justified to develop a new site IE only.
With these figures, in 2009 new sites designed have even stronger reason to cater for the "other" demographic.
Too bad there's no credible alternative to vista or vista 2nd release in sight for your average gaming-oriented PC. I wouldn't use linux for general desktop stuff either, too much pain if there's no ideological reason to go there. And the other notable requires joining a cult with the membership fee charged in overpriced hardware.
Re:IE Almost 70% -- Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously? That is really freakin weird. Got any (english) links? Not disputing, just curious.
IE was better for a while and Apache hurt too (Score:5, Interesting)
This is really not a surprise. IE is an inferior product. It always has been. The market share it has received is solely attributable to the bundling with the Microsoft operating systems
This is not true at all. IE 1, 2 & 3 were not as good as Netscape Navigator and they suffered, but IE 4 was hands down better than other browsers. It mainstreamed a fully programmable DOM, where Netscape Navigator had what, document.write, and a bunch of junk about layers.
And, while we lament the death of Netscape, you do have to remember that while free IE may have killed Netscape on the client side, I'd be willing to bet that Apache utterly crushed Netscape on the server side. Does anyone remember Netscape web servers? Ah, that's a big negative. I remember even in the late 1990s our Sun admin was looking to replace Netscape web server with Apache... him and others like him really finished that company off.
The only direction IE ever could go was down. If Microsoft wants to change that then they need to do some serious work and start cooperating with the rest of world. Build a better product is the simplest way to put it.
This is very true. But you have to understand that the counterpoint to Microsoft's strategy is to get people to think about rich clients again and they are actually being rather successful with VSTO and Excel integration. I see lots of contract work with Excel front ends, instead of web front ends, these days. It's a crappy technology, but businesses pay for it.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
"I've never understood all the broohaha over browsers."
The browser is the gateway to all modern on-line consumer activity. If Microsoft controlled the browser, web sites would be forced to run Microsoft's IIS web server (because Internet Explorer would not behave, at all, with anything else). That would give Microsoft total control over all online commerce. Web sites would then have to pay Microsoft whatever it wanted, or cease doing business.
Microsoft would then tie it's browser and/or server into its other products. If you want to stay in business online, you have to run IIS. IIS, by the way, requires a Microsoft Office license pack. This is because Internet Explorer uses Microsoft Word to interact with IIS, but Microsoft only sells the Office License Pack For IIS in bundles of 100, and each remote connection uses one license. The Office License Pack For IIS also requires a functional X-Box Live account for each visitor to your web site. Next year, Microsoft will raise the bundle floor to 200. Why? Because they can.
Ntescape all over again (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Option 4: strong-arm users with silverfish, etc (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't mean to be mean but that makes no sense.
By de-facto standard you mean ubiquity.
Lets look at the history of ubiquity in the IT world. From the MS perspective.
MS office. ( expensive, copied, Google Apps, Open Office )
Windows. ( expensive, copied, OSX, Linux, Both UNIX varients )
IE. ( buggy, secutiry nightmare, Loosing ground fast to alternatives. )
ActiveX ( Attempt at ubiquity, buggy, security nightmare. Not copied )
A de-facto, ubiquitous standard has to maintain certain properties in order to stay in that postition.
1. Cost little to nothing
2. Be reliable
3. Be safe
4. Stay ahead of the competition in form and function
All of these points are in direct odds with MS style of doing business. Cash flow from any and all sources.
1. MS is learning that charging huge sums of cash for something is not working.
2. Reliability has always been a teer two priority for MS. Cash is first. Case in point IE, Vista.
3. Because of the market dominance it has always been the target of attack simply because of the huge install base thus high return on attack. And again for too long MS put money first then security and it's been regretting that ever since.
4. Why invest money in something to make it better when we have the market share. Case in point IE 4-5. But effectively stopping development they left the barn doors open.
It's all about the money. This has been the MS mantra for decades. Unfortunately they have completely missed so many opportunities for new cash flow streams. As they sat on the piles of money in their offices. Web search and advertising is the prime example.
Have they had any successes lately. Arguably the Xbox was a decent one. But that was a copy of competitors, so not their idea. Zune, copy again and a bad one. Who puts in a Jan 2009 bug? How the hell does something that dumb find it's way into the code base. IE 8, well this is a Firefox rip off. I don't think this will live long. IE 9 will be out shortly after. In the same way that Windows 7 is out shortly after Vista.
So MS is miles behind in the new de-facto, ubiquity race. It's not that FOSS is copying it's now leading in the standards front. Even Apple is using FOSS, (webkit).
Re:Layoffs (Score:3, Interesting)
I am also interested in this. My school district has been looking to cut costs by implementing energy conservation. This is laudable for many reasons. Getting off the MS bus is also appealing to me for a number of reasons, but I think the cost cutting would have the most impact if proposed.
Re:Yay! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not the worst thing that could happen to Microsoft, that would be keeping Steve Ballmer in charge indefinitely.
However, they lose leverage when significant portions of the population aren't using their browser. Remember, they can only compete through unfair means, they are too stagnant, too bloated and too atrophied to actually produce software that isn't years behind everyone else... all they can do is lie, cheat and steal marketshare. However, they are very good at that and have the resources, the willpower and the chutzpah to keep doing that for many years. Who's going to stop them? The Department of Justice? They are in MS's pocket as much as anyone.
Microsoft will hobble along for many more years, if not decades, before they become completely irrelevant as a business, but in terms of the state of the art, they haven't been relevant for years. Their only technological success these days is wholly based on their formerly good products that have been unnecessarily "upgraded" into the hopeless, obsolete mess they remain today, but are still shipped on 99% of computers sold, because, hey, they can force it.
If I were in charge, I would dump Vista and everything that reeks of the stink of it and go back to XP SP3 and start over. Take a product people actually like and want to use and move on, rather than trying to triage a product that almost no one wants and doesn't offer anything over XP. But that's me. I've used almost every Microsoft OS going back to DOS 1.1, and while a few upgrades were painful (DOS 3.0, Windows 95, NT 4.0 SP2 come to mind), they were generally really good (even when I wasn't expecting it) until Vista. That was the one that pushed me to Linux full time, and I haven't looked back.
Re:Layoffs (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I only see one post marked as troll before yours. It's valid too. There is nothing substantive in that post. Just accusations that I am a fanboy and my statements lack credibility. I don't think you will be modded as troll either, nor should you. Calling my post bizarre is pushing it a little, but the rest of your post is worth reading and responding to.
Falsehood my buttocks. Office 2007 is a buggy over priced piece of crap. I get more complaints about it crashing, load times, weird Excel stuff, etc. It was not stable when it was pushed out. Not by a long shot. With Outlook 2007 you had huge problems connecting a true Exchange server or a 3rd party emulated Exchange. Define "successful" too please. Just since a business can be successful in spite of MS's problems does not mean that the platform was stable and bug free.
Their productivity products are over priced and they ARE buggy. To say otherwise flies in the face of every tech and IT person out there. We know better and no amount of marketing is going to change all the calls we get about it. MS products don't become stable till SP3+. Wonder why....
Uhhh, no. Darth Vader had a "reputation" for heavy-handedness. Emperor Palpatine and Lord Sauron had reputations for "heavy-handedness". MS has a reputation like Aliens. You just can't reason with them sometimes and even whole squads of Marines can't deal with them. Orbital bombardment gets discussed as the only logical solution (low-level formatting).
Dealing with MS is like six year olds trying to win an argument with their parents. Ultimately, you are in the parents house, you WILL do their bidding.
Now whose statements are "bizarre". MS is not free. period. It's a slippery slope of lock-ins. One way or the other, you will be paying MS. As for eating VMWare's lunch, I find that highly dubious. VMWare is serious competition on the virtualization market. Their products are not buggy. They aren't easy, i'll admit that. Once you have it up and running and get past the high learning curve associated with virtualization, VMWare is actually a pretty good product.
I did not compare MySQL to SQL. There is no direct comparison. MySQL has more in common with Access then it does with MS SQL. I made a statement about the market in general. I was only stating that as far as databases went *GENERICALLY*, MS is not the only solution out there, or the most widely used. The "mom's recipe" sites as you put are more prolific than the sites that need that high-availability and high-transaction capabilities. As for the biggest sites? They don't use MS at all. They use their own custom solutions.
As for high availability and high-transaction sites (internal corporate ones or public ones) MS SQL does have competition from Oracle AND Firebird.
Firebird is being used on high-availability and high-transaction sites. As I stated, Firebird is quickly becoming capable of true clustering capabilities and there are 3rd party solutions that you can create to do it yourself. Free will always be cheaper than MS SQL. I mean my GOD, is it EXPENSIVE. When you are faced with tens of thousands of dollars in startup costs and free how ca
Re:Layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, you forgot their accessories division (Microsoft keyboards and mice) which will keep them afloat for many years to come!
I think, if anything, the internet will be their downfall. They just don't understand it. In the mid-90s, they tried to control the internet by marrying internet explorer to their OS. Yes, it screwed up standards and forced the internet to bend to their will for a while (IE only websites). I suppose it was great to sell boxes that way by practically having an exclusive market on the entire WWW working for them, but IE made no money on its own.
Then in the late 90s, it shifted it's attention to the holy grail of an internet Portal. MSN. It's target was yahoo. To make it apparent how serious it took this and for how long, within the last year they were trying to take over Yahoo. To demostrate their lack of focus, with the market crash, despite having a ton of cash lying about, they are not willing to buy Yahoo now. Less than 6-9 months later. I guess flailing around in the dark, they found another strategy beyond the internet portal.
But the internet marches on. It will be their death one day. Linux adoption would not have been possible without the internet. But more than that, someone else mentioned about how they would explain to their grandmother why the windows card game disk doesn't work in her linux box. It won't matter. That market is dead. Games are slowly splitting into two parts: hardcore gamer games where they need max hardware, or flash games which work on any platform readily. The middle market has eroded. Grandma is more likely playing online than off a CD these days. And the high end market, MS itself has made less important, with its consoles that are guaranteed to play. There will be always a PC gamers market, but it becomes less important with every console generation.
Lastly, Microsoft is pricing itself out of the market. I can either be a pirate and take what I need or I can pay through the behind a price for boxed MS while OEMs pay but a fraction of it. That means, eventally, with WGA, that less and less people tinker with the OS. While Ubuntu and others play friendly at installs, MS just assumes it's king and has no partition tools upon install. Nor is it's install disc readily a livecd either, unlike many linux distros. It's also not handling 64 bit too well imo. My one Vista Business install, I decided that 32 bit was no longer enough. Do they give me a 64 bit for free or a small fee? No, OEM copies cannot be upgraded cheaply, they want $$$. Yet, when I bought the computer, 32/64 bit had no price difference. It's just a case of MS wanting to extract money where it can, and in this case probably will cost more than the actual ram I want to upgrade with. Other than ram, these are things that the linux community will gladly give me free.
There will never be a year of the linux desktop. As this stastic shows, it will just keep creeping up before we realize what happened. The cracks in the wall are already there. I would say a dam bursting event is when Quicken or Photoshop list on their software Windows XP, Vista or Wine 1.0 (or whatever version) compatibility. Then you know things will get ugly quick for MS.
Good Exchange Replacement (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you give examples of good Exchange replacements?
Yes. Lotus Domino / Notes.
And no, I'm not joking. Lotus has come a *long way* with their new version 8.x stuff.
It works very well, is reliable, and even looks very good with an all-new user interface. IBM has been remarkably active in Lotus development the past few years and has made Lotus into a highly capable enterprise messaging and groupware system for the 21st century.
Yes, there have been many years of Lotus nightmare stories, and Lotus still does have a fairly steep learning curve, and its architecture is vastly different from Exchange.
It's as different from MS Exchange as Linux is different from Windows.
Re:Layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
How do they get these numbers ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to question how these survey companies get their results. Most of the people I know who use Firefox, also have IE on standby for fussy MS-centric sites (or updates). I use both because I have to test my work on IE, and because I'm tied to Outlook Webmail for certain things. Do I count as a Firefox user, an IE user or both ? Do they factor total pageviews, or do they narrow it down to "sessions" (IPs per time window) ?
If I consider just my own usage, I would count as both a Firefox and an IE user, but by pageviews it's probably 1000:1 for Firefox, as I only use IE when absolutely necessary. If I were to self-identify, I'd say I'm a Firefox user since I wouldn't touch IE at all were it not for my job.
The reality of things is these articles always quote a number from nowhere. They don't ever explain their methodology, nor their sources. The fact is, you can't really get an accurate tally because browsers don't offer you enough information to identify unique users, and more importantly your results are skewed by the nature of whichever sites' logs you're mining. Any result is, at best, a rough guess based on some convenient subset of the data.
Is it true that IE is losing out to other browsers ? Hell yes, I'm an eyewitness. Do we have tangible numbers to quantify that battle ? No, and we never will.
Whether Microsoft declines or not... (Score:3, Interesting)
They can't grow. That makes their stock a poor investment for the long term.
Re:Layoffs (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you actually USED Sharepoint?
It's just a bodged up collection of mismatched software components. Squeeze a lightweight (in terms of capabilities) document manager in with a half-assed web server and database, add a browser-based site designer and call it a collaborative tool...
Sharepoint is another product that has just been bashed out without no thought whatsoever into what the customers needs are, and no ingenuity.
Re:Layoffs (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, I'm strictly a developer; I really don't get into the IT world with boxen and routers and what not. You may have a terrible time of it but those dev tools MS puts out are the shiznit: polished, clean, and a pleasure to spend countless hours in front of. This puts starts in my eyes...so we are in two different worlds.
Oooohhhh! Shiny metals excite the crows!
You are a developer, and so am I. But I've also been a System Administrator, and I currently operate as a CIO. Because of my experience in all these areas, I can say that Microsoft does well in seducing developers. (Developers! Developers! Developers!) But it really falls short, and very, very badly in the System Administrator role, while Linux is a breeze to administer. So much so that we still don't yet have a full time administrator position for our company serving student data for over a hundred school districts, with 12 production servers.
Until you've spent a year or two administering for both do you really learn just how stark the difference is: night and DAY!
I have scripts to do backups, scripts to check for security updates and patches, scripts to monitor things like uptime, and all these scripts ensure that our servers are patched, backed up, and online at all times 24x7.
In my experience, the average uptime of a well-maintained, reasonable quality Linux server is about 99.95%, 24x7, even with otherwise commodity hardware, including patches, updates, and full-system backups. It usually takes significant effort to get Windows to do better than 99% when you include patches, updates, and full-system backups. (Most EULAs by providers covering Windows system specifically except these things, we don't)
Re:Layoffs (Score:3, Interesting)
I call bullshit. How is this "insightful" when it's just plain wrong (or at least several years out of date)? Many if not most Linux distros aimed at desktop users (e.g. Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandr*, etc.) have huge repositories and GUI frontends for accessing them, and these are entirely sufficient for "ordinary" users who just want to surf the web, read email, look at some photos, chat, write a term paper for school, etc. At least on my distro, there's no need to use a command line for any of this stuff.
As for dependencies -- the repos and package managers take care of these.
As for apps that need to be built from source -- puh-lease, you've got to be kidding me. This is by and large restricted to things that only developers/techies are going to be interested in -- or have any need for.
Re:Uncomfortable truth (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux will never take off as a desktop OS. There will be no year of the Linux desktop. It is a myth. Get over it. Move on.
I say this as a keen open source advocate, user, and developer (although I generally prefer BSDs to Linux), but it's important to have perspective. There will be no open source desktop, because that market is already dying. People are buying laptops now in preference to desktops, but a laptop is really just a desktop in a more convenient box. The big change is towards ubiquitous computing systems. What will your next TV or mobile phone be running? These are the important questions. If you can run an X server on your TV, and an app server on your phone, why would you want a 'computer'? When your HiFi can stream audio, your TV can stream video, and your mobile phone can control both, how many computers are you really using to watch a film? This is where open source needs to be aiming, and where it has a lot of innate advantages.