IE Losing 10% Market Share Every Two Years

mjasay writes "Mozilla's Asa Dotzler points to some interesting long-term trends in browser market share, noting that 'browser releases aren't having any major impact on the macro trends,' which suggests that a better IE will likely have little impact on its sliding market share. The most intriguing conclusion from the data, however, is that Firefox could surpass IE market share as early as January 2013 if Firefox continues to gain 5 percent every year, even as IE drops 5 percent each year. In the past, Microsoft might have fought back by tying IE to other products to block competition, but with the EU keeping a close antitrust eye on Microsoft and the US Obama administration keen to make an example of an antitrust bully, Microsoft may have few good options beyond good old fashioned competition, which doesn't seem to be working very well for the Redmond giant, as the market share data suggests. Microsoft's loss of IE market power, in turn, could have serious consequences for the company's efforts to compete with Google on the Web."

NetApplications source link

[Toe, The]

It seems this conversation might benefit from a link to the original source data:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1 [hitslink.com]

Developers anyone?

[WankersRevenge]

I tell you ... I remember back in the day when IE was the browser of choice for developers. Netscape was the nightmare. This was the age of table based layouts and one missed closed table tag stopped the entire page from rendering in Netscape. I don't know when that changed, but now, IE is monkey on my back. At my current gig (huge web shop) we do everything in firefox, and then work out all the kinks in the various IE browser. I absolutely loathe MS for not allowing customers have multiple versions of IE on the machines without jumping through some nasty hoops. And the debugging situation on IE is just abysmal. You'd figure if they improved the development situation on the browser, market share would improve from user experience and developer evangelization. They really need to step it up on all fronts to maintain their position not that I want them to. I think it will be a good thing to have browsers in competition with each other. I certainly don't want Firefox to become the big guy on the block. The only good thing about firefox is the extensions It's the only reason I use the damn thing. 3.0 was supposed to be lean and mean when in reality, it still eats memory like a fat guy at an all-you-can-eat buffet which kills my system. I have hopes for Chrome, but when I'm not in development mode (which is rare since I find myself using firebug all the time to remove annoying pictures from articles or alter inline js), I think Opera is the winner. This is coming from a guy who has been using Mozilla products since the .70 mozilla suite.

Re:Why does microsoft care?

[JasterBobaMereel]

It was to sell Windows and development tools and IIS

If you developed for Windows/IE/IIS then you use those, and people you sell to use them etc ...

You make Windows cheap to companies, make IE free, so they will pay to use MSSQL/IIS/Sharepoint and not use alternatives

Re:There's an Artificial Barrier

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting A.C. to keep my bosses happy...

I work *FOR* the government, and your statement is a half-truth. We are not allowing people to download IE 8.x because it is an unknown quantity. IE 7 is a mature product (yeah, yeah) and for all its faults, we know how it will react to our applications and internal websites.

Please keep in mind, this does not just apply to IE 8 though... any brand-new software must be evaluated and go through a shakedown process before being allowed into the general use.

Re:There's an Artificial Barrier

[Mojo66]

Corporations with policies of only using IE.
This is backed by the fact that on weekends, FF market share rises dramatically.

They just forced me to download IE8 on two boxes

[WillAffleckUW]

I didn't pay for the downloads, but my guess is they'll count me as an IE user - even though I only use it to download WinXP patches ...

Never trust metrics provided by a monopoly.

Just ask Intel. Or the EU.

Re:And Razors,

[Anonymous Coward]

My Philishave got about 70 blades on each wheel... that is about 200 blades in total.

Re:There's an Artificial Barrier

[Dog-Cow]

I always set my browsers to default to about:blank for the home page and have never seen them reverted by any patch.

Re:There's an Artificial Barrier

[slimjim8094]

Number 3 is "Improve your browser so people use it by choice, but can use any other one".

I use Firefox. But I could use Konqueror, Chrom(e/ium), or Opera (or IE8 in a virtual machine)

And you know what? Not ten years ago, that wasn't really a viable option. Everything had a 'works best in IE' button, and I was extolling its virtues.

Then... nothing changed for a long time.

Finally, the browser world is changing, improving, and becoming more interesting. Five years ago it was tabs. Can you imagine having a browser with no tabs now?

The web is a better place because of step 3.