IE Losing 10% Market Share Every Two Years 345
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."
The Obamma administration looking at Microsoft huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line: Politicians lie all the time, this is not news, this is normal operations. Look for the actions to back up any words. Given Microsoft's encamped army in Washington I doubt that sentiment will amount to much.
if if if (Score:1, Insightful)
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
A big surprise for me today... (Score:3, Insightful)
While at school (kindergarten) I overheard a teaching assistant say, "When I opened my Firefox, it still could not work..."
"I then called my sister who told me to install a new extension..."
I did not expect to hear this from the assistant more especially because it's IE all through at school and it's been since time in memorial.
Re:Date is wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be the normal way that word of mouth campaigns go. I wouldn't expect any of the alternative browsers to crack 50%. Not because they aren't good enough, but because there's competition. When IE and Netscape did it, there weren't really any other browsers available to the internet going public. It was also a smaller total market. In more recent times MS had to use it's power to force it up there. Getting above 50% is going to be tough considering the different needs of various people going online.
But that being said, even with numbers in the 30-40% range, that's much too large of a market for developers to ignore. Plus even if the figures don't get better for the alternatives, the best thing for everybody is going to be when IE 6 dies the horrific death it deserves, abomination that it was.
Re:There's an Artificial Barrier (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the reason for forbidding IE8 is more because it's quite difficult to get working installations of both IE6 and IE8 on the same computer. They have shit web apps that only work on IE6 and it's not so much that they don't want IE8, it's that they don't want to lose the crutch of IE6.
That about how things are at my work. I use Firefox, but IE 7 and 8 are blocked. I still need to use IE 6 for our web apps that don't work in Firefox.
Re:There's an Artificial Barrier (Score:3, Insightful)
But even that isn't working much. I mean, I'm working with federal govt. entities, and they are mandating that you can NOT download and use IE8.
I am by no means endorsing or defending IE8 but as someone familiar with corporate America, I can assure you that you are incorrect in your assumptions of motive.
Whenever a new "most significant digit" version is made in a new product, they wait until it's several subdivisions along before jumping to it. Simple reason is that in the 8.01 versions of weblogic or IE there are likely security issues. Which is why some places are still using Weblogic 8.14 or 9.XX instead of jumping to 10.1. They did the same thing with Firefox 2 and 3 where I work. It was "verboten" (god, I hate that crossover word, we have "forbidden" and "prohibited" already in English unless you're making a stupid Nazi reference).
I don't find it interesting, I find it a common precaution. Once it's hardened, they'll be on IE8 just like when they moved from IE6 to 7 (if they even have yet).
The elephant in the room for Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Often they will feel more for their new browser because they CHOSE it and make it their default, so when an updated IE comes in as part of an automatic update they may not even know it, as they will already be using a different browser. For many people, their memories of IE are loads of pop ups crashing the fucker, toolbars installing themselves and their home pages being changed without their permission. This is NOT a warm and fuzzy feeling to give any "new and improved" IE a second chance.
People who are already awakened to the fact that other browsers exist and almost all of them are better than IE will happily jump between different browsers, perhaps start with Firefox then try out Opera etc but they are not likely to go back to IE. IE is a one-way exodus and there's nothing Microsoft can do to stop it, all they can do is try to slow the flood by actually making a good product people WANT to use.....for once.
Don't you just love karma? This is what happens when you let your product stagnate and your users suffer for years because they have nowhere to go. As soon as they do have an escape vessel they rush for it and you're left trying to lock the doors to keep them onboard.
Extrapolation? (Score:4, Insightful)
From Life On The Mississippi:
One of the Mississippi's oddest peculiarities is that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two-hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much.
The water cuts the alluvial banks of the `lower' river into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank.
Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and `let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor `development of species', either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague--vague. Please observe. In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi 173-6 (1883)
Ignorati. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's utterly ignorant to believe trends will continue indefinitely in a linear manner. We're in a global recession caused in large part by this destructive thinking. People saw a couple years of double digit returns and assumed they'd continue indefinitely.
Firefox will rise at a linear rate until it captures its natural market share. After that point, it'll quickly level out. It's a basic first order process.
Firefox is a quality product, but acting as if the current meteoric rise is sustainable is to join the ignorati who have forgotten history, time and time again.
Re:browser wars are old news (Score:4, Insightful)
and no one cares anymore
Actually, there are plenty of developers who would love to be able to stop supporting IE. The amount of times things have to be tweaked and hacked just to please Internet Explorer, when the web site already works on most everything else (everything else: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera).
There is a probably a ceiling on Firefox's gains (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:There's an Artificial Barrier (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not convinced Firefox will make significant gains going forward, unless they can address some of the significant problems with browser -- no multi-threading, memory hog, and pretty much sucks on a Mac.
Chrome is set to make a huge dent in everyone's market once it becomes a rounded finished product, and there's a decent extension library.
Re:The browser is infrastructure (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:There is a probably a ceiling on Firefox's gain (Score:3, Insightful)
While this is certainly true, there is also the problem of moderately tech saavy
end users becoming tired of cleaning up after Microsoft. They are likely to take
the machines of these n00bs and lock them down so that they cause minimal trouble.
It doesn't even take a "geek".
Listen to the Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a significant Bellwether for the future in the tech industry - find out what the Nerds are recommending! True of any industry, find out what the pros in the industry are happiest with, and you'll find the up-and-comings if they aren't already on top.
People come to the "computer nerds" in order to get advice. Sure, many sales happen at the local Best Buy with whatever's on the shelf, but the trends start with nerds who identify new technologies, use them, and then recommend them to friends.
Microsoft has had a pretty tarnished name among the nerd community for a long time. Is it any wonder that their products are losing market share? It's really only inertia that's propping them up now. ALL of the following are gaining market share at the expense of Microsoft:
* MacOS
* Ubuntu
* OpenOffice
* PostgreSQL
* Fedora
* Zimbra
* Firefox
* Chrome
* Safari
Any I missed?
What's more, these technologies represent *core* technologies for Microsoft. Windows + Office are the cash cows for Microsoft, and they are what's most under attack by the Open Source crowd.
Listen to the nerds. They are the quiet whisper that define the future of the industry!
Re:2013? (Score:1, Insightful)
As a Firefox user myself I have to ask... Who gives a rat's_ass?
Re:browser wars are old news (Score:3, Insightful)
Be careful what you wish for, because (in the general sense) standards wars favor the largest company with the most resources.
Aside from MS "cheating" with PC OEMs and ISPs, they totally buried Netscape in the W3C the first time around. The result was that IE was far more attractive developer platform, which is the main reason its still entrenched in corporations.
Re:The Obamma administration looking at Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
IE dominated the browser market because Netscape blew monkey balls.
The reason firefox took off wasn't because of anti-competitive behavior it was because users found a competitive product and decided to replace what they viewed as an inferior product.
Re:There's an Artificial Barrier (Score:4, Insightful)
Controlling the default browser home page is a multi-million dollar a year business. This has always been Netscape and Mozilla's main revenue source.
Microsoft also makes a crapload of money from their development tools business -- in theory, controlling the browser platform sells copies of VisualStudio. (However I wonder how well this has worked in practice.)
Re:There's an Artificial Barrier (Score:4, Insightful)
Running old versions of software for improved security sounds like eating rotten food to avoid getting swine flu.
No, it's more like keeping the prize you have vs exchanging it for what's behind curtain #1.
People need to test important software to make sure it works well in their environment. That means not only checking for security issues but making sure something like a new browser will not cause issues for the various in-house and external web applications that are important to the organization. If there are any problems you might have to redo some code that was otherwise working fine.
Then you have to train your support staff on the new software to deal with any issues that might come up and possibly train other staff.
Add it into your change control system to deploy it to all the locked down workstations since most of your users don't have rights to install software since that can be a security and support nightmare.
That takes a lot of time and resources to do. If there's no real incentive to upgrade browsers why bother with the hassle.
It doesn't sound like you've ever worked in the IT department of any medium to large sized business.
Re:Yeah, but I don't really like Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)
You should try to see how many of your favorite websites still work at all in IE5. A big part of why things seem slower today is that your software (even the web apps) do a whole lot more than they used to.
Re:The elephant in the room for Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was young the paradigm was big iron, as this is what everyone learned in college. For vertical applications there was some variance, for instance there might be an Apple ][ running visicalc. A generation later, around the early 90's, it was MS Windows because that is what everyone used in college, especially the marketing people, which meant that all the grunts and executives had MS Windows machines, the rack was mostly mS windows machines. Again, for special applications there might be a different type of machine.
MS Windows is not necessarily the cheapest simplest solution, and IE is not necessarily what people use. However, the paradigm of MS/IE is not going to change until the current generation of managers is replaced with a more up to date generation, and the paradigm is allow to shift, so to speak. Cost will likely not play a huge role. New managers and technicians familiar with Firefox and Linux will make the choice. Unfortunately schools are still teaching MS only, on the whole, and managers still tend to be of limited technical education.
Of course, it will change. A generation was born that did not automatically buy cares from Detroit, so Detroit fell when they had to compete. Same thing for MS.
Re:Listen to the Nerds (Score:2, Insightful)
* MacOS
* Firefox
* Safari
Sure, albiet very slowly.
* Ubuntu
* OpenOffice
* PostgreSQL
* Fedora
* Zimbra
* Chrome
Huh? No, these aren't going anywhere. Windows netbooks are now outselling Linux netbooks. OO isn't cutting into Office, Postgre isn't even in the same league as a database server, and Chrome seems pretty much dead after an initial lovefest.
Don't delude yourself into thinking that FOSS is taking off... the only thing denting MS at the moment is Apple and FF. We'll see how the recession shakes out Apple as well.
Re:There's an Artificial Barrier (Score:3, Insightful)
whenever there is an update to IE MS seems fit to switch my preference *back* to live.com
Ah, another complete and utter falsehood about Windows, brought to you by Slashdot. My day is complete.
Re:2013? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Web Developer, I'd have to say "me" :-)
Re:2013? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:There's an Artificial Barrier (Score:3, Insightful)
Bundling is now working against them because businesses can't move to Vista while their webapps still target IE 6.0.
(A big reason that Win7 will include a XP virtual machine.)
Re:Listen to the Nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
Nerds *do* dictate the future of the web. Which is exactly why Firefox is gaining market share.
Ha, but no. Nerds pushed the Mozilla browser for 5 years and it ended up with a 1% marketshare. Firefox was an explicit effort to de-nerdify it.
Google didn't get popular until they started returning shopping results over technical documents.
Re:Listen to the Nerds (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because we were already happily using Opera long before it became trendy to switch from IE.
(I really don't get the Opera-hate here on Slashdot - so much for a community that allegedly is supposed to embrace alternative non-Microsoft products. And don't give me the "not open source" whine, if that really mattered, then OS X wouldn't be praised like it is here.)
Anyhow, the usage share of Opera on the desktop is comparable to that of Linux on the desktop - so I guess you'll be telling Linux users to go back to their corner too, right?