Slashdot

We've seen no major drop off, just a steady and slow decline. We track over 15 million users a day across the sites we manage here in the UK (mainly council properties).

There are a few sites where IE 6.0 displays things badly because the web master stopped kludging for it.

Slashdot.org
some parts of Google.
(Help me here!)

Joe-six paks noticed this and has found out that he has options...

If you look at the longterm trends reported by Net Applcations, something that StatCounter doesn't offer, it's hard to conclude that anything dramatic has just happened.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/historical_view.html

These longer trends are steady and smooth and there's nothing that's happened in the last couple of months that would cause IE to fall off the cliff.

That being said, there is a lot of churn in the various browser versions. IE is really a collection of browsers with measurable share, IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8. Looking at these versions, it's clear that a lot is happening.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/07/a_browser_prediction.html

It's likely that IE 7 and IE 6 will fall to under 10% global share by the end of this year and that IE 8 will grow to approximately 40%. That would give IE 60% overall, Firefox about 25%, Safari about 10%, and "other" would hold the remaining 5%.

Especially after all the breathless "Firefox is taking over" stories on Slashdot, submitted by fanboys every time there's a spike in downloads (like after a release!) or the browser's market share gains a tiny fraction of a percent.

Mind you, I'm really glad to see that we're finally getting some serious competition in the browser marketplace. But before you congratulate yourselves too much, send a psychic "Thanks for Shooting Yourselves in the Foot!" to Steve and Bill. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera all have real advantages, but none of these would have overcome IE's big advantage: being the default browser on the desktop OS that owns 90% of its market. The only thing that could have overcome that advantage is not the advantages of the competition, but the extreme crappiness of IE itself.

Not only would this change be welcome, but it would force Microsoft to "play ball" with the standards for HTML rather than roll their own and mark all the bug reports "will not fix".

Take a look at the history:

1) Microsoft is all about selling stuff on CD-ROM with the marketing vision "Information at your fingertips".

2) The Internet happens, and overnight, Netscape is a raving success because it actually PUT information at your fingertips.

3) Billy boy issues a memo to the whole company to turn as fast as possible to support the Internetz.

4) IE comes out - first a sucktacular mess, and finally almost livable around IE 5 or so.

5) IE 6 comes out, Netscape crumbles.

6) Netscape goes underground at AOL who throws a few developers at it while using it to negotiate a link on the Desktop. IE Dominates so tremendously that it's the platform of choice simply because it's installed everywhere.

7) Microsoft stops doing anything for half a decade. (whistle whistle)

8) Navigator continuously improves, finally re-emerging as Phoenix/Firefox. Suddenly, Microsoft's browser looks like a 5-year-old pile of cruft that's difficult to program for.

Suddenly, Microsoft will give a shiat. They might finally fix the things that developers!developers!developers! have been whining, bitching, complaining, and screaming about all these years.

Irony: "Free Internet Exporer 8" ad at the top while I type this message!

That's for a major Polish website devoted to a popular, long-running game series. The userbase is indeed a little more tech-conscious than the average Internet user around here, but not by much - just a few power gamers and techies, lots of "casuals". Nevertheless, IE was at ~70% in 2004, ~50% in 2005 and so on down to ~25% in the late 2008 and ~20% now. Right now it's kind of stabilizing (but still falling) and I don't forsee it falling below 15% anytime soon, but I'm starting to suspect that by the end of the year, Opera might overtake it (16% and rising, mostly ex-Firefox users right now).

We're not actively doing anything anti-IE or pro-FF/Opera (well, maybe except that IE is getting all the CSS/JS bugfixes lats, but that's *because* it's so low in the stats - we can afford letting the IE support lag behind), so it's mostly an outside trend, I think.

All the statistics I'm basing this post on were generated by Google Analytics, by the way.

W3 Schools [w3schools.com] which has an admitted alternate-browser bias does not show any sort of abrupt drop-off for IE, and if anywhere were going to, I would think it would be this site. In fact, it shows Firefox dropping for the first time since September of last year (when Chrome was initially released), but only half a percentage point. IE7 is losing ground to IE8 rather quickly, but IE6 actually gained a half a percentage point since May. Chrome is also up another half a point, and nothing else really had enough movement to be worth mentioning (Safari up a tenth, Opera down a tenth).

What I really would like to see is the browser share of the Slashdot logs.

The drop in IE use is probably inversely proportional to the rise in unemployment.

With millions of people being laid off work, they are surfing at home and using sensible browsers.

Only people surfing at work get stuck using IE. My current gig is still using IE6!