Firefox Passes IE6 In Browser Share 350
Jared sends word of Ars Technica coverage of Net Applications' monthly browser share numbers. What's significant this time is that Firefox has finally passed IE6 in worldwide share. "Internet Explorer remains ahead of the rest of the competition, but since month after month it continues to lose ground to all other browsers, Firefox has now finally surpassed IE6, which is easily the most hated version of Microsoft's browser. ... In October, all browsers except for IE and Opera showed positive growth. Between October and September, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.07 percentage points (from 65.71 percent to 64.64 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.32 percentage points (from 23.75 percent to 24.07 percent). ... Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions have more share than the newer ones (we can only hope that as Windows 7 gains popularity, this trend will reverse)." Ars presents a graph with their own site's browser share picture, and as you might expect it's very different from the general population's.
Re:StatCounter etc (Score:5, Informative)
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-200902-200902-bar [statcounter.com]
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-monthly-200902-200902-bar [statcounter.com]
The numbers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:StatCounter etc (Score:5, Informative)
Hi,
I work at StatCounter and I would just like to point out that we have a very diverse sample size from around the world.
As per http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#sample-size [statcounter.com] for July 2009 here was the breakdown of our sample pageviews for the month.
* 1.3 billion United States
* 570 million Brazil
* 280 million Turkey
* 260 million Germany
* 250 million Thailand
* 240 million China
* 240 million United Kingdom
* 180 million Indonesia
* 160 million Canada
* 140 million India
* 109 million Russia
Wildly different at work (Score:3, Informative)
Here are the stats for the company web site for the company I work for. It's a smallish Nordic company, and it's a safe bet that 95% of all visits are from other people at work. (I have no proof of that figure, obviously, but trust me when I say that looking at our site isn't something people do on their free time.)
MS Internet Explorer 2920837 96 %
Unknown 56869 1.8 %
Wget 32632 1 %
Firefox 18582 0.6 %
Safari 4934 0.1 %
Opera 2970 0 %
Mozilla 2532 0 %
LibWWW 148 0 %
Netscape 92 0 %
Nokia Browser (PDA/Phone browser) 12 0 %
Others 7 0 %
These figures are just incredibly different from those in TFA. Figures are page hits for the month of November, i.e. a little more than three days, but the percentages always look like this.
Bit late? (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Wildly different at work (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pretty sure that our internal websites are almost 100% IE, but that's because using Sharepoint in anything but IE is a world of hurt.
Not that using Sharepoint from IE is exactly pleasant, but damn.
Not on my site (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox (all versions) 42.1%
IE (all versions) 40.1%
Safari 7.8%
Chrome 4.5%
Go firefox!
IE6 (Score:5, Informative)
I decided to collect some stats for the trade services section of my companies website. Our typical customer is *not* technically minded in the least:
MSIE 8.0, 38.4%
MSIE 7.0, 33.8%
Firefox/3.5, 9.5%
MSIE 6.0, 9.1%
Chrome 9, 8.4%
Firefox/3.0, 3.0%
Safari 4, 1.5%
IE 6 is dropping fast, but a very poor showing for Opera and Safari. The OS stats are dominated by Windows XP (62%) and Vista (33%), with OS X and other flavours of Windows taking the remaining few percent. No Linux at all sadly.
Re:Problems are still corporate users and non-tech (Score:3, Informative)
Large corporate installations are highly change averse; but they also tend to be unsupportive of non work related web activity. The poor people who code corporate intranet portals will have to support those IE6 users until the end of time; but a fair few of them can't even ping facebook through the corporate firewall, much less make it into the browser stats.
I suspect that the total extinction of IE6 could take years to decades; but that its survival will be extremely uneven, and largely irrelevant outside of large corporate legacy applications. Nontechie home users may never upgrade; but computers don't last forever and you already have to go out of your way to buy a computer with IE6 on it today. That won't get any easier as time passes.
Re:Hoping for Windows 7's success... (Score:3, Informative)
Most modern operating systems also have a web browser, shipping without one is not a wise choice. As illustrated, it also allows third parties to rely on there already being a rendering engine for such things available (or I have even seen documention ship as html).
Re:StatCounter etc (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not on my site (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, well, I'm a manager of a Starbucks located near amajor university campus in the most yuppie part of town, and our stats are quite different, too:
Safari: 75%
Firefox (all version): 15%
IE (all versions): 9%
Chrome: 1%
* Note: tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Re:IE6 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:StatCounter etc (Score:3, Informative)
They might see Internet Explorer as "The Internet", but this is behavior that can easily be changed. My company actually had to block Google Chrome (not a decision I agree with, mind you) because too many people were installing it (somehow without knowing what they were doing) and then reporting problems with our Intranet*. When we asked what browser they were using, they wouldn't know but when pressed they would say "I'm using The Google Internet." Their view of IE as "The Internet" was easily changed to Google Chrome being "The Internet" (albeit one by Google).
* As a note, I wrote our Intranet to work in all versions of IE and FireFox. I'm unsure why it doesn't work with Google Chrome but as Chrome consists of less than 1% of our Intranet traffic, it is not worth my time to debug it.
Re:Why does anyone care? (Score:3, Informative)
People are making comparisons to IE6 because its market share is still relevant and affects the state of the web as a whole. For example, developments like Google Wave simply aren't possible on IE6 (at least without the somewhat controversial Chrome Frame plugin), so IE6 is hindering the adoption of new technology. Additionally, IE6's endless list of quirks cause untold lost hours of devlopment time for web developers worldwide.
Once IE6 drops down to a negligible percentage it means that many developers can free up a large part of their time to do more productive things, as they abandon support for it altogether. This would be great news not only for developers, but also for the web as a whole, which can proceed into new cutting-edge areas without being hindered by stale and outdated platforms.
Re:Why does anyone care? (Score:2, Informative)
IE7 has been in the wild for at least 6 months, perhaps a year (I don't use it so I don't know exactly) so of course IE6 market share is going to be dropping. From what I can tell more and more people are migrating to IE7 and it's a reasonably decent browser now.
IE 7 has been out for 3 years now. IE 8 has been around for about 6 months. If what you say is really the case, you would think that IE6's market share would have dropped a long time ago.
Why is anyone comparing anything, be it Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, or anything else, to IE6 now?
Because it is still the dominant version of IE even though there are 2 newer versions.
Re:Errr....people updating a free browser is news? (Score:2, Informative)
So, to summarise, if you lump all the versions of FF together, they're more popular than IE, as long as you don't allow the numbers IE to do the same....?
Exactly. And since the lump sum of FF means "mostly the latest FF", this is quite relevant for future trends, because the lump of IE means "mostly a very old IE". Of course nobody is saying FF is more popular than IE, that would make no sense whatsoever.
I'd say that FF is *too* popular with the wrong people (the devs) - but, ignoring the fact that those IE6/ XP boxes will be replaced in the not-too-distant future with Win7/IE8, this leaves us in another no-win - either the statistics are incomplete (which is probably true for dozens of reasons), or the development-swerve towards FF far outweighs the actual usage...leaving us in a second browser war where we all have to run multiple browsers due to fan-boy coders insisting that 'their browser is best'. The fact that IE6 was hell is irrelevant - this sissue hould have been addressed long ago, not once a standard has been introduced that the whole world uses (and when I say standard, I mean what's installed on every machine - so the standard is IE. It's too late to bleat about it not being web-compliant, something should have been done when it mattered).
And where do you get these statistics from?
Net Applications. The same source the article referrers to.
Which (by the text on their site) is way below the actual number of users, which again suggests the stats are incomplete.
- but as stated before, I find it highly unlikely that all the users/ sites I visit just happen to be the ones that have upgraded to IE7/8.
Why? Your own personal experience has little to do with the world as a whole. I know only a few people who use any version of IE at all, but I don't doubt IE's popularity.
I don't agree. I'm not making that statement as someone who only looks to their immediate circle for examples - I (and my team) have to deal with thousands of machines from Europe and Africa. I don't get anyone from my support team calling asking about how to fix IE6. I (and they) should be seeing at least a few sites/ users running it at home, and we don't - usually by the time we get to an XP machine with a problem, the user has already upgraded it themselves. In fact, since it was so horrible, how can all those IE6 users still be happily using it after all this time? It would sort of suggest that they've never had any problems with their browser and have therefore never seen fit to reinstall or upgrade - something that, with Windows, is very, very rare).
It's also worth noting that going by the statistics listed, I should be finding far more FF's than I do and far more IE6's than 7's and 8's (which I don't). I cover remote sites/ VPN users in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Africa - and the remote users are using their own machines, not corporate pre-builds - which suggests that it just happens to be *the rest* of the world as a whole that's on IE6...
It's a similar story with OpenOffice and Linux Desktops - should I start believing the statistics that are regularly bandied about in desperate attempts to make them seem more used than they are? No, I think I'll wait until I actually see them running in a corporate environment. I've been doing this for twenty years now, I've worked for banks, hospitals, schools, investment companies, oil companies, lawyers....all with remote access home users running their own stuff and I'm still waiting to see one. In fact the only times I've seen Linux running is on fellow IT bods' personal boxes, never the users themselves. Macs I've seen a few of (again, less that the supposed market share), but don't get me started on those :-)
Re:StatCounter etc (Score:3, Informative)
As a member of one of those "groups who have the power" I (as an individual) don't feel very powerful, wealthy or in control of much of anything.
Go visit a slum some day, then tell me again how difficult your life is. Trust me, you have plenty of power and wealth. But, like so many other Slashdot nerds, your worldview is so narrow (probably thanks to a lifetime spent in a basement) that you don't even realize it. Which is probably while libertarianism is so popular around here...
Re:Not on my site (Score:3, Informative)
I have a (PC) gaming-related site. To my knowledge, the amount of IT-expert visitors isn't higher than among the general population, but obviously people who play PC games at least see the PC as something more than just a Web access device. So, over the last 6 months, I'm showing
Firefox 37%
IE 35%
Chrome 15%
Safari 6%
Opera 5%
Note that Chrome's share here is definitely higher than its overall market share. Also, IE6 is also quite unpopular. Out of IE's 35%, IE8 is 13%, IE7 is 17% with IE6 at a bit under 4%.
Re:StatCounter etc (Score:4, Informative)
As a white person, your parents, and their grandparents, and so on, haven't been subject to the legacy of US slavery and ongoing racism.
I'm part Irish. I'd like you to tell my grandparents that they - and their neighbors, the Italians - are part of a white, privileged, un-discriminated-against upper class.
Of course, you'd have to go to the Irish and Italian ghettos to find them.
Re:StatCounter etc (Score:2, Informative)
I work at StatCounter and I would just like to point out that we have a very diverse sample size from around the world.
Respectfully, your numbers show quantity, but no guarantee of diversity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_heterogeneity [wikipedia.org]