IE 8 Is Top Browser, Google Chrome Is Rising Fast 319
An anonymous reader points out that the latest Net Applications numbers show that MSIE 8 has become the world's most-used browser, taking over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP. PCMag.com emphasizes another angle on the numbers, which is that Chrome is the fastest-growing browser. Firefox's market share has stalled just below 25%. Chrome is now in third place, ahead of Safari. The Guardian's article reminds: "There's no guarantee that NetApps' numbers are accurate, and they are very unlikely to be correct to two decimal places. However, they do appear to be a good indicator of market trends."
the more prevalent it remains, the bigger the risk (Score:5, Interesting)
With so many people still using IE, whatever holes there are in firefox and chrome just won't get the same attention from the hackers. That alone makes me not want to use it. Obscurity may not be obscurity but it's also not jumping up and down with a target painted on your chest.
Going by rendering engines... (Score:5, Interesting)
MS HTML control 62%
Gecko 24.5%
Webkit 9.7%%
Opera 3.0%
Miscellania 0.7%
At some level this is may be a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Who are these people? (Score:2, Interesting)
Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer. If it's a computer that I set up for someone else I install Firefox AND Chrome and explain to them the values of IE, FF, and Ch, and months later I'm still seeing them using Firefox.
Ok I take that back. Some of my coworkers (and myself I suppose) use IE for some Cisco and HP devices that have clunky web interfaces. But those browsing sessions don't get registered on these kinds of reports and certainly don't add up to 40%.
I'd like to see a list of what sites are being browsed with what browsers. I bet that would be a very telling set of statistics as well.
Can someone please answer this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Something that bugged me throughout the whole China-Google-IE6 fiasco... Why were Google etc. using IE6 internally and got hacked? MS released IE7 with sandboxing in Vista and Windows 7... and Google's internal IT saved lots of money by sticking with IE6, but then turn around and blame MS for IE6 when MS itself recommends upgrading. Did I miss something or did Google PR and astroturfing successfully prevented this point from being made in any of the articles or Slashdot comments?
It's very different in some parts of the world (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember posting about this about a year ago or so on /., and now I see the trend continue.
I run a website about the Heroes of Might and Magic game series (very little "geek bias"), in Poland and for Polish-speaking audience. It's relatively popular, about 1500 unique visitors a day, first hit for "Heroes of Might and Magic" in a localized Google search, thrid for "heroes" only after a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the term and the page on that goddamned TV series. The statistics are so completely different that it looks almost as if it were a parallel universe or something:
January 2008:
53.58% - Firefox
31.19% - IE
13.83% - Opera
January 2009:
60.99% - Firefox
23.99% - IE
12.32% - Opera
2.10% - Chrome
January 2010:
60.33% - Firefox
16.12% - Opera
15.29% - IE
6.24% - Chrome
Data gathered by Google Analytics, active on just about every non-static page on the server. It gets even more interesting in a month-by-month comparison on a graph, some of the fluctuations clearly correlate with new releases of FF, Opera, Chrome, *and* IE, but I'm afraid that I don't have the time right now to prepare something you could see and decide yourself.
Any other admins out there with similar statistics to share?
Re:I'm using Chrome (Score:1, Interesting)
Same. We have JIRA on our intranet. When I type 'jira' into the search bar in Chrome, the first thing that pops up is my bookmark to the internal JIRA, which is also my home page. Great! Then about half a second later before I have time to down+enter, it pops in four fucking search results above it, leaving JIRA fifth. No I don't want to Google it, I have NEVER fucking googled Jira, IT'S MY HOME PAGE AND IT'S IN MY FAVORITES FOR FUCK'S SAKE I DONT WANT TO GODDAMN FUCKING SEARCH
captcha: chairing. *shudder*
Re:I'm using Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
Google won me with speed, but, as usual with everything except search and GMail, they are losing me with bugs and a lack of features (Print Preview, the ability to remove typos from my search history
I agree with you. I switched to Chrome as my main browser for similar reasons. I used to use Firefox, but I became weary of how slow Firefox is relative to Chrome, even without extension. With extensions it's a joke. (Side note: I like the userscript extension method in the Chrome Beta - which is very stable for a Beta).
But why, as you say, can't they have a half intelligent search history, like Firefox? Why does the browser constantly chatter to 1e100.net? image [tinypic.com] If this is a Google server, why doesn't it LOOK like a Google server? Why doesn't a Google search for "Chrome plugins" have as a result the proper Extensions page? https://chrome.google.com/extensions [google.com]. In fact, why is that page the SECOND result for "Chrome extensions"?
Mystifying.
I downloaded Chromium a few days ago (Score:5, Interesting)
And I have a bunch of random observations. Nothing so coherent that I'd call it a review, but still relevant here.
So far, I've been really pleased. It's very fast compared to Firefox.
Unfortunately, almost all of my Firefox plugins are geared towards privacy and security. I can't run any of them on Chrome, so I am only willing to use Chrome to browse a small subset of the websites I'm willing to browse with Firefox. Slashdot happens to be among those.
Strangely, now that I no longer browse Slashdot with Firefox, Firefox behaves significantly better than it has been. Apparently, one of the absolute worst sites for the overall performance of Firefox is this one.
I routinely keep at least 30 or 40 tabs of state in Firefox.
Incognito in Chrome also looks like a much more convenient (and in some ways better) privacy feature than anything I currently use on Firefox. Though I still really wish I had Ghostery and NoScript.
Chrome does have some features that are almost as nice as Firebug built into it.
I really wish Firefox would just go multi-threaded, get a much better Javascript rendering engine and lose the horrible memory leaks. Last time I had to shut down Firefox it had a VSS of nearly 4G!
Chrome (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who are these people? (Score:3, Interesting)
I do a lot of IT support for school. EVERYONE uses Internet Explorer. Students don't know any better, teachers don't know any better, admin don't know any better. I don't know if it's mandated as such, but it's what people go for straight away when they need to use the Internet. Doesn't matter that I put a Mozilla Firefox icon on the desktop of all machines either (which is nice for me and anyone else who knows what it is).
Having said that, pulling down updates via WSUS for IE makes it a lot easier to update than static versions of Firefox which are fixed until the next build of the system image. I know there's a 3rd-party created MSI for Firefox, but they're no-where near as automatic as what Microsoft punches out. Maybe if the school was running Linux I'd employ repositories to fix that (like that's ever gonna happen with the inertia Windows has).
Re:Who are these people? (Score:1, Interesting)
Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer.
So don't really know any one, then? Welcome to slashdot, home of socially inept nerds and wannabes.
If it's a computer that I set up for someone else I install Firefox AND Chrome and explain to them the values of IE, FF, and Ch
Ah, that explains the lack of friends. I prefer to associate with people who don't get hung up on browser preferences and just want one that works. Shit, if you bored me to tears like that I'd avoid you too.
Some of my coworkers (and myself I suppose) use IE for some Cisco and HP devices
I take it back, you can't be a real nerd. Real nerds (like me I guess) use telnet to manage Cisco equipment. The gui's don't let you get to most of the features. If you're just using the web gui, then you're a poser.
Re:I'm using Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does the browser constantly chatter to 1e100.net? image [tinypic.com] If this is a Google server, why doesn't it LOOK like a Google server?
I suspect they were going for 1x10^100, which is by definition a googol [wikipedia.org]
Re:the more prevalent it remains, the bigger the r (Score:4, Interesting)
"Legacy bullshit" is Microsoft's stock in trade. That's what they are. Windows is the win32 API; IE is IE6-style HTML. That's the core of their business, why it's so hard to get rid of them. Lots of people would like to be rid of Windows and move onto a platform that's less of an attack vector, but nearly everyone has some shitty old application somewhere that they can't do without and Windows provides a good upgrade path, or at least better than anyone else. IE may be a shitty browser but it works on a lot of shitty intranet sites that were designed for IE6 and that nobody can afford to fix now, and probably won't be fixed for a decade at least.
If they decided to pull an Apple and just say "screw you, everyone who built stuff for the old API, you're dead to us," they'd be torn apart by the market as a thousand little competitors jumped in and tried to get in on everyone who'd been left behind. (Apple only gets away with it because they're small enough, and cater mostly to home users with shallow pockets, that nobody really caters to the people who get screwed by the Steve Jobs Upgrade Treadmill.)
It's Microsoft's blessing and the key to their success, but it's also their curse and will probably be their eventual downfall. They can toss billions of dollars around and try to get the greatest programmers in the world, but they're always going to be hampered by the thing they can't (or are unwilling) to change -- the legacy cruft that gives them real vendor lock-in, or at least a huge advantage over all comers.
Re:Can someone please answer this? (Score:2, Interesting)
The best that I can figure is that GOOGLE itself was NOT HACKED. Just the accounts of people using Google services were hacked. Those people were external. But because newspeople are clueless about technology they equate "wah, my google account got hacked" with "Google got hacked". You are right; outside of some simple virtual machines for testing their code changes against IE6 nobody at Google uses IE6.
Wrong. If that's the best you can figure out, you're either a Google shill or really lack reading comprehension. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/operation-aurora/ [wired.com]
Re:This confirms what I said earlier ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think auto-update needs to go die in a fire. I don't want a program dialing home, downloading a file, and then bitching at me to install it (or even going ahead an installing it on its own). FFS, even Windows Update doesn't do that if you tell it not to.
However, what *does* need to happen is someone should make a small program that can check what version of a program you're running, and what the latest version is, and let you know if you can update. Ideally, the program would allow you to list and delist programs on your own initiative (in case you don't want something updated, say for compatibility reasons). I've heard that one massive problem with security on computers is running out-of-date software, so making something like this for Windows would be a massive boon. Especially if it could also track things like Flash.
Re:Who are these people? (Score:3, Interesting)
Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer... Ok I take that back. Some of my coworkers (and myself I suppose) use IE for some Cisco and HP devices that have clunky web interfaces.
You sound like a professional, so the pool of people you know is probably a bit skewed. I'm a biologist, literally no one I know is a creationist. Sadly they are many out there lurking in dark places, conspiring to ban evolution from the classroom and replace it with a bible.
Re:Can someone please answer this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has just announced today they are phasing out support for IE6 in the Apps suite (Docs, Sites, etc) by March 1 2010.
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html [blogspot.com]
Re:the more prevalent it remains, the bigger the r (Score:3, Interesting)
That's hardly proof of anything without some context. All I can see from the screenshot is that there are a shit-ton of toolbars. Whether this person deliberately installed them (intentionally or to make FF look bad), they were installed as part of some third-party program (optionally or otherwise) or they are the result of some sort of malware infection(s) isn't clear.
In fact, a lot of the toolbars strike me as horribly suspicious to be anything related to malware. Google Toolbar, Netcraft, Facebook? These certainly don't seem like sites that malware would bother installing toolbars for. Somebody just went out of their way to cram as many stupid toolbars as possible into their browser for some reason.
It depends on your audiance (Score:3, Interesting)
My audiance, clearly more technical folks (as I just blog about technical stuff) say otherwise (this is last month's unique visits to my blog):
1 6962 38.20% Firefox
2 6818 37.41% Microsoft IE
3 1034 5.67% Chrome
8 491 2.69% Safari
9 346 1.90% Opera
22 149 0.82% Wireless Transcoder Google Wireless Transcoder
28 119 0.65% Android
71 44 0.24% Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.10
91 37 0.20% Konqueror
Re:the more prevalent it remains, the bigger the r (Score:4, Interesting)
And you should also realize that there are many organizations that still are stuck with IE6.
I'm working on a web-based application and the clients accessing it are more then 70% IE6, 23% IE 7 and 3% IE8. The remaining are the other browsers. But this application I work with is not placing demands on which web browser to use, it only takes statistics of the user agent and is designed to be W3C compliant through the HTML Validator.
And it's also easy to see that there are still clients out there running Windows 2000 and Pre-SP2 Windows XP. (information that is provided through the user agent string).