IE9 May Not Be Enough To Save IE 328
An anonymous reader writes "The October market share numbers are in and Net Applications' numbers show a surprising drop in IE8 market share — the first time since the browser was introduced. Strangely, IE9 has not gained much and IE7 as well as IE6 are losing as well. The only two browsers gaining are Chrome and Safari — and both browsers have hit new record market shares. The frenzy around IE8 may have subsided already, and Microsoft is under tremendous pressure to roll out IE9 soon. StatCounter's numbers indicate that Firefox is close to surpassing IE in Europe."
IE is dead in Germany (Score:3, Informative)
Hi Miss Interpret, this is Captain Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
FTA:
FTA's other article, that the quote is from:
See a difference there? If there were 10 million downloads of IE9 after it's launched wouldn't be surprising (it's usually not pushed out on Windows Update then), but that is actually a LOT of betas, even if people were just downloading it to see if the hardware accelerated rendering actually worked.
Who knew that one word (Betas) made that big a difference.
For me, IE = work only (Score:5, Informative)
I only ever use IE for work machines, because far too many web sites I use at work are Microsoft stuff that doesn't always play well with other browsers. For most stuff at work I use Firefox.
I just don't trust IE -- for years it was one of the worst vectors for exploits, malware, and all sorts of annoying shit. If there's an equivalent to noscript for IE, I might consider using it.
Until then, IE is a "when all else fails, and you have to trust the site", otherwise, it's something I stay away from as much as possible.
Re:IE is dead in Germany (Score:2, Informative)
Re:IE-only websites (Score:1, Informative)
That depends on your definition of secure. IE 8 runs in a low privileged Protected Mode [microsoft.com] by default. This results in the browser running at a privileged level that is much lower than the user who launched it and is quite effective at preventing certain attacks from working.
Last I checked, Apple still hasn't added support for low privileged/low integrity mode in Safari, which means the Safari binary has all of the privileges of the user who launched it.
Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!
It isn't, the OEM license is tied to the motherboard. New motherboard, new license. The only exception is a like-for-like replacement in order to effect a repair - if there's no like-for-like on the market, then it sucks to be you.
Interestingly, this means that Microsoft are essentially forcing small PC shops (which can't reasonably be expected to keep a good stock of spares for every PC they've ever built, not when motherboards seldom stay on the market that long) to either break the terms of the license or absorb quite a bit of additional risk over the large OEM - the customer can't very reasonably be expected to fork out for another Windows license when their motherboard failed under warranty.
for those too lazy (Score:2, Informative)
IE: 31.1%
Firefox: 45.1%
Chrome: 17.3%
Safari: 3.7%
Opera: 2.2%
Those are the estimates for September and I'm assuming that's from all of the doctype fetching. Though, I predict that Firefox will lose numbers to Chrome soon because FF isn't what it used to be, rather Chrome is what FF used to be to IE back in the day IMO.
Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try (Score:4, Informative)
Calling XP 'a decade old' is misleading. Until very recently (i.e. this year), it was still shipped by MS OEMs - if you bought a Netbook in January, for example, it probably came with XP. Supporting a product that you were shipping less than a year ago is very different from supporting a decade-old product. Your comparison ti Red Hat 7.2 is misleading, because Red Hat 7.2 wasn't being sold by Red Hat early this year. You could still get updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (including updates of third-party software), which was superseded by RHEL 5 in 2007, until 2009.
Using FireFox in your example is also misleading, because it's not made by the same company, and no company has any obligation to support another company's products. A better example would be Safari on OS X, as both are made by Apple. Last time I turned on my PowerBook, running OS X 10.4, it had an update to Safari 4 waiting, which contained a back-port of most of the features of Safari 5. Apple stopped shipping OS X 10.4 long before Microsoft stopped shipping XP.
When did Microsoft stop shipping XP? I just checked on their site - apparently it was one week ago: October 22, 2010. Not quite a decade.
Re:IE9 hasn't gained much? Really? (Score:3, Informative)
It's not about marketshare, it's about user numbers already declining.
IE user numbers have been declining for the last, oh, 6 years or so? It's not news. IE9 is supposed to change that, but it's too early to tell.
That means people have tried the beta, and gone back to whatever they were using before.
Your typical IE user won't ever bother trying a beta (he doesn't know what a "beta" is, and doesn't hang out in places where it was announced). The people who tried the beta are mostly web developers, or just curious techies. In the grand scheme of things, they are a tiny part of IE's current 50% global market share.
Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!
For well under $300 you can get about a hundred Windows 7 (10 for each version of 7, spread over the many versions) licenses for your family's computers via Technet. Or you can buy a single license for $100. Or you can buy 3 in a Family Pack for $50 each. Even the non-upgrade retail license is $170, not even close to your $300.
And there are no versions tied to a disk. The closest is an OEM version of the OS, which is tied to a motherboard. But even then, if you want to change motherboards you can just call MS and they'll happily let you reactivate provided the 5 word explanation, "I have a new motherboard."
Re:For me, IE = work only (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Reports of IE9's death greatly exaggerated. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:IE9 hasn't gained much? Really? (Score:3, Informative)
That's because any good web developer will check to see how their sites work in IE9 and then return to their browser of choice. Your average consumer is not going to try the beta, nor will many people stick with a beta indefinitely until it's released. I have Firefox 4 installed on my computer but I only use it to check out major updates to the beta; otherwise I'm using Firefox 3.6 or the latest version of Chrome.
This article is pretty irrelevant in regards to how well IE9 will do once it launches.
Re:Reports of IE9's death greatly exaggerated. (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently you didn't look hard enough.
From the article:
"IE is now a 39.53% in Europe and Firefox at 38.65%."
Unless you're using some new fangled kind of math, that's not double.
Facts versus interpretation (Score:2, Informative)