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."
Hmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
The frenzy around IE9 may have subsided already and [...]
What frenzy? :-)
Is it worth saving? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seemingly not!
Silver Lining (Score:5, Insightful)
Hang on a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when was IE9 actually launched? Are we seriously predicting the doom of IE because not so many people downloaded a browser that isn't even released yet?
There are legitimate concerns for web developers about how widely IE9 will be adopted, not least the operating systems it will run on (or not), but for goodness' sake, this whole story is just premature.
Popularity contests... (Score:0, Insightful)
I'm saving my judgement until after IE9 is released. Caring about which major browser most people are using is as rediculous as voting for the winning candidate just because they are winning.
I just hope they fix the issues with text looking like crap when GPU acceleration is enabled. Firefox 4 has some of the same issues as IE9 in this regard.
Competition is Good (Score:2, Insightful)
I would prefer it if there is no clean winner. Competition is driving the companies to put serious efforts into the browser market. The result is everyone benefits from faster, more robust and frequently more secure browsers.
I like having Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE and all the others out there, at each other's throats.
Re:Save? (Score:4, Insightful)
IE9 hasn't gained much? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, I wonder why a beta browser from Microsoft isn't gaining market share. Don't predict any death knells for the browser until it's actually, you know, released. Geez.
Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oddly enough, the only people downloading IE9 *beta* seem to have done so within a few weeks of it being made available and so it's reached saturation. Regular users aren't going to download a beta version of "the internet" and techies grabbed it, installed it, tried it and forgot about it pretty quickly.
I eagerly await the article a couple of weeks after the IE9 RC is made available trumpeting the massive increase in IE9's market share.
Re:IE9 hasn't gained much? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about marketshare, it's about user numbers already declining.
That means people have tried the beta, and gone back to whatever they were using before. That is not a good sign, especially for the 50% or so that are going back to an older version of IE.
Re:Silver Lining (Score:3, Insightful)
Naww, EU regulators just have more teeth and US "regulators." The 'anything goes' version of American capitalism is sub-optimal.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Silver Lining (Score:1, Insightful)
No, what they should be doing is the responsible thing and fixing the mess they started.
Release a sandboxed-to-complete-hell-and-back version of IE6 with ActiveX, problem solved.
It's not like they will pay to upgrade their intranet software or applications if it just works now.
Will they do it? Will they hell. It took them bloody long enough to get off their asses and make IE7, which was terrible in both standards they decided to support as well as interface.
Reports of IE9's death greatly exaggerated. (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk about jumping to conclusions:
This is not the result Microsoft would have hoped for, but the writing was on the wall when we heard last week from CEO Steve Ballmer that IE9 was downloaded only 10 million times within 6 weeks after launch. That is a big number, but given the expensive marketing campaign, Microsoft surely needed much more. We remember: Apple got 11 million Safari 4 downloads within one week and with a simple press release.
Err, that's 10 million beta downloads according to the linked article, making it the most popular IE beta ever(according to Ballmer). That's in contrast to the Safari number which was a regular version launch.
And the drop in IE8 numbers was:
This trend is even more puzzling as IE8 shed market share for the first time in its history and fell from 29.06% to 29.01% (a number that does not included shares of IE8 fragmented versions as Net Applications recently decided not to publish this data anymore.)
A drop of 0.05%? That seems to be well within the margin of error and might have to do with the non-inclusion of IE8 fragmented versions.
The article is bad and the title and summary of the Slashdot are even worse. Lets save the news of IE9's death after it has been released(in Spring 2011), okay?
Re:Save? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the passive-aggressive way to say "you're probably wrong" without doing any of the legwork you demand that your target perform. It's not lazy, it's annoying.
In informal discussions, it's pretty traditional to respond to claims with questions, or to challenge it with ideas of why you don't see how it works/makes sense. However, in informal discussions requiring a citation is just dumb. No one's going to go read the citation anyway.
Can slashdot accommodate vigorous debate? Sort of. Kind of poorly. Is that really what it's good at? No.
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
IE might have had a better response with version 8 if they just hadn't started to mess around with those startup questions and halting the installation to ask stupid questions.
I can't find any reason to actually provide Microsoft with my web usage statistics, so when they ask for it I always answer NO, and that is something that puts me off too - because that means that they do track people on the web in unclear ways. And when I answer NO, it also means that most other security-minded persons will do the same thing. The result is that it's only the unaware, noobs and fools that they get statistics from - which also explains why it seems like their software seems to be more and more adapted for dummies for every generation.
Re:Reports of IE9's death greatly exaggerated. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah the summary is painfully pathetic.
I looked at the share and see IE is still outnumbering Firefox by almost 2 times but somehow the submitter translated that to "Firefox is close to be surpassing IE in europe". Uh... no. If this was a NASCAR race, firefox would be 2 laps behind and still trying to catch up. Not close.
Re:Why is Europe more hostile to IE? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is the news? (Score:2, Insightful)
Large IT shops are scrambling to update internal portals and apps that rely on IE6. I fought the good fight on standards with a big5 accounting firm in the early 2000's and lost. However now, the proliferation of blackberrys, iPhones and Androids is forcing this as much as the Windows XP end of life. Once they start the move to standards based internal apps, are they going to repeat the mistakes of the past and develop "for" IE9, or will they develop standards based, cross browser apps that also support their burgeoning mobile users?
Personally, I think (hope) IE9 will get a bit of a dead cat bounce and then slowly decline into irrelevance.
Re:Save? (Score:3, Insightful)
Citation-demanding is just an easy way to filibuster a discussion. You aren't entitled to a citation.
It's a conversation. You know, casual talking about stuff. If someone says something, and you think they may be full of shit, say "I think you're full of shit", and if they care, they may cite their source.
They probably won't care.
Re:Hang on a minute... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is Slashdot, where submitters are free to craft their own fantasy world in the space of a paragraph. Of course, when Windows Update installs IE9 on everyone's machines, reality will override fantasy.
Re:Who uses Safari? (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess would be that it is the iOS version of Safari that is boosting the numbers.
IE mattered because it saved Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft didn't launch Internet Explorer to take over the lucrative browser market - they gave it away free, competing with Netscape who gave it away free, and older browsers like Mosaic, some of which were also free, or even because it helped them take over the web page development tool market, which they could charge money for. They did it to save Windows, and to save their products which depend on Windows, like Office and Mail.
The threat to Microsoft was the combination of Netscape, Java, and AOL, which were enough of an application platform to make the underlying operating system irrelevant, plus a distribution system that had people willing to feed dubious coasters into their home computers and a popular enough email system to compete with MSMail/Outlook. If the market got committed to that platform, and to compatibility with those standards, then it wouldn't matter if the underlying OS got replaced by Linux or Solaris or whatever.
By giving the public IE, and making sure that it wasn't quite compatible with Netscape and taking advantage of its proprietary or non-standard features, Microsoft was able to take over enough of the browser market that Netscape/Java/AOL couldn't displace them.