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."
Save? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, they're under tremendous pressure to release IE9? By who? The public? You can't say people are fleeing because IE9 isn't a big deal, and then turn around and say they have to get it out because all these people are waiting for it. Reality is, the average Joe has no idea that IE9 is in development, has no idea when it will be released, and *DOESN'T CARE*. They click the blue E, and they get to the internet. And every couple years, the window looks a bit different and they don't really know why, but it still works so that's good enough. *THE MAJORITY OF WORLD ARE NOT TECH GEEKS*.
IE-only websites (Score:3, Interesting)
And yet just last week, a friend told me he couldn't make a filing with the Georgia Department of Revenue because "his browser was insecure." Nevermind that he was using the latest version of Safari, which is likely more secure than any version of IE.
What they actually meant was "we are too lazy to program for anything but IE... but that's OK, because 99% of the world uses IE... right?"
Re:IE-only websites (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet just last week, a friend told me he couldn't make a filing with the Georgia Department of Revenue because "his browser was insecure." Nevermind that he was using the latest version of Safari, which is likely more secure than any version of IE.
What they actually meant was "we are too lazy to program for anything but IE... but that's OK, because 99% of the world uses IE... right?"
Now that's interesting because they are making a positive claim about browser security. They are not merely saying "at this time we only support Internet Explorer," which would be completely different.
Since we like to solve problems with litigation in this country, to the point that there are often few or no effective alternatives, I have an idea. Why don't the makers of Safari and other browsers sue the State of Georgia for libel? They are making a claim of insecurity. As evidence, save the snippet of code/markup that checks the user-agent string and produces the message stating "your browser is insecure". Claim that the message is libel because it is based on merely not being IE, not on any rigorous study of browser security, and therefore cannot use "truth" as a defense. In fact it would not be hard to come up with evidence contradicting it. Therefore, intentional or not, it amounts to an attempt to coerce users to use IE and therefore Windows for no good reason.
The point is to make it more expensive to defend such a suit than it would have been to make a standard, browser-agnostic site. A government agency in particular has no excuse for not making their sites as accessible as possible. They are not like private companies where you can just go to a competitor if a given company refuses to be reasonable.
Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try (Score:3, Interesting)
Have fun as more and more software says "Fuck you" and you can't run it on your fancy-shmancy XP Pro any more, because you think using a decade-old OS is a great idea.
At that point it will presumably be a good time to upgrade to Linux.
Frankly... (Score:3, Interesting)
...I'm not impressed with any browser right now. Chrome still has privacy issues (and also has standards conformance issues), Firefox is getting very slow and will occasionally leave zombie processes, IE is as naff as always, Opera and Safari don't support the plugins that I actually do need.
And NONE of them support scripting using LaTeX or Metapost (HTML is becoming an inferior typesetting language rather than the presentation language it used to be, with virtually nobody implementing the complex standards anyway). Seems to me that if people want CSS and HTML to let you typeset, you'd be better off with a browser supporting LaTeX 2e and the A tag natively, then emulating HTML. The results can't be any worse and would add all the features people wanted in HTML5 and will doubtless pester for in HTML6.
Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure it was more like a tasteless odorless chunk of chum was thrown into the ocean, and there was no reaction. There was no interest at all.
More importantly, it hasn't even been released yet. It is available as a beta, but you have to implicitly install it.
First, go to Google, and search for msie 9 [google.com]
The first link takes you the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive [microsoft.com]
Which the download button doesn't download, but takes you to the Explorer9Beta page [microsoft.com]
(Does Ford know that they've hijacked the "Explorer" name?)
The download button does actually download.
And no, I'm not a fanboy. I was just curious. Don't ask about performance though, all I got to was the download page. I didn't actually install it. :)
Re:For me, IE = work only (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I don't mean that at all. I love how people on Slashdot think that they know what I mean more than I do. Firefox and Mozilla have been around for a long time, it's not like they're brand new and nobody is aware of them.
I mean IE ran with a security policy that more or less was wide open, and that you could set to "allow everything" or "allow nothing" -- invariably some %^$#^& POS web-site the company I worked for would force us to use basically expected to be able to run everything. When it didn't work, HR would say "oh, just turn down your browser security".
Basically these shitty IE specific sites would only work if you ran in the most unsafe mode that existed. The solution was to keep IE as an insecure browser because the stuff I was required to use it for demanded it.
I have no idea that people are going to work on exploting Firefox -- though, the example you give isn't an exploit against Firefox, it just uses it.
Things like NoScript allow me to turn off the most likely vectors of attack, or at the very least, get rid of some of the annoyances. While it doesn't stop all of them, it at least gives me better control over what I'm willing to run. I am not aware of a tool in IE that allows me to selectively say "run this, don't run that" -- I can go through the nuisance of setting a site as a trusted site, but for a one-time thing, it just doesn't work.
Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice things going for it (Score:3, Interesting)
The browser has nice things going for it, and I still won't use it.
Microsoft has done this to themselves. They two have two groups. One are the enterprise environments who drank the Flavor-Aid way back in the day and wrote all their internal web apps to rely on IE6 specific features. Since Microsoft spurned compliant HTML/CSS rendering, their newer browsers have trouble handling IE6-specific sites. These shops refuse to upgrade to IE7/IE8/IE9, and thusly refuse to upgrade to Vista or 7. The only reason Microsoft hasn't really hurt themselves with this has been selling Vista and 7 licenses to these customers, but allowing them to downgrade to XP.
The second group of users care about web standards. They care about speed and security. They realize that IE is dead last in standards compliance, speed and security. So even when Microsoft rolls out some neat hardware acceleration features, they aren't worth all the other massive trade-offs involved.
Honestly, how many people are there that will want to use IE9 as their primary browser?
Re:I quite fancy giving IE9 a try (Score:2, Interesting)
None, yet (that doesn't exist modified/simplified in some ways for XP) - because XP still has a too large userbase - and most standard programs just aren't sensitive enough to care.
What can kill XP however are 64-bit programs. Now you don't need to point out that XP has a 64-bit version; i know that; but what does need to be pointed out is that the 64-bit version of XP is poorly supported. Tons of missing drivers, and outdated drivers, results in a OS that regularly doesn't behave that nicely compared to the NT6 OSs and XP 32-bit.
This however is still likely some ways off.
Re:Why is Europe more hostile to IE? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not that it surprises me. Every person I know with more that average insight in computers has been advocating anything else as long as there has been a real alternative.
Re:For me, IE = work only (Score:3, Interesting)
At my old company, HR were among the worst offenders -- regularly requiring us to go to survey sites or various 3rd party sites to do various stupid tasks. Sometimes Finance did this as well.
Several times I tried to tell them "why the hell are you sending me to a 3rd party site when we have something that does this in house" or pointing out that the sites were requiring way too many permissions for what they were doing for us. Unfortunately, the tedious people in the beaurocracy of some organizations just don't understand why you're objecting to being sent to a 3rd party site that needs to install an ActiveX control.
Not visiting these sites for the stupid reasons cited was something which would get you in trouble.
In many cases, requirements from HR and some of the other groups more or less meant you couldn't have your IE set to the level of security IT mandated. So, they essentially forced us to run IE as an insecure tool, and only use it for very limited things.
It really does come down to stupid and lazy outranking sane and careful in some cases.
Re:Hmm. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, go to about:config in Firefox, and put in "http" as your filter criteria. It can (and does) send information off-site. Try changing the filter criteria to "safe", and see what it comes up with. It should be a more discrete list places that every request is sent to, like "http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/report?".
I'm not paranoid. If you're going to information so private that no one should know it, you shouldn't be playing on the Internet.
I was working on a project once, where it was a stand alone machine (like an kiosk with no Internet connection), and we built a browser based application for it. It saved a lot of hassle of making a custom GUI, managing graphics, layout, etc, etc. It also made it easy to hand off to another developer, who would only need to know how to make a web page. :) Without an internet connection, it suffered a speed decrease, because it was trying to resolve and then request things like the safebrowsing URLs. I believe there were about 25 entries to remove to get rid of all functionality like that. Other pesky ones were ones like the automatic update checks (we disabled them). It became very speedy on very slow hardware.
But, these are just the ones that we can easily find. Is there such a resource for MSIE or Chrome? I know Chrome has a very primitive configuration interface by design, so we have to trust that Google is following the "do no evil" motto. I trust Microsoft will not only record and send the info somehow, but they'll deny it to the end.
Re:Hmm. (Score:2, Interesting)
You do know that the Ford Explorer is not a web browser, right?
Re:Why is Europe more hostile to IE? (Score:3, Interesting)
The ballot screen provided a few extra downloads for the other browsers, but didn't change much, if at all. Early reports were encouraging for IE competitors, but it turned out that the balance didn't tip as much as some had anticipated.
I don't really think the results of the ballot screen will be noticeable for some time. Given average turnover rates only about 6% of people in the EU in an average sales quarter would even see the ballot. So we need to wait at least a year to get numbers outside the margin for error of the studies I've seen. It will be four years or more before we can accurately judge the level of impact the ballot is making. Note, I'm not saying it is effective, just that trying to draw conclusions at this point is just bad math.
Re:Hmm. (Score:3, Interesting)
(Does Ford know that they've hijacked the "Explorer" name?)
Actually I think it was more hijacking WebExplorer, the browser that shipped with OS/2 in 1994.