Internet Explorer Market Share Drops To Almost 15% 423
glitch0 writes "Internet Explorer used to be the most prevalent browser with a market share that peaked at 88% in March of 2003. Now they're down to almost 15% due to stiff competition from Google, Mozilla, and even Apple. What implications does this have for the future of Microsoft?"
Re:none (Score:5, Interesting)
"I for one don't understand why they would really care that much."
Because it was (and still it can be, since it's bundled on Windows for free) a cornerstone on their lock-in strategy (along with Office and Exchange, and currently Sharepoint too). If they allow "the cloud" to reach the point when vendor lockin is not possible, Microsoft will have a very worrisome future.
Re:none (Score:4, Interesting)
Win8 will do well, IMO. It will come out coupled with touchscreens, on which it really does work well - certainly far better than 7. I'm going to get it just for the various improvements such as insanely quick boot times and a huge improvement to the taskbar's multi-screen usage. Do I care about the looks of the new start menu? Yes, but not enough for me to overlook the other improvements. Besides, someone, probably stardock, will modify Win8 to have a classic start menu again. Until then, I'll just use windows key+F.
For Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
So why would Microsoft care? I can think of one reason -- as has been pointed out by others [xkcd.com], the more time people spend in a browser, the less they care about the underlying OS. When the user community is not dependent on a browser that's locked to a particular OS, the OS becomes less important, because you can run Chrome or Firefox or Opera on a lot of different platforms. Unlocking the browser from the OS is the first step -- causing a movement en-masse to a different operating system (or systems) is the next logical step. I would argue it is already happening.
So for the long term, if Microsoft isn't scared, they should be. I would expect over the next couple of years many attempts at embrace, extend, extinguish to get ...something... that everyone uses, locked into their one platform. I mean, how else are they going to compete?
IE Is Commentary On MS (Score:2, Interesting)
Internet Explorer. A technology developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, by NCSA staff programmer Eric Bina, improved by undergraduate (David Thompson, Marc Andreessen) and graduate computer science students, renamed Mosaic, was licensed by Spyglass (Spyglass Mosaic) and later licensed by Microsoft Corp. (Internet Explorer).
Yet again.
Microsoft Corp. had nothing to do at all with the development of the internet and neither the world wide web. They with little effort licensed a technology given their dollar reserves at the time. And true to form Microsoft Corp. could not and did not posses the necessary intelligence nor even comprehension to understand the technology which they had bought with their inflated dollars at the time.
Thus we have as exhibit A the Microsoft Lost Generation.
Who is the Father of the Microsoft Lost Generation?
LoL :D
Re:Really one a sample size of 1 website? (Score:4, Interesting)
After building this stuff for about 12 years now I have found that stuff is more likely to break in IE than other browsers. Firefox and Chrome over the last 2 years or so have rarely broken my sites with an update to any new version however IE7,8 and 9 have all had minor patches that broke completely standard behavior.
I know it seems like it should be breaking more often since they update so often but I have not run into that problem. Chrome updates especially I have never encountered something breaking. It updates all the time but since I don't have to care about the version number and it keeps itself, flash and some other stuff patched I recommend it to all my clients. By silently updating you don't have to worry about users updating their systems and you have far fewer security problems.
Re:Really one a sample size of 1 website? (Score:4, Interesting)
Except for the whole "IE9 doesnt run on XP, and IE10 doesnt run on ANY production Windows", yea, its wonderful. HOORAY for 3 platforms to support!
One of the reasons why I recommend chrome so heavily: Every one of my friends / clients / acquaintences running Chrome is on the same version of Chrome, Flash, and PDF plugins. Makes securing and troubleshooting them a zillion times easier, as well as instructing them to do anything since I dont have to guess what their UI looks like.
Prefetch? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:none (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, if someone finds a way to permanently disable Metro, then I'll buy Windows 8. It has some nice new features: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8 [wikipedia.org]