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Internet Explorer Microsoft Software Stats The Internet Technology

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?"
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Internet Explorer Market Share Drops To Almost 15%

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  • us too! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jank1887 ( 815982 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @07:54PM (#40586493)

    what about Opera?

    *goes back to sit in the corner*

  • by Karlt1 ( 231423 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @07:56PM (#40586503)

    Yes, IE is losing marketshare but w3 schools statistics says nothing about the general population. Of course people who are studying web technologies are going to use other browsers. I would have more confidence if a site like Google or Yahoo published statistics.

    • by gQuigs ( 913879 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:07PM (#40586587) Homepage

      http://gs.statcounter.com/ [statcounter.com] is my goto site for this. It has IE at 32% http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120702-20120708-bar [statcounter.com]

    • by Samantha Wright ( 1324923 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:08PM (#40586597) Homepage Journal
      Global Statistics from StatCounter [statcounter.com] is more holistic. 32.76% for Chrome this month, vs. IE's 32.31%. Not shabby, but hardly the landslide w3schools is reporting.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        People running IE are far less likely to have blocked statcounter.com than those running other browsers.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by pspahn ( 1175617 )

      That 15% is still kinda scary though, huh?

      Every now and then I'm forced to debug something in IE and I have yet to really figure out how to use their debug tools.

      To think that 15% of their visits are in IE makes me wonder what the hell that 15% produces for clients.

      • Probably eactly what the client deserves; the likelihood is they're internal developers from an organisation that specifies Internet Explorer as part of the standard operating environment and refuses to allow people to use alternatives.

        • by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

          Considering how many revisions firefox has been through this year, I'm more sympathetic to locking to IE if you have to lock to something. Firefox has been averaging two - three months between major releases, chrome isn't far off.

          When you do a contract for someone you don't want to have to go back every 3 months because their browser changed how your page is rendered or how your plugin works or the like.

          It would be great if you could do everything as a web service properly, where browser choice doesn't ma

          • by Ambassador Kosh ( 18352 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @09:31PM (#40587173)

            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.

          • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

            Firefox and Chrome updates are supersets, that is they add features and fix bugs, and providing your page complies with standards and didn't depend on those bugs there's no reason it wouldn't render the same in subsequent versions.

            IE on the other hand introduces, promotes and then subsequently deprecates all manner of non standard features.. Similarly, their support for standards has traditionally been so poor and buggy that people have resorted to all kinds of kludgy workarounds... Workarounds which then b

    • by kesuki ( 321456 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:32PM (#40586775) Journal

      i just checked and wikipedia paints a different tale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers [wikipedia.org]
      i consider wikipedia as a pretty common denominator of who uses the web, google cheats, and some web based spyware is commonly blocked by advanced users (with ghostery or the like)
      android users are 4% of the browser marketshare at wikipedia.

    • by man_of_mr_e ( 217855 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:34PM (#40586797)

      Indeed. I have access to logs from entirely non-computer or technology related sites, and on average IE is still well above 50%, in many cases closer to 70%.

      However, that could be because our sites appeal mostly to older users, and few technically literate people visit them (sort of the inverse of w3schools).

      Certainly, if you add in Mobile browsers, IE's market share is probably more realistically in the 30%. However, since Mobile browsers are not really in the same competitive field, that means you need to remove a large percentage of safari and chrome/android browsers from the statistics.. otherwise you're not comparing apples and oranges.

      What I want to know is how far IE usage ON PC'S has dropped.

      • However, since Mobile browsers are not really in the same competitive field, that means you need to remove a large percentage of safari and chrome/android browsers from the statistics.. otherwise you're not comparing apples and oranges

        Chrome is not the default browser on android except in the unreleased 4.1 (jelly bean); it's available as a optional (buggy) beta on 4.0, but since 4.0 is only on 10% of android devices, I imagine it's a pretty small percentage of a small percentage. Ergo the chrome stats are

    • Wikipedia quotes from 5 different sources. Most sources have IE at about 30%, w3schools appears to be the most out of line.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table [wikipedia.org]

  • Oh wow, really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 08, 2012 @07:56PM (#40586505)

    That is statistics FROM THEIR WEBSITE.
    Worse, it is statistics from a website that technically literate people visit!

    Why this managed to reach the frontpage is beyond me.
    This isn't indicative of browser usage in any realistic manner.
    Hell, they even said so on the page. It is their own user logs.

  • I would love IE to be irrevelant- maybe it would mean proprietary apps would finally work cross-browser in the future if the companies behind them want to remain relevant...
    • by GiMP ( 10923 )

      ActiveX was already on the way out for IE users, being replaced by Silverlight. I'm not sure it is really a much better option, but at least there is a Mac plugin. The Linux alternative (Moonlight) is dead, however.

  • by countach74 ( 2484150 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @07:59PM (#40586531)
    I'm no Internet Explorer fan, but let's be fair here... The statistics are from visitors of w3schools.com, a site that people go to for web development. How many web developers or people interested in web development use Internet Explorer? I imagine it would be an easy point to argue that most of these individuals decidedly do not tend to use Internet Explorer. Claiming IE use is down to "almost 15%" sourcing nothing but a single web site's logs seems hardly trust worthy.
  • Oh, I mean still accounting for almost three fourths [wikipedia.org] of the OS market share won't save them? Let's remember what OS those browsers run on...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by wvmarle ( 1070040 )

      IE is Windows-only. Users that want IE, must use Windows. Users that prefer Firefox or Chrome can switch OS without switching browsers.

      This is just part of the Windows lock-in. Office is another major one. As long as people stick to MS Office, they must stick to Windows. If they start using OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, they can switch OS without switching word processor.

      The list goes on. For now the lock-in to Windows, partly thanks to the large number of software titles that are Windows-only, is strong. But

  • by adamchou ( 993073 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:00PM (#40586543)
    This is just browser usage for w3schools. The first paragraph underneath the charts even states

    W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Yea its certainly a poor sample to use for drawing conclusions about the browser market as a whole.

      Still W3CSchools is mostly reference material. Developers probably do go there using their browser of choice. As a general rule mass market users follow where the developers are after some time to over come inertia. IOS probably being the big exception to that rule in recent times where the massive user base has drawn the developers in.

      So this might say something about what the browser market share of the f

  • by F69631 ( 2421974 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:04PM (#40586571)

    First of all, it's closer to 17%. With the current rate of decrease we'll hit 15% in something like four months if nothing happens before that. More importantly...

    (The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures)

    Audience of W3Schools is people who are trying to learn the basics of certain web-related technologies and don't yet know that W3Schools is hardly the best place for that [w3fools.com]. Whether you like W3Schools or not, it's hardly representative of general population.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:10PM (#40586605)

    In my free time I run a vegetable gardening website - so a very non-technical, home-oriented audience. Looking at the entirety of 2012, Google Analytics reports the following (everything else is at 1% or less):

    IE 34.19%
    Firefox 22.52%
    Safari 21.38%
    Chrome 14.80%
    Android Browser 4.42%

    For OS I see

    Windows 65.68%
    Macintosh 15.57%
    iPad 5.24%
    Android 4.53%
    iPhone 3.95%
    iOS 2.09%
    Linux 1.23%

  • by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:18PM (#40586671)

    What implications does this have for the future of Microsoft?

    It means they failed to pwn the internet, thank all the gods

    But after Netscape withered it was Apache + BSD servers that kept them from it, not Firefox. If Microsoft had won on that front, they could have easily forced a MSInternet on us.

    It was a close thing, but settled quite a few years ago. This story is about a symptom of *that* failure, not a failure in its own right. No need to use Microsoft products, if Microsoft doesn't pwn the infrastructure or file format.

    They haven't given up pwning the PC yet, though. (New "secure" boot loader - mostly secure for Microsoft.)

  • invest in office chair companies.
  • by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:19PM (#40586677) Homepage

    windowsupdate.microsoft.com reports 99.9% IE user agents. IE is on a comeback!

    (What? It's just as useful a metric as TFA.)

  • by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:20PM (#40586683) Homepage

    From TFA itself:

    W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.

    These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.

    Glitch0, please submit your résumé to CNN. They greatly value your kind of selective reading skills.

  • by westlake ( 615356 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:25PM (#40586727)
    W3Schools has always posted this disclaimer:

    W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.

    These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.

    Net Applications collects stats for 12,415 clients the size of Disney, Apple, Microsoft, Roche, the Moz Foundation, CNN, the WSJ, the New York Times and so on. The guys paying for these stats don't give a damn about the geek. They do give a damn about what is happening in their core markets.

    Desktop Browser Market Share [hitslink.com]

    Statcounter exposes more of its stats --- and there can be some big surprises:

    Top 12 Browser Versions In China [statcounter.com]

    Mobile vs. Desktop in China [statcounter.com]

  • by Zamphatta ( 1760346 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @08:29PM (#40586755) Homepage
    The link shows the browser stats ONLY for visitors to w3schools.com, which is notoriously skewed away from IE due to it being a techy site for people who tend to use other browsers 'cause they're web developers who use a variety of browsers. This is not news by any standard. Even the text below the chart says "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user." & "These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser."
  • For Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @09:05PM (#40586999) Journal

    ...almost nothing, on the short term. Microsoft used IE and the fact that a lot of broken code on the net would only run on IE to drive sales on Windows. IE no longer drives sales on Windows, for a few reasons -- (a) the perception that IE is not as secure as other browsers, (b) Most competing browsers run on Windows, (c) the perception (less now) that IE is way behind in technology compared to other browsers.

    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?

  • Oh, Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)

    by slasho81 ( 455509 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @10:31PM (#40587471)
    The last two stories timothy posted were assertions of facts based on meaningless statistics (Objective-C Overtakes C++ based on TIOBE Index) and now this. Is it naive incompetence or deliberate provocation of a circlejerk? I'm not sure which is worse.
  • It's almost as bad as using MidnightBSD.org. I just checked Google analytics and it's showing 54% use Firefox, 26.59% on chrome, 11.59% on safari, 7.78% on IE and 4.92% on Opera. Any site that caters to technically savvy people is a bad indicator of general population.

    If we based this magic percentage on hits to my BSD project site, it would look even worse for Microsoft. It's just not fair to do so.

    Interestingly 47% of visitors are using Windows on my site and the second highest number is Linux at 31%. Are we going to assume Linux has 30% marketshare in desktops now too?

  • Prefetch? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pikine ( 771084 ) on Sunday July 08, 2012 @10:59PM (#40587669) Journal
    Could it be that Chrome prefetching [seroundtable.com] is actually generating enough traffic to skew the result?
  • by Patch86 ( 1465427 ) on Monday July 09, 2012 @03:16AM (#40588967)

    Oh, that summary hurts me in so many ways.

    - They're at 16%. I know that's "almost 15%", but why not just type 16%? It's not like you saved any time!
    - Stiff competition from Apple? Safari is at the same 4% market share it's been at for several years.
    - Implications for the Future of Microsoft? I'm sure dropping to third place in the browser market is really going to be the straw that broke Ballmer's back...

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