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Internet Explorer Microsoft Software Stats

IE Drops To Single-Digit Market Share 390

New submitter fplatten writes "I think this is all you need to see to know what legacy Steve Ballmer has left at Microsoft, where its IE browser market share has collapsed from a high of 86% in 2002 to just 9% now. I guess this is just another in a long list of tech companies that failed to maintain its dominant market share. Also, IE may be the one product that never really deserved it, but just piggybacked on Windows, and users left in droves once decent (more secure) alternatives and standards became popular." Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though -- browser choice is a pretty small arm of the octopus.
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IE Drops To Single-Digit Market Share

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  • by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:30PM (#46112965)

    W3Schools has a very skewed demographic, I wouldn't take their figures to be a true representative across the board.

    My companies websites (Insurance) have an IE share of about 40%.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      it's because insurance companies prey on idiots.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:43PM (#46113103)

        I will hazard a guess that you own neither a car nor a home, and that you don't have to worry about anyone being supported until they're 18 in the event that you get hit by a bus before then.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So does w3schools, go figure.

      • "Idiots" (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        As much as I loathe Internet Explorer, this sort of response is unproductive. A lot of people are forced to use Internet Explorer who are neither idiots nor prey on them. Public access computers in libraries, computers in businesses and non-profits that have limited IT resources, and schools in lower income areas are also large users of Internet Explorer.

        Such blind, fanboyish hatred doesn't serve those users at all.

    • by jones_supa ( 887896 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:37PM (#46113033)
      StatCounter's 12/2013 data [statcounter.com] shows IE being at 24.91%.
    • by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo ( 1000167 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:51PM (#46113203)
      I keep the stats on 12 state government websites. As sad as it may be, the lowest I've ever seen IE (taken as a whole) dip was 55%. And, for the record every site is tested and compliant on a multitude of browsers and not a single one recommends IE. We're getting there, but we're not at single digits yet.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Threni ( 635302 )

        As a government body, of course, they'll also be skewed. There's probably, for example, loads of poor bastards forced to use IE6 or whatever and who are not allowed to installer their own choice of browser for security reasons (don't laugh!).

    • by magic maverick ( 2615475 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:54PM (#46113255) Homepage Journal

      Yes. Don't trust one website's stats. Always look at your own stats before deciding you can afford to not support a particular browser. Of course, you should always use progressive enhancement, so that even if people do insist on using ancient browsers, they should still be able to get the basic content. (It's a pity more people don't take the view, but considering the web was intended to be a universal, regardless of machine or software, medium, it's the view that is more inline with the intention of the web.)

      • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:50PM (#46113873) Journal

        I just popped up our site's stats We have had about 31,000 visits this month (according to awstats). IE comes in at 23%. The winner is Safari at 26.1%, so that tells use there are a helluva lot of iPhones out there. Firefox and Mozilla come in at 17.3% and 10%. Chrome comes in at 16.1%.

        What it tells me, most of all, is that smart devices are becoming the dominant surfing platforms, and that not just IE, but Windows in general in slipping down the list.

        • by xaxa ( 988988 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @05:14PM (#46114871)

          Visitor attraction + scientific research institution, 50% hits from UK, rest pretty much even across the rest of the world:

          Main domain: 650k "visits" (Google Analytics definition) this month. 31% Chrome, 26% IE, 18% Safari, 17% Firefox, 3% Android.
          60% Windows, 19% iOS, 13% Mac, 6% Android, 1% Linux.

          Another domain of no interest to visitors, only scientists (and hobbyists, probably): 52k visits, 33% Chrome, 33% Firefox, 24% IE, 7% Safari, 2% Opera(!), 1% Android
          85% Windows, 10% Mac, 2% iOS, 1% Linux (the site isn't very nice on a mobile, we don't think many people want to look at tables of data on a tiny screen).

          • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot&worf,net> on Thursday January 30, 2014 @05:42PM (#46115169)

            Main domain: 650k "visits" (Google Analytics definition) this month. 31% Chrome, 26% IE, 18% Safari, 17% Firefox, 3% Android.
            60% Windows, 19% iOS, 13% Mac, 6% Android, 1% Linux.

            Another domain of no interest to visitors, only scientists (and hobbyists, probably): 52k visits, 33% Chrome, 33% Firefox, 24% IE, 7% Safari, 2% Opera(!), 1% Android
            85% Windows, 10% Mac, 2% iOS, 1% Linux (the site isn't very nice on a mobile, we don't think many people want to look at tables of data on a tiny screen).

            The interesting thing is, or rather, something wrong, is that Android's marketshare is around 80% of smart devices, iOS around 20%. And yet in all your stats, iOS still comes out ahead of Android.

            Even Ars Technica [arstechnica.com], a site for technical enthusiasts still records just over 50% IE usage. And on mobile, iOS takes 50% of the traffic, while Android is around 35% (Android+Chrome).

            So the question is - why is iOS so over-represented? We know there are at least 4 times as many Android devices out there.

    • by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:55PM (#46113277)

      My first job out of school was in the insurance industry.

      There is no better example of clueless IT. The whole industry is run by and for the benefit of the commissioned salespeople.

      Because of that (and the simple computer problems faced by insurance) they get the bottom of the barrel of techs, programmers and engineers.

      Your users are so dumb (insurance salespeople) that whatever came on the machine is going to be what they use.

      Get out. The grass is greener, just about anywhere. Even banking.

      • by sootman ( 158191 )

        > My first job out of school was in the insurance industry.
        > There is no better example of clueless IT. The whole
        > industry is run by and for the benefit of the commissioned salespeople.

        Have you had any other jobs? Many industries are like that.

    • Many company have internal applications that require IE. Fro example, my employer and a lot of other companies I know of rely on a web-based "project time and resource reporting" system that only supports IE (ver 6 or newer) and uses several methods to get around user agent header spoofing. It is the only reason I still use IE.

      Probably very few people are visiting W3Schools from their corporate PCs, so their statistics won't include those installations. On the other hand, if people who use EI at work are us

    • by recoiledsnake ( 879048 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:03PM (#46113391)

      W3Schools is a site for web developers and does not represent the web despite the three W's in the name.

      Net Applications(which measures visitors instead of page views like Statcounter) has it at ~50%.

      Story brought to you by the same geniuses that brought you the following stories:

      "Draconian DRM Revealed in Windows 7"
      http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]

      "Microsoft to abandon Windows Phone"
      http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
      (As an aside, the above story was submitted by the zealot megalomaniac symbolset).

      Milking views by trolling only works for so long.

      Thanks to zealot posters like bmo, symbolset, Zero__Kelvin, LordLimeCat, Jeremiah Cornelius, UnknowingFool, rtfa-troll, binarylarry, MightyMartian, drinkypoo, pieroxy for karmawhoring the groupthink and slowly ruining the site by spewing lame shill accusations. Oh and thanks to moderators for marking them insightful and modding down any posts that go against the groupthink.

      When the beta lands and is the default without a way to go back to the old layout is the day I remove Slashdot from my bookmarks and unfollow on twitter.

      Last one out turn off the lights.

    • by WPIDalamar ( 122110 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:05PM (#46113411) Homepage

      Looking at logs I have access to, I see

      Between 50% and 65% for a series of education related sites.

      6% for a highly technical site.

      Clearly what the site caters to has a big impact.

      I bet apple.com is even lower ;)

      • by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:48PM (#46113847)

        I bet apple.com is even lower ;)

        You might be surprised. I seem to recall that they revealed the breakdown a few years back, and the IE traffic was much higher than you'd expect, simply because of interest from the typical, rank-and-file Windows variety of users who were looking for a change. I'll admit that I could be misremembering, however.

        • by smash ( 1351 )
          Also, there are plenty of iPod, iPhone and iPad toting Windows users out there.
    • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:06PM (#46113427)

      My hobby (veggie gardening) website shows the following, out of 7034 visits this month (per Google Analytics):

      Safari (appears to be iOS for the most part): 1,828 / 25.99%
      Internet Explorer (must be all the Surface users eh?): 1,564 / 22.23%
      Chrome: 1,511 / 21.48%
      Firefox: 1,368 / 19.45%

      Fifth place, at 5%, is "Android browser" which I'm guessing is that gosh-awful thing from Android 2.2 / 2.3...

  • by manquer ( 1950350 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:31PM (#46112981) Homepage
    w3schools.com really? That's best data set OP could come up with??
    • by Ralph Wiggam ( 22354 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:52PM (#46113225) Homepage

      It is the best data set to make Microsoft look bad- which is the point here.

      • by x0n ( 120596 )

        It is the best data set to make Microsoft look bad- which is the point here.

        And the real irony is that as of IE 11.0, it's actually a pretty solid browser. It's stable, fast, has a decent integrated web tool set and implements everything that is important (WebGL, HTML5, Offline, etc. etc.) Meanwhile, Chrome is slowly turning into a crashy, buggy piece of shit. Sigh.

        • I ditched Firefox for Chrome when Firefox went off a cliff. Chrome is not heading in a good direction. Maybe it's time to give IE 11 a shot.

    • Yeah, right? Who cares what share IE has with... Web developers.
    • by fermion ( 181285 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:57PM (#46113975) Homepage Journal
      The more accurate summary maybe that that most people who have a choice and know better do not use IE. This has always been the case since the internet began. IE has never been a decent or secure browser. It was an ok application front end, ane most people used it because there was no choice, and why run two different browsers. To this day I have websites written in legacy code that only run in IE. TO be honest, for a few years, maybe 1997-2000, there were a few, mostly intranet, bussiness cases that did justify the use of the MS Internet. Mostly it was just laziness, which we are still paying for, So yes, in the wide world IE may still have a majority, or a least be the largest minority in the web browser use. The web browser war, though it over, and the MS IE strategy has lost.
  • 9%... out of the user agents connecting to w3schools. I guarantee you that Chrome is not the majority browser among the public (yet), either.

    The only surprise was the 82% in 2002... those IE 6-only sites back then didn't seem to designed with any open standards in mind.

  • by gr4nf ( 1348501 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:34PM (#46113013)
    It's a good thing there are websites out there like W3Schools that just about everybody visits on a daily basis. How would we get these statistics otherwise?
  • What's funny is that IE11 on Win8.1 is finally fast, at least as fast as Firefox/IceCat and Chromium. And it is stable and actually compliant with standards.

    Not that I'd use it voluntarily, but it's the least horrible it's ever been at the same time it has the lowest market share.

    • The current IE version isn't really relevant, because lots of people don't use that. For instance, here on my work computer, I'm using IE8 on Win7. It's not like I have any choice in the matter. Luckily, for browsing non-intranet sites, the company lets me install Firefox (version 26 currently). There's still lots of companies chugging along with IE6. And there's pretty much zero companies that have moved to Win8, so if the latest IE version only works on that (I don't know if it's available on Win7 or

    • Yea I was surprised to see a canvas-heavy app I'm writing is actually running faster in IE11 than in Chrome. My worldview was shattered and I was left despondent, my only choice - to sadly pick up the pieces and cut myself with them. These are my last words, my dying hope - that others will see my plight and be warned.
      • Yea I was surprised to see a canvas-heavy app I'm writing is actually running faster in IE11 than in Chrome. My worldview was shattered and I was left despondent, my only choice - to sadly pick up the pieces and cut myself with them. These are my last words, my dying hope - that others will see my plight and be warned.

        Be cheerful even if you hate IE. The more we can get corps to upgrade the more we can just write to standards. Starting with IE 9 MS really did try to say we are sorry and make up for it. IE 9 compared to Firefox 4 was a better browser but lacked a few things. A different world than IE 8 - 6.

        IE 10 can crash but made it modern. IE 11 finally uses edge javascript but unfortunately it breaks many intranet corporate sites which rely on ancient non standard behavior and even public ones like Monster.com which us

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:37PM (#46113041)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Stock price (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dilaudid ( 574715 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:40PM (#46113079)

    Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though

    He joined in January 2000 when according to that link, the stock was at 48.94. Today the stock is at 36.50. Managing a -25% return over 14 years is not a good thing.

    • Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though

      He joined in January 2000 when according to that link, the stock was at 48.94. Today the stock is at 36.50. Managing a -25% return over 14 years is not a good thing.

      Did the stock split between 1/2000 and today? Did it pay dividends between those dates? Did you count either of those against your figures our just figure out that 36.50 was around 25% less than 48.94?

  • Serious sample bias (Score:5, Informative)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:43PM (#46113105)

    The statistics are "collected from W3Schools' log-files..." So an English-language site for people interested in web development is now considered an accurate proxy for browser usage? I think not. Predictably, the results are way out of line with, well, pretty much everyone:

    http://www.netmarketshare.com/... [netmarketshare.com]
    http://gs.statcounter.com/ [statcounter.com]
    http://www.w3counter.com/globa... [w3counter.com]
    http://browsermarketshare.com/ [browsermarketshare.com]
    http://clicky.com/marketshare/... [clicky.com]

    • by Havokmon ( 89874 )

      The statistics are "collected from W3Schools' log-files..." So an English-language site for people interested in standards compliant web development is now considered an accurate proxy for browser usage? I think not. Predictably, the results are way out of line with, well, pretty much everyone:

      FTFY- We all know anyone who does dev in IE isn't concerned with standards compliance.

  • statcounter numbers (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cyko_01 ( 1092499 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:45PM (#46113119) Homepage
    IE at 22.82% and falling
    chrome at 43.67% and rising
    firefox at 18.88% and falling slightly
    safari at 9.75% and rising slightly

    there is a strong correlation between chrome and IE in both gains and losses
  • by netsavior ( 627338 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:46PM (#46113131)
    15% of my customer base uses IE6 or IE7.
    not just IE but superbad IE... of course we are business oriented software, which for some reason explains it all... corporate organizations are insanely, dangerously slow at upgrading.
    Sometimes our site is run on cash registers and other ancient POS systems... but our "cloud" solution is accessed by IE more than any other browser, and IE6/7 more often than you could possibly imagine.... and it is no simple matter of forcing the customer to upgrade... what are they going to do, re-flash Windows CE and somehow get a decent browser to run on 256 meg of memory?

    It is actually less shocking (though still really annoying) that people still use IE6 when you realize how much "modern" stuff you can still do on it. Almost everything in jQuery works, so even fancy active ajax pages are fine, as long as you account for the lack of JSON.stringify and JSON.parse and don't try to use a decent CSS layoyt.

    a bajillion mobile devices and home computers that don't make anybody any real money run the latest stuff, but a tiny and extremely profitable segment of the userbase are Microsoft for life, and often, some old and horribly dangerous incarnation of Microsoft...
    • by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:54PM (#46113253) Homepage

      It's a vicious circle. At my former employer we were on IE6 because several of our critical Web applications only worked correctly with it. And since we were locked into IE6, any new Web applications had to work with it as well which removed any pressure to update. The only way we'd've gotten resources allocated to update those few ancient Web apps would have been if some other business-critical Web app had abandoned IE6 support entirely and said "IE 8 or later or we don't work". Which they won't do because they don't want to risk losing their IE6 user base. And round and round it goes, like a pair of orbiting black holes.

      • Worse if these customers are vendors, suppliers, or retailers, then they also demand each B2B company to also use IE 6.

        So now the trucking company has IE 6, supplier has IE 6, retailer has IE 6, and trucking company has IE 6. Now they have their other customers but ooops now these 4 or 5 companies that use IE 6 tell the others to use IE 6 etc.

        The damn thing is a virus! Like herpes is spreads and even when they upgrade and appear to have the dinosuar behind it is still there if you peel deep within the skin

    • Probably because

      1) Those corporate org customers/clients of yours probably have intranet apps that were designed around IE6 and break horribly in any other browser, and it is "too expensive" to re-do them for either a neutral platform, updated version of IE, etc.

      2) Those same corporate org customers/clients of yours probably have an IT department that won't allow them to install other browsers to use when not using the aforementioned IE6 based apps

    • Now is the time to put the javascript from IE6countdown to remind users to upgrade. Modify it so IE 7 displays the same message. Since XP is going EOL it is something their IT departments should be working on anyway.

      Here is a link to show your boss about a website that finds it cheaper to pay users to upgrade [neowin.net] rather than support IE 7. :-)

      I know it is about money and reaching out, but it is time to move on. You should be phasing out IE 8 as well as it is keeping HTML 5 out. Google docs no longer even works w

    • by BUL2294 ( 1081735 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:02PM (#46113361)
      Let's see... Microsoft has only themselves to blame for this problem. They stopped supporting their non-standard features in newer versions, and made the stupid decision to not make newer versions of IE to try to "nudge their OS choices". In mixed OS environments, even if only temporary, the version of IE used ends up being the least common denominator. So, in a shop that ran a mix of XP, W2K, and 98, you standardized on IE6. Currently, if you're running a mix of XP and Win7, you're likely using IE8...

      Obviously, this plan backfired on Microsoft. What other browser vendor supports 6 major versions of their browser? Oh, and if you thought that IE6 would fall off with the demise of WinXP, think again--it came with Windows Server 2003, so IE6 is already supported until 7/2015, just shy of 14 years after it was introduced!!! (And that's not assuming that XP doesn't continue to get support fixes beyond 4/2014 or even 7/2015...)
  • I do not mind IE (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:47PM (#46113159) Journal

    What I do mind is old IE and wanting that to go down to single digit marketshare.

    Why can't we all have nice websites that look as good as your apps on your phone? IE the fact that users never ever upgrade!

    Shit IE 8 is 5 years old now and we can't have HTML 5 outside our crappy tiny phones. Inexecusable. Let this dinosaur die and I hope the intranet developers die a horrible death who still do not know what ECMA script is and think Jscript is javascript. ... and that statistic is BS. If IE 9 and early hits single digit it is time we stop making business sites that work in HTML 4 and CSS 2. They wont upgrade until websites stop working and websites wont stop working until users upgrade. Now it is 2014 and we are living 10 years in the past due to the same old BS.

     

    • Speaking of this, is there a site that breaks down IE usage by versions?

      • g.statcounter.com make sure you select North America as China is such a HUUGGEE outliner with IE 6 compared to every other country. However it produces results that conflict with everyone else such as Chrome #1 browser, while IE 8 is the worlds most popular browser according to netmarketshare and others.

      • Google Analytics does this. Looking at my veggie gardening site - which I assume means home users, mostly - 98% of IE users are version 9 or above. So that's good news!

        Of course my site mostly sticks to standards, so it was never designed to work well with IE 6 (and only marginally w/ IE 7). I've gotten complaints about that in the past... so perhaps those users just stopped coming.

    • by JcMorin ( 930466 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:00PM (#46113351)
      Humm, as a developer I feel a bit idiot because I never really ask myself the question... and always think it was the same thing. After a quick look it seems I'm right, both compile and run the same way... it's different name for specific version of ECMA Script. http://stackoverflow.com/quest... [stackoverflow.com]
    • IT guy here. I'm with you. I hate old IE. I wish it would die a horrible death. Having said that, I think new IE is quite nice, to the point that the only thing preventing me from switching is a few Firefox behaviors that are technically deprecated.
      However, I must pipe up regarding old IE usage on corporate networks. In my experience, the thing preventing upgrading IE is legacy enterprise software, as you accurately pointed out. Sadly, these programs often were only purchased because they were the cheapes
  • by kperrier ( 115199 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:56PM (#46113283)

    For this one site. Not the most honest headline. I don't think w3schools is a representative sample of all of the sites on the Internet.

  • by Bill_the_Engineer ( 772575 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @02:58PM (#46113307)

    A biased submitter found a statistic to support their claim that IE is no longer relevant. I agree IE may be losing relevance but the w3school log files only show that people who want to learn how to write a webpage from w3school are likely to use Chrome. I suspect if I looked at the log at Microsoft's developer network I would come to the conclusion of IE being preferred by developers, and if I went to Apple's developer site it would show that Safari being preferred by developers.

    The other red flag being that the statistics are presented as percentages with no absolute numbers given. This could be a site serving a very small demographic with very low volume. In fact the site discloses some of these caveats in the "Statistics can be misleading" section of that page.

  • by strstr ( 539330 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:20PM (#46113555)

    I am sure at w3schools they're dealing primarily with devs, who do in fact prefer another browser over IE. but on my site of 3000 unique visitors per month, I'm seeing... what others are seeing at sites other than w3schools.

    The breakdown is :

    Firefox 27.3%
    Google Chrome 26.1%
    MSIE 16.6% (down quite a bit from a few years ago)
    Mozilla 10.6%
    Opera 7.7%
    Safari 6.5%

    Unknown/Android/iPhone/etc make up the rest.

    Most of my IE users are IE6.. o.o

    On my other site with a seeding of 1500 unique users, IE sits at 29.5%, Chrome at 33.7%, Firefox at 17.9%, everything else, who cares .. It makes me wonder what more Windows orientated sites, mainsteam news sites get - Yahoo, Rage3D, Tomshardware, etc. These are the sites I think most of the IE users are on (my site here gets most of it's users from the AMD graphics card camp, doing 29.5% IE).

  • by EmperorOfCanada ( 1332175 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @03:30PM (#46113673)
    Nearly every time I do cross platform testing, it is Firefox-yup, Safari-yup, Chrome-yup, IE-NOPE. I don't remember the last time I made a browser conditional if statement for the first three but nearly always I find that with IE I have to resort to the awfulness that is browser conditional javascript.

    Now with IE10 things are pretty good but due to the huge prevalence of 7, 8, 9 (and in some corporations, even 6). But this has been years of being smashed in the teeth by IE, So I am not glad to see it go away because of any problems with IE10/11 but like the wall street bankers past actions, MS had it coming.
  • by Dcnjoe60 ( 682885 ) on Thursday January 30, 2014 @04:07PM (#46114117)

    Microsoft stockholders probably don't feel too badly about the Ballmer legacy overall, though -- browser choice is a pretty small arm of the octopus.

    Microsoft's stock is 20.89% higher than it was on this date in 2002. That is an average yearly increase of 1.74%. US Savings Bonds had a greater return over that time period! So, if their shareholders aren't upset, they should be.

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