Internet Explorer has long been declining in popularity, but it hit an abandonment milestone in October as its market share dropped below 50 per cent for the first time in more than a decade. What browsers are reaping the benefits?
Microsoft’s browser is far from dead, but the October stats are hardly favourable. Some of IE’s decline can be attributed to the rapid increase in mobile browser usage — Safari rules that land. But while IE is still hovering above 50 per cent of users on desktops, it’s dropping fast — nearly 2 per cent last month. Most of the defecting desktop users are going to Chrome, but Firefox still has an edge over Google’s browser. Check out graphs above for more or head over to Ars Technica for comprehensive analysis of web usage. [Ars Technica]
Rooboy
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 8:57 AMIts understandable why IE is finally losing the market share they’ve monopolized for so long now. The browser itself hasn’t really been evolved other than the GUI and some minor changes in the back end.
FFox/Chrome and Safari are all completely tweakable with a variety of extensions that let you take over control of your web access how you see fit.
I think if IE had adopted this approach many moons ago they wouldn’t be shedding market share today.
just an opinion.
jeremy
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 9:29 AMAs a person who stares at web stats all day, all I can say is that as interesting as this is, it is not actually good and averages lie badly – the fragmentation of the browser market is making life for professionals tough. The actual (day by day, hour by hour) picture is way more complex, for example during working hours IE usage is way higher, and IE is broken into 4 major sub-releases thanks to locked down IT update polices. IE6 now fluctuates from just about 0 on weekends to 6% in some parts of the day – hell :-( Even firefox is a pain – FF3.6 is still suprisingly popular (last version before autoupdate, 7-8% share on our stats). I actually suspect the IT factor is what turns people off IE to some degree – they use old, pants, versions at work. I have all the IEs installed via various magic, and I can tell you that IE9 is really quite nice compared to the “tip” of other browsers (eg chrome/FF/safari). IE10 looks very good indeed, sorry to fanboys.
Sorry if this sounds like a winge, but ALL of the browsers have thier issues, and weeks of cross-browser testing for a release yesterday have tired me out – even the “best” ones have issues that are hard to work around …
Marrowmaw
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 12:51 PM+1
Nate
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 9:46 AMThe ONLY reason IE has the market share is becuase so many big corporations have kept IE as the default web browser because they can tweek the Java settins to their likings. However it makes the browser incrediby unstable. I’ve used it in many locations where this has been done to suite custom made in-house apps and tis buggy as hell and full of memory holes often causing it to crash / hang when using alot of the modern websites these days. Most of the time it won’t even render the pages right either and if it does.. it stuggles in IE7 and IE8. Not seen it running in IE9 in a corporate enviroment yet.. and not realy used it at home as my browser of choice is Chrome.
Matt
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 9:59 AMI think it’s amazing how well Chrome is doing considering how new it is compared to Firefox and IE.
I was a long time Firefox user but I switched to Chrome 6 months back, you can’t go past it’s simplicity.
Brendan
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 10:23 AMWell as the saying goes IE is the number 1 browser to download a better bowser
MotorMouth
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 10:44 AMIE is easily the worst desktop browser I’ve used. I don’t know why anyone puts up with it. Mind you, I don’t really understand why people are moving to Chrome, either. I’ve tried it a few times after hearing people sing it’s praises but I don’t find it a whole lot better than IE. Nothing beats Firefox with a few well chosen extensions.
Win8 doesn’t improve things for IE, either. In fact, the touch-enabled browser app is terrible, forcing you to go back page by page, instead of being able to jump back to a specific page in a history list. It has some handy features but overall it can’t hold a candle to FireFox.
Steve
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 4:53 PMEvery advantage you can mention about FF over IE, Chrome has it as well. IMO Chrome’s extensions are better designed and web apps are far more usable. The problem is that moving browsers sucks so few people want to bother with it. The first month of moving Opera > Chrome stunk, but after you break it in, it’s amazing. By far the best browser I’ve used.
Rooboy
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 10:45 AMDoes anyone who uses Safari and Chrome see some similarities? I’ve often wondered if they were clones of one another.
Marrowmaw
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 12:52 PMThey are both WebKit.
For more information try wikipedia.