Is IE Usage Share Collapsing? 575
je ne sais quoi writes "Net Applications normally releases its statistics for browser and operating system usage share on the first of every month. This month, however, the data has not shown up — only a cryptic message stating they are reviewing the data for inexplicable statistical variations and that it will be available soon. Larry Dignan at ZDNet has a blog post that might explain what is happening: Statcounter has released some data that shows a precipitous drop in IE browser use in North America, to the benefit of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. At the end of May, StatCounter shows IE usage share (for versions 6, 7, and 8 combined) at around 64%; at the beginning of June it is now about 56% — an astounding 8% drop in one month. We should keep in mind the difficulties in estimating browser usage share: this could very well be a change in how browsers report themselves, or some other statistical anomaly. So it will probably be healthy to remain skeptical until trend this is confirmed by other organizations. Have any of you seen drops in IE usage share for Web-sites you administer?"
typo in summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
No problem, Noone reads the summary.
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Peter Noone, formerly of the band Herman's Hermits, gets blamed for everything. Apparently gives a shit. [encycloped...matica.com]
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Cousin of Anonymous Cowardon.
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
I wish I had mod points. The parent's post is pretty well on topic. My first reaction to the grandparent's post was that "Noone" was an intentional typo, since it was replying to a post about a typo. Now I'm not so sure.
OK, now I'm replying to a post about a typo that was in another post about a typo. I hope my post doesn't have any typos...
I counted 6 including the subject.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I always thought that was the name of the guy who built Data. Wasn't it? Dr. Noone Young Sung?
Doctor Noonien Soong
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
I always thought that was the name of the guy who built Data. Wasn't it? Dr. Noone Young Sung?
Doctor Noonien Soong
Doctor who?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No Doctor Who accidently left the positronic plans behind for Sung to steal.
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe this is just a case of "Nothing to see here, move along..." until we find out they had some mundane reason they were tardy this month.
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
There's a summary now?
I was making do with the first eight characters of the headlines.
So, in response to "Is IE Us", I'll have to say no. No it isn't.
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
You read the tags? I just blindly comment without even reading the post I'm replying to.
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:typo in summary (Score:4, Funny)
No, ocularDeathRay, not exactly. I'm not a good guesser at all.
Though it may at times seem like I'm responding to other people's posts-- like where you mention that I knew he read the tags-- I assure you that all of my posts are just random rants without any attention paid to the posts I'm responding to. If the response seems appropriate, it's just a wild coincidence. And yes, Linux is awesome.
See! I just said "Linux is awesome" even though that's completely irrelevant to what we're talking about. Why would I even say that until I had no idea what we were talking about? I bet you feel silly now.
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot Posting Form v0.1
Please select all that apply:
[ ] IANAL but ____
[ ] XKCD link : ___
[ ] Bash quote: ____
[ ] There, fixed that for you
[ ] In soviet russia the _____'s YOU
[ ] sudo _____ >
[ ] Get off my lawn
[ ] Cory Doctrow
[ ] Al gore
[ ] Natalie Portman
a.k.a. checkbox humour
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
You read the web page? I just drink a fifth of Jack, bang on the keyboard, and let the moderators sort it out.
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
You're putting monkeys out of work!
ivan
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Listen, sonny. In my day we didn't have tags. We had to stand on street corners, ranting about any topic that came to mind.
And stay the hell off my lawn!
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:typo in summary (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm MSIE the 8th I am. MSIE the 8th I am, I am. I got bested by the browser next door. We've been tryin' 7 times before. And everyone was an MSIE. We wouldn't pass an AcidTest, no ma'am. I'm the User Agent MSIE, MSIE the 8th I am, I am. MSIE the 8th I am.
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Segment and conquer (Score:5, Funny)
Proliferation of mobile browsers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Proliferation of mobile browsers... (Score:5, Informative)
My stats only count desktop browsers and I am at 52.4% for all versions of IE. And I don't run a tech-heavy site or anything, I run a site selling Japanese clothes. (http://www.tokyorebel.com)
Firefox 3.0 is at 35.6%, 3.5 is at a surprising 0.6%, but then it's new. (And thank God, because some of my CSS is totally messed up in 3.5.)
Actually now that I'm looking, I do have a stat that says "iPhone" which is at 0.2%.
Re:Proliferation of mobile browsers... (Score:5, Interesting)
The perception of myself (and finally! lately!) my non-technical friends...
is that using IE
a) has a ton of obnoxious ads- some are loud- some take over the screen.
b) is like walking around with a huge "kick me" sign on.
c) is frustrating because of the lack of many useful plugins (where would I get all these glorious HD Videos-- FINALLY "Blues Travellor" without firefox).
d) is frustrating because "they" own your browser-- not you. It's behavior serves "them", not you.
But mainly the virus/kick me thing.
After my bud clicked on a link (just a frikkin link!) on the yahoo message boards, he had to reinstall his entire computer!?!?!
With Firefox, Flashblock and Noscript- you are pretty darn safe.
Chrome got a lot of press- and to be honest, I've been looking at Safari myself. (once you break yourself of IE, you ask-- okay, but is there something else EVEN better than this?)
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Yes, actually, there is. Microsoft's BUILT IN InPrivate filtering by default manages to block every ad and tracking site (it works by auto-blocking things that are common to lots of sites) and you can set it to manual mode to block only things you don't want.
Also, IE7Pro (third party) goes the extra mile and is pretty much AdBlock, FlashBlock, and NoScript in one.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The important number is not so much the current percentage, but what the rate of change is. I've seen sites where IE has held steady at 80% and sites where it was never over 30%.
The story shows an 8% IE drop in a single month, which is so huge that it has to be a change in the sample size or methodology. Just as an example, at an old job we used the Omniture analytics service. They signed up Apple Computer to their service, and instantly the "internet" stats for OS X went from 3% to 12%.
Re:Proliferation of mobile browsers... (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at the data for the same period in previous years, I'm seeing:
2008: 63.26% IE and 31.49% Firefox
2007: 72.85% IE and 23.22% Firefox
2006: 77.60% IE and 17.77% Firefox
That's with 20,000+ visits in each period, so it's more than just noise.
Re:Proliferation of mobile browsers... (Score:5, Funny)
You host what??
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Re:Proliferation of mobile browsers... (Score:4, Interesting)
We still use IE6 where I work. We have too much stuff hard wired to it. Yet we need another browser - one that is up to date and compatible - in order to use a lot of sites and to test new externally facing applications. So we have Firefox installed everywhere too. We can install and run Firefox without disturbing our corporate standard. We can't do that if we upgrade IE.
Some are also running Safari 4 on Windows and Mac OS/X and there are a few other odds and ends around as well, but the bottom line is that if your company must continue to use IE6 for its internal apps, then they pretty much have to support a non-IE browser in order to effectively use today's internet.
Re:Proliferation of mobile browsers... (Score:5, Informative)
You could use IETab [mozilla.org] for the sites that still need Internet Explorer. It can be set up so that the tab automatically uses IE for certain websites. The other sites will use FireFox as normal and users won't need to worry about firing up a second web browser. Then, if you update a web application so that it doesn't require IE6, you can remove that site from IETab's list. Users won't need to change their habits at all, but will get the FireFox rendering engine.
My statistics (Score:4, Informative)
40.91% MSIE 7.0
27.11% MSIE 6.0
14.60% Mozilla/5.0
12.98% MSIE 8.0
Everything else below
Re:My statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Does your web site not work on Safari or are you reading your statistics wrong?
Re:My statistics (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm. You do realize that Safari reports itself as Mozilla/5.0, right?
Here's mine:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.1 Safari/530.18
They do this because various websites sniff for various browsers, and they want to show up as much like Mozilla/Gecko as possible. If your user agent parser isn't very smart, it might miss the Safari/530.18 part of that user agent string.
Of course, another possible explanation is that you work for a dental insurance company, for whom the most common users of the website are likely dental receptionists (for submitting claims), followed by people in HR (for signing up for services and looking up services on behalf of employees), both of which groups likely use only Windows machines.
Re:My statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
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Firefox:
June 6, 2009 - July 6, 2009 63.55%
May 6, 2009 - June 5, 2009 63.77%
Internet Explorer
June 6, 2009 - July 6, 2009 20.83%
May 6, 2009 - June 5, 2009 21.68%
Opera
June 6, 2009 - July 6, 2009 5.86%
May 6, 2009 - June 5, 2009 6.48%
Chrome
June 6, 2009 - July 6, 2009 5.62%
May 6, 2009 - June 5, 2009 5.07%
Safari
June 6, 2009 -
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My stats show an increase in IE 7 at the expense of IE 6 but not much else. Also many spiders like msnbot.
I wonder if some of the stats change is due to Bing? That might change the mix of browsers going to some sites.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul (partial)
IE 82.2 80.7 79.6 77.2 78.1 77.3 75.3
Firefox 11.9 13.4 14.3 15.8 14.0 14.6 15.5
Safari
Re:My statistics (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My statistics (Score:5, Informative)
As others said, forget spoofing.
However, ad blockers break the data collection for most analytics system. So it is likely that Firefox is being underreported, just because the of the popularity of ABP, NoScript, various cookie blockers, and so on.
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2001 called and said you can't use that tired old argument anymore. The default install of Firefox since 2.x (I believe) does not spoof IE in the user agent string. Firefox being the largest market share aside from any version of IE, the weight given to any other browser would be a statistical blip at best. In fact, if I remember correctly Konqueror in KDE3 and 4 actually spoofs Gecko by default. And Opera stopped spoofing MSIE after 6.x, IIRC.
No version of Firefox ever spoofed as IE. Safari has a "like Gecko" in their user agent string, and Opera spoofs only for specific sites.
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I used to. The Canadian employment insurance website for some inexplicable reason checked the browser and demanded either netscape or IE they fixed that but then inexplicably locked you out if your OS wasn't mac or Windows. My choices were either travel for 45 minutes and file my reports in person, install windows, or spoof my browser ID. Thankfully they have since come to their senses.
St-Hubert ordering system had the same IE or netscape (I need my rotisserie chicken) as did several other food ordering
No drop off here (Score:5, Informative)
We've seen no major drop off, just a steady and slow decline. We track over 15 million users a day across the sites we manage here in the UK (mainly council properties).
hmm.... it's summer? (Score:5, Funny)
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Not too mention everyone who uses IE at work is taking their vacation!
Its not people switching browsers, its switching off!
(probably an innaccurate statement, I haven't even looked at the numbers)
Re:hmm.... it's summer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hmm.... it's summer? (Score:5, Informative)
European nations require companies to give employees more paid vacations--4-6 weeks on average. Some companies pretty much shut down during the summer months. In the US, you tend to get your two weeks and that's about it.
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Those crafty socialist bastards! Enjoying a high standard of living and getting loads of free time? Must be a plot, I tells ya...
Re:hmm.... it's summer? (Score:5, Funny)
It's OK, we make up for it by being hideously inefficient most of the rest of the time.
It's because IE 6 support was droped on some sites (Score:5, Informative)
There are a few sites where IE 6.0 displays things badly because the web master stopped kludging for it.
Slashdot.org
some parts of Google.
(Help me here!)
Joe-six paks noticed this and has found out that he has options...
Re:It's because IE 6 support was droped on some si (Score:5, Funny)
In fairness, Slashdot displays things badly in Firefox 3.0. And Safari. And Opera. And Chrome. And probably Mosaic if you gave it a spin.
Please, just give me back the old site.
Re:It's because IE 6 support was droped on some si (Score:5, Funny)
If you ignore the five screens of Javascript at the top of each page, Slashdot is actually more usable in Mosaic than it is in other browsers.
Re:It's because IE 6 support was droped on some si (Score:4, Informative)
It is driving me up the wall that an article page looks different if you go to it from the front page vs. hitting the headline embedded in the display controls. One goes to http://foo.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=yy/mm/dd/idnumber [slashdot.org] and the other goes to http://foo.slashdot.org/story/yy/mm/dd/idnumber/Hyphenated-Article-Title [slashdot.org] . And the latter sucks.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We stopped supporting it on our site - www.ausgamers.com. If you go to it in IE6 you get a big fat warning at the top advising you to upgrade along with a link to Firefox.
Looking from multiple angles (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the longterm trends reported by Net Applcations, something that StatCounter doesn't offer, it's hard to conclude that anything dramatic has just happened.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/historical_view.html
These longer trends are steady and smooth and there's nothing that's happened in the last couple of months that would cause IE to fall off the cliff.
That being said, there is a lot of churn in the various browser versions. IE is really a collection of browsers with measurable share, IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8. Looking at these versions, it's clear that a lot is happening.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/07/a_browser_prediction.html
It's likely that IE 7 and IE 6 will fall to under 10% global share by the end of this year and that IE 8 will grow to approximately 40%. That would give IE 60% overall, Firefox about 25%, Safari about 10%, and "other" would hold the remaining 5%.
Skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
So it will probably be healthy to remain skeptical until trend this is confirmed by other organizations.
Especially after all the breathless "Firefox is taking over" stories on Slashdot, submitted by fanboys every time there's a spike in downloads (like after a release!) or the browser's market share gains a tiny fraction of a percent.
Mind you, I'm really glad to see that we're finally getting some serious competition in the browser marketplace. But before you congratulate yourselves too much, send a psychic "Thanks for Shooting Yourselves in the Foot!" to Steve and Bill. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera all have real advantages, but none of these would have overcome IE's big advantage: being the default browser on the desktop OS that owns 90% of its market. The only thing that could have overcome that advantage is not the advantages of the competition, but the extreme crappiness of IE itself.
1% maybe... (Score:4, Informative)
On the two sites I have access to for this info IE dropped about 1% for May vs June. One site (~19M visitors a month) it was 57.91% vs 56.64%. The other (~132M visitors) it was 60.17% vs 59.40%. I always question these sort of numbers because browser usage is very closely tied with demographics, and I wonder just what sites are they using to get them...
Please let this be true! (Score:5, Informative)
Not only would this change be welcome, but it would force Microsoft to "play ball" with the standards for HTML rather than roll their own and mark all the bug reports "will not fix".
Take a look at the history:
1) Microsoft is all about selling stuff on CD-ROM with the marketing vision "Information at your fingertips".
2) The Internet happens, and overnight, Netscape is a raving success because it actually PUT information at your fingertips.
3) Billy boy issues a memo to the whole company to turn as fast as possible to support the Internetz.
4) IE comes out - first a sucktacular mess, and finally almost livable around IE 5 or so.
5) IE 6 comes out, Netscape crumbles.
6) Netscape goes underground at AOL who throws a few developers at it while using it to negotiate a link on the Desktop. IE Dominates so tremendously that it's the platform of choice simply because it's installed everywhere.
7) Microsoft stops doing anything for half a decade. (whistle whistle)
8) Navigator continuously improves, finally re-emerging as Phoenix/Firefox. Suddenly, Microsoft's browser looks like a 5-year-old pile of cruft that's difficult to program for.
Suddenly, Microsoft will give a shiat. They might finally fix the things that developers!developers!developers! have been whining, bitching, complaining, and screaming about all these years.
Irony: "Free Internet Exporer 8" ad at the top while I type this message!
MJ Factor, plus, it is summer (Score:3, Interesting)
First, the MJ factor - these stats my be low, but I bet they will rise again once all the web-surfing born-again Michael Jackson fans are reflected in the stats for July.
Also, the summer factor is huge - at $WORK (Public school district) we have over 1,000 windows boxes that are now sitting idle through August, their IE 7 and IE 8 browsers aren't flipping through the most popular websites anymore. There are likely MILLIONS and MILLIONS of idle Windows machines at Universities and public schools skewing the stats down for IE 6, 7, and 8.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Plenty of time to go install FF3.5 on all those machines so the students will enjoy working in the lab again... ;)
~20% here, and still in decline (Score:5, Informative)
That's for a major Polish website devoted to a popular, long-running game series. The userbase is indeed a little more tech-conscious than the average Internet user around here, but not by much - just a few power gamers and techies, lots of "casuals". Nevertheless, IE was at ~70% in 2004, ~50% in 2005 and so on down to ~25% in the late 2008 and ~20% now. Right now it's kind of stabilizing (but still falling) and I don't forsee it falling below 15% anytime soon, but I'm starting to suspect that by the end of the year, Opera might overtake it (16% and rising, mostly ex-Firefox users right now).
We're not actively doing anything anti-IE or pro-FF/Opera (well, maybe except that IE is getting all the CSS/JS bugfixes lats, but that's *because* it's so low in the stats - we can afford letting the IE support lag behind), so it's mostly an outside trend, I think.
All the statistics I'm basing this post on were generated by Google Analytics, by the way.
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I have no good explanation, only some guesswork. Computers came to the Soviet bloc later, and weren't even luxury items, but were only available at universities and at some workplaces. Because of that, a certain hacker-like mentality arose around them - quite similar to what happened in the West a decade or two earlier, but this time it was an epoch of PC already, and therefore the knowledge and skills were centered around that. The result is that CIS and Eastern Europe have an abnormally high concentration
Hmm (Score:3, Funny)
Or maybe NetApps just came up with a creative way to earn more money from ads by delaying the release and having people come back every day for one week to check if the data is already there...
Well, why not. It's ok. But let's not misinterpret that.
w3schools doesn't show anything (Score:5, Informative)
W3 Schools [w3schools.com] which has an admitted alternate-browser bias does not show any sort of abrupt drop-off for IE, and if anywhere were going to, I would think it would be this site. In fact, it shows Firefox dropping for the first time since September of last year (when Chrome was initially released), but only half a percentage point. IE7 is losing ground to IE8 rather quickly, but IE6 actually gained a half a percentage point since May. Chrome is also up another half a point, and nothing else really had enough movement to be worth mentioning (Safari up a tenth, Opera down a tenth).
My Stats Disagree (Score:4, Informative)
The stats for MagPortal.com [magportal.com] (should be fairly unbiased) are not showing a drop in MSIE of that magnitude. Here is a comparison going from the last week in May to the first week in July:
MSIE: 66.10% -> 64.34%
Firefox: 25.71% -> 27.41%
Safari: 5.90% -> 5.61%
Chrome: 2.29% -> 2.65%
Slashdot browser shares?? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I really would like to see is the browser share of the Slashdot logs.
Re:Slashdot browser shares?? (Score:5, Funny)
Firefox: 13.45%
Safari: 4.23%
Chrome: 6.97%
Lynx: 22.43%
Self-created web browser: 23.12%
No browser - reading HTML directly: 14.22%
No browser - interpreting modem signals directly: 15.21%
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These numbers are faked. If your stats were accurate exactly 11.7% would be showing Emacs/w3m. Of course, you cold just be a jealous vi user who has no web browser or Rogue client built in to your text editor.
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I've seen a huge drop in IE... (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the economy, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
The drop in IE use is probably inversely proportional to the rise in unemployment.
With millions of people being laid off work, they are surfing at home and using sensible browsers.
Only people surfing at work get stuck using IE. My current gig is still using IE6!
Re:In utter disarray? (Score:5, Funny)
Did it loose 73% of its core developer?
I dunno, but what I'm interested in is what they did with the other 27% of him.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously, they tighted the other 27%.
But that's sexist to assume it's a him.
I'm interested with what they did with the other 27% of her.
Or, since we don't know the state of the core developer, perhaps we should be interested in what they did with the other 13.5% of him and the other 13.5% of her.
Or something. It's a little late in the day for me to be recalling Schroedinger.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But that's sexist to assume it's a him.
I'm interested with what they did with the other 27% of her.
Well, he was a he, before he had that 27% removed.
He was also quite well endowed, apparently.
Re:In utter disarray? (Score:5, Funny)
There's no difference. None of them come while you are awake.
Zing!
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Re:It was to be expected (Score:5, Insightful)
It always takes a while to educate the whole population with regards to technical stuff, after a while, it becomes public knowledge although ;-)))
The tough part isn't making it public knowledge, the difficulty is in making it common knowledge.
To compare this to more sinister things: Notice of your house being demolished on Tuesday can be put up in a dark cellar with no stairs at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory of the planning office guarded by a Leopard. This is public knowledge.
Making a news cast on the fact a new road is being run through your neighbourhood and personally notifying everyone whose house will be demolished is much more difficult. This is common knowlege.
Re:It was to be expected (Score:5, Interesting)
What I noticed is a dramatic shift in the listening to your IT guy lately.
People actually listen now instead of blowing me off and going right back to their porn surfing with IE.
The bad economy makes people actually listen when the IT guy says "I'll be back in 30 days to collect another $250.00 if you dont change your internet habits."
I love a bad economy, it forces people to be less stupid.
Re:It was to be expected (Score:4, Informative)
I love a bad economy, it forces people to be less stupid.
But apparently a large portion of your business was relying on the fact people are stupid. Now what?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think he'll be OK. There are a lot of stupid people out there...
Here, here !!!! (Score:3, Funny)
I think he'll be OK. There are a lot of stupid people out there...
There is no shortage of them here either ;-)
Re:It was to be expected (Score:5, Interesting)
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Oh, I don't know. I think it just forces them to be stupid in new and different ways.
Re:It was to be expected (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I'm rabidly pro-F/L/OSS [wikipedia.org], and nudge "ordinary" people towards it wherever I can, but I think it's a bit of a simplification to describe it as purely technically superior. When it does push the envelope, it normally drives the commercial world to react and improve, so they're usually roughly level-pegging at the feature level.
Where it really shines, I think, is in harder-to-define areas. Ethics, for one. Architectural taste, for another (debian got package management right 10 - 15 years ago - has windows caught up yet?) Social/organizational factors - the maintenance and repository models used by open OS distributions works so well that the commercial world is mimicking it with "app stores." Lastly, of course, there's motivation - I trust Ubuntu and Mozilla to fix security holes because it's the Right Thing and because they want to do a good job, and not just because they're scared of getting caught out, which I always feel is the mindset in the commercial world.
I understand these things are probably harder to explain to the general public, but can we at least be a bit more honest / precise amongst ourselves?
Re:It was to be expected (Score:4, Insightful)
> how much of the difference between commercial and OSS really is technical
If regular people are leaving IE for Safari or Chrome or Firefox in large numbers it is for technical reasons not political because even I don't understand WTF you are talking about. A recent poll showed only 8% of the public know what a "Web Browser" is. The fact that WebKit is BSD licensed and Firefox GPL probably has no meaningful impact on IE market share.
Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all 2x-8x faster than the latest IE, and you can run the latest Safari and Chrome on mobiles also. You can run Firefox completely for free on almost any PC hardware because you just have to install Ubuntu and there you go. At the same time, IE is a disaster. An epic technical failure. The current mobile version is based on the 1998 PC version.
You don't need to look any further than technical as the IE users peel off. The contrast is extremely stark.
I'm consulting in an all-Microsoft shop right now and they have all 2003 stuff and what they want is to move to Web apps, so they are thinking of standardizing company-wide on Chrome, at first on Windows and then later on Linux or a Google client OS. Nobody talks about moving to whatever is coming out of Microsoft tomorrow or ever. Their conversation around Microsoft for years has been how to keep it all running without upgrading it any further, basically an I-T freeze. Now they can see Web apps and cheap PC clients and of course smart phones for all as the next steps, and Microsoft is 0/3 in those categories. Also, they are moving away from paper faster than ever and Word does not have a "Publish to Web" command, there is no enthusiasm for a new version of Office, which is why they're still using 2003.
Microsoft's technical problems surely come at least in part from their inability to accept that some software projects, like browser engines and operating system cores, are better done in a community way through open source and standardization. But at the end of the day if your stuff works, nobody cares how you made the sausage. IE is falling under its own weight right now, and just when Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are really shining. The new typography in Firefox 3.5 really impressed me, and I was happy to see good typography from someone other than Apple and Adobe. Safari is so easy to use and so fast, what a joy. Chrome is a great business browser that will replace IE in a lot of corporate environments over the next few years and everyone will be better for it.
Re:It's the iPhOnE! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft hasn't released any apps for the iPhone, clearly indicating that it isn't a legitimate software company, but merely a marketing company that perpetuates the Windows monopoly.
Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble [roughlydrafted.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If we're not supposed to base our opinions on a "SINGLE SITE" (which we're not, most discussion revolves around aggregate data), why should we care about your site? Also, what the hell is the topic of your site to attract such a crowd of drooling mouth breathers (as I assume anyone still using IE5 must be)? I want to get in on that action, I bet my click through rates would go through the roof.
What browsers to actively test/sup
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I appreciate your sentiment, but you come off sounding like a raving loon.
You must be new here.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No? Then you haven't tried all ways of trying to secure the box. XP (or any windows really) can be configured to be pretty sure, you just need to know shit from chocolate, pull your finger out and actually DO IT.
Do I like doing that? No. Do I do that? No. But if i was desperate to secure a windows box
Re:a fool to run Windows XP on a daily basis (Score:4, Informative)
Disabled NoScript so the web would "work".
That sounds completely reasonable, disabling scripting does in fact make sites "not work".
Why are you foisting an extension for hardcore goatporn browsers onto regular corporate users?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, Microsoft promises not to sue users to propagate Silverlight creep on Linux, as long as they are content to use an old version.
Silverlight = MS Flash: replacing the open web with a closed binary that only works well on Windows.
Ogg Theora, H.264 and the HTML 5 Browser Squabble [roughlydrafted.com]