IE's market share is slipping | The Coffeehouse

Shining Arcanine

http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox30.html

Onestat neglected to mention that Apple's web browser marketshare is increasing becuase Microsoft discontinued further development of Internet Explorer for Mac.

Anyway, the version of IE intergraded with Longhorn will really have to be something to win back this marketshare. Bells and Whistles alone won't do it as an increasing amount of webmasters are dropping support for IE and telling people to switch to Mozilla, Safari, Opera or a browser based off the same code as they find it impossible to develop for IE's broken standards (CSS2 and PNG are the main issues at the moment) support. Additionally, fixing the standards support will only slow the growth of competing web browsers as webmasters won't be pushing for people to switch. Microsoft will have to implement as many Bells and Whistles (e.g. Tabbed Browsing, Bit Torrent support, etc) as they can think of to show people that by switching back they won't give up features but will gain features.

Jaz
From the depths of Wales I come

what is with this need for bit torrent support?

Shining Arcanine

Jaz wrote:
what is with this need for bit torrent support?

I came up with that idea. I said that the next version of IE will need features that already exist in other browsers and features that don't, currently, it is one of those features that don't so I felt like citing it as an example.

Knute
Behave, or else...

You can't be serious... Webmasters are dropping support for IE?

I'd like the name of at least one fortune 500 company who has done this, just one.

~ Knute

harumscarum
out of memory

After seeing the 93.9% I am extremely disappointed in MS for letting it drop beneath 95%. I would hope that they strive for 100%. IE really needs to get its act together.

AndyJ
andyj

Shining Arcanine wrote:

...an increasing amount of webmasters are dropping support for IE and telling people to switch to Mozilla, Safari, Opera....

Yeah, right.... Per your link IE marketshare is still 93%. I don't see any realistic general-public web site developer saying "we don't support IE" anytime soon. By the nature of it's marketshare IE creates the standards. Sure it not always follow the "official" standards, but that's not always relevant. I develop a lot of sites for a lot of clients and the question of non-ie browsers is always the same. IE is supported first, other browsers as time and budget allow. IE is the dominant force behind browsers today and it doesn't need flashy new features to retain usership. On the other hand non-IE browsers need a very difficult combination to gain general-public users: zero cost and stunningly killer features. However the web is mature enough now that truely inovative feature development is just not there. What more could a browser do that the general public would just "have to have?" Don't think of this in terms of tech-heads, think of you mom, your grandfather, or a corporate beancounter. Why do you need browser X, what doesn't IE do that is THAT important? Bit Torrent? ha ha ha. Now if they could make a browser that would fetch me coffee, there would be a killer feature. Otherwise, the general public doesn't want to think about their browser choice. That's 1995, now we just start our PC's and surf to our favorite sites. We want information, not an information provider....
-Andy

Shining Arcanine

Knute wrote:
You can't be serious... Webmasters are dropping support for IE?

I'd like the name of at least one fortune 500 company who has done this, just one.

~ Knute

I said that an increasing number of webmasters are dropping support for IE. I didn't say that being a webmaster meant that you worked for some huge company. Here is one that dropped support:

http://www.pokefor.tk/

After numerous compliants, he created a CSS hack to make his site use a color scheme that he hasn't used for years so that it looks almost acceptable in IE. If you look through his news posts as well as the index page on his site, you can see how much (as much as he possibly can) he is pushing Mozilla.

harumscarum wrote:
After seeing the 93.9% I am extremely disappointed in MS for letting it drop beneath 95%. I would hope that they strive for 100%. IE really needs to get its act together.

It is called Longhorn.

Shining Arcanine

The growth of the competing browsers does show that chances are if Microsoft doesn't do something in Longhorn they will lose control of the market.

By the way, I edited my previous reply, you might want to read it.

Knute
Behave, or else...

Shining Arcanine wrote:

Knute wrote: You can't be serious... Webmasters are dropping support for IE?

I'd like the name of at least one fortune 500 company who has done this, just one.

~ Knute

I said that an increasing number of webmasters are dropping support for IE. I didn't say that being a webmaster meant that you worked for some huge company. Here is one that dropped support:

http://www.pokefor.tk/

After numerous compliants, he created a CSS hack to make his site use a color scheme that he hasn't used for years so that it looks almost acceptable in IE. If you look through his news posts as well as the index page on his site, you can see how much (as much as he possibly can) he is pushing Mozilla.

Ok so I will agree, only fringe sites that don't need to compete in the market place drop support. But all business' will still develop for IE.

~ Knute

AndyJ
andyj

Shining Arcanine wrote:

.... Here is one that dropped support:

http://www.pokefor.tk/

After numerous compliants, he created a CSS hack to make his site use a color scheme that he hasn't used for years so that it looks almost acceptable in IE....

Yeah, so here's one guy that's too ignorant/dumb/lazy to get this site (and what a site <rolling eyes>) working in IE and the industry is now flocking away from IE....

I'm sure MS is shaking in their collective boots.... Bill G must be apologizing to his kids for loosing his fortune even now....
-Andy

Shining Arcanine

Knute wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote:

Knute wrote: You can't be serious... Webmasters are dropping support for IE?

I'd like the name of at least one fortune 500 company who has done this, just one.

~ Knute

I said that an increasing number of webmasters are dropping support for IE. I didn't say that being a webmaster meant that you worked for some huge company. Here is one that dropped support:

http://www.pokefor.tk/

After numerous compliants, he created a CSS hack to make his site use a color scheme that he hasn't used for years so that it looks almost acceptable in IE. If you look through his news posts as well as the index page on his site, you can see how much (as much as he possibly can) he is pushing Mozilla.

Ok so I will agree, only fringe sites that don't need to compete in the market place drop support. But all business' will still develop for IE.

~ Knute

Other webmasters have dropped support as well (can't recall any others at the moment but I have seen them) and if those sites have, what keeps more from dropping support for the same reasons? This is becoming a trend and will continue as long as webmasters want to pull their hair out over IE.

harumscarum
out of memory

Shining Arcanine wrote:
I said that an increasing number of webmasters are dropping

and this would include persons who profit from pushing standards or persons who do a "site for a family member". I am not taking anything away from the previous mentioning but there is no way a corporate site (identity), e-site($), or a community site would have a "I’m sorry don’t use ie use moz to view this."

Shining Arcanine

AndyJ wrote:

Yeah, so here's one guy that's too ignorant/dumb/lazy to get this site (and what a site <rolling eyes>) working in IE and the industry is now flocking away from IE....

I'm sure MS is shaking in their collective boots.... Bill G must be apologizing to his kids for loosing his fortune even now....
-Andy

It is that thinking that allowed Linux to become what it is today and allowed Hilter to take over most of Europe. Actions must be made now and not later as little things will grow. Just as weeds grow in your yard if you don't kill them at first sight.

harumscarum wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote: I said that an increasing number of webmasters are dropping

and this would include persons who profit from pushing standards or persons who do a "site for a family member". I am not taking anything away from the previous mentioning but there is no way a corporate site (identity), e-site($), or a community site would have a "I’m sorry don’t use ie use moz to view this."

You have to admit that webmasters have a great influence and if enough (if people value the content it just takes 1 webmaster to get some people to switch) drop support and nag people to switch, an increasing number of people will grow dissatifsied with Internet Explorer and switch. As after all, what do they lose by switching?

harumscarum
out of memory

Shining Arcanine wrote:

As after all, what do they lose by switching?

What do they gain? Isolating 93.9% of their users?

The site that has had the biggest impact as far as standards go was espn.com. It was a large site and moved away from a tabular layout (yes this is old news) but it made a big influence on the suit types because it allowed us to give the typically childlike..."well espn did it". The funny thing about this is as much as the evangelist preach and scream about standards none of them have had the impact that espn.com did. In fact some of them will tell you it is unacceptable since it is not compliant. If you happen to have NN4.0 and go to their site they actually tell you that you need to upgrade.

This is all of course IMHO

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

Shining Arcanine wrote:

It is that thinking that allowed Linux to become what it is today

What is Linux today? Look at those numbers (hey, you brought them in). 2.1% uses Mozilla, I'd go on a VERY generous limb and say that only 75% of them run Mozilla on Windows, that leaves 25% of 2.1% (about 0.55%) running Linux.

Whoopty-doo...

Shining Arcanine wrote:
and allowed Hilter to take over most of Europe.

Godwin's Law.

From this point on, anything else you say can be safely discarded.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

By the way, this thread is mistakenly titled, it should have been:

IE's market share is increasing

because those are the facts, right?

lars

Shining Arcanine wrote:
It is that thinking that allowed Linux to become what it is today and allowed Hilter to take over most of Europe.

Godwin's Law:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving *s or Hitler approaches one."

/Lars.

AndyJ
andyj

Shining Arcanine wrote:

AndyJ wrote:

Yeah, so here's one guy that's too ignorant/dumb/lazy to get this site (and what a site <rolling eyes>) working in IE and the industry is now flocking away from IE....

I'm sure MS is shaking in their collective boots.... Bill G must be apologizing to his kids for loosing his fortune even now....
-Andy

It is that thinking that allowed Linux to become what it is today and allowed Hilter to take over most of Europe. Actions must be made now and not later as little things will grow. Just as weeds grow in your yard if you don't kill them at first sight.

Yeah, Linux. The OS of geeks everywhere, and "Hilter" yes, well there is that....

Look at it this way: the browser market is no longer the place it was in 1995. It's now a mature market, that doesn't mean competition is gone and nothing will ever change, but think of it like Word Processing in the late 80's/early 90's.... Back then WYSIWYG was hot, Hot Keys vs GUI toolbars were hot.... A new version of Word Perfect or MS Word made people stop and look. Now? Yeah, so MS Word 2003 adds 100 new features that nobody will ever use because 95% of the user base just want to jot off a quick memo, or type a document. The market is mature, the feature set is so rich most features are never used. The technology is just not exciting enough for anyone to really care anymore.

To relate back to browsers.... unless there's a NEED to change your browser most users will stick with IE. Even if competitor browsers are better, have fancy features, etc. Why should the general user switch? They both view web pages, and your average user already knows how to use IE. Unless MS screws up (with buggy releases) or some new aspect of the web is developed that's a MUST HAVE and IE doesn't support it fast enough, the browser has become just another no-think tool. My hammer isn't a Craftsman brand, but it still pounds nails.... And any sizeable web site knows this and codes to the IE defacto standard....

In 10 years will we still be using IE? In 10 years who will care? The web will be, as it is now, a massive store of information and communication. What I care about is getting to that store easily and seamlessly. The tool must be cheap, and not cause me undo hardship in usage. If I have to think about it, it's too hard.

Competitors in the browser market have a much bigger challenge to surmount than standards and features: apathy....

-Andy

Shining Arcanine

harumscarum wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote:
As after all, what do they lose by switching?

What do they gain? Isolating 93.9% of their users?

The site that has had the biggest impact as far as standards go was espn.com. It was a large site and moved away from a tabular layout (yes this is old news) but it made a big influence on the suit types because it allowed us to give the typically childlike..."well espn did it". The funny thing about this is as much as the evangelist preach and scream about standards none of them have had the impact that espn.com did. In fact some of them will tell you it is unacceptable since it is not compliant. If you happen to have NN4.0 and go to their site they actually tell you that you need to upgrade.

This is all of course IMHO

They gain popup blocking and tabbed browsing. And better rendering of web pages. As well as a few other nice things.

By the way, you failed to see who I was referring to. I was referring to the end user when I said "what do they have to lose?" Things are at the point that by switching the end user has nothing to lose but quite a bit to gain.

PaoloM wrote:
Godwin's Law.

From this point on, anything else you say can be safely discarded.

What happened decades ago was a paramount event in history, it cannot be avoided and anyone who ignores people who makes references to it fails to even begin to attempt to understand what they are saying.

By the way, psychologists have a name for what you are doing; it is called projection. When you say something about other people, you are saying it because that is how you feel about yourself. I can make references to cheap comments as well, lets not go there.

PaoloM wrote:
By the way, this thread is mistakenly titled, it should have been:

IE's market share is increasing

because those are the facts, right?

It went down from 95.4% to 93.9%. I hardly call that an increase.

In general, almost everyone who has posted in this thread has failed to see the reason why I posted it in the first place. I posted this thread to help Microsoft, not to state the obvious, nor to have an argument but to help Microsoft stay on top. If you guys don't want to help Microsoft, fine, but I do.

Jeremy W
that blogging guy

Dunno, dropping from 95% to 93% in 5 years? Slipping's a good word. Yes, IE needs work done, bit of nip and tuck... But the "jump" in other browsers is practically a statistical anomaly.

Should MS pay attention? Yeah, but this isn't a 'cultural shift', as someone else mentioned.

Jeremy W
that blogging guy

I typed my last response with 2 fingers. Let me be more clear and concise. I agree with what you are saying, I just disagree with the reasons.

Do users have things to gain / lose from switching? Sure, they could gain tabbed browsing (though gestures, tabbed browsing and popup blocking are available either through new versions of IE about to come out or through plugins... In fact, as is anti-spyware through Yahoo's toolbar).

To lose? Well, I use FF exclusively at work. Half of the sites I visit (mainstream sites, we're talking sites like Yahoo and CNN) have issues in FF. While you could argue that that's the webmaster's fault (and you'd likely be right), the fact is that for the end user (the person you're accentuating) they lose a consistent browsing experience (for now).

Anyways, I'm really not disagreeing, and I'm pretty sure this'll get lost in the flood of the curfuffle. I don't want to shut this discussion down because discussions around IE are important.... It's just that I'm sure the team is even more aware than we are of the issues with IE, and with user's preferences...

Shining Arcanine

Jeremy W. wrote:
Dunno, dropping from 95% to 93% in 5 years? Slipping's a good word. Yes, IE needs work done, bit of nip and tuck... But the "jump" in other browsers is practically a statistical anomaly.

Should MS pay attention? Yeah, but this isn't a 'cultural shift', as someone else mentioned.

I never said a cultural shift, I said that if this is ignored Microsoft will lose control of the market over time (as I said earlier, Longhorn is really the latest that this can be remedied to prevent long term damage to Microsoft's marketshare; by the way, you might have took what I said out of context).

I am also telling Microsoft what needs to be done now (I didn't mention that they must continue to do this and not stop after a while) to solidify their marketshare for a very long time.

Jeremy W. wrote:
I typed my last response with 2 fingers. Let me be more clear and concise. I agree with what you are saying, I just disagree with the reasons.

Do users have things to gain / lose from switching? Sure, they could gain tabbed browsing (though gestures, tabbed browsing and popup blocking are available either through new versions of IE about to come out or through plugins... In fact, as is anti-spyware through Yahoo's toolbar).

To lose? Well, I use FF exclusively at work. Half of the sites I visit (mainstream sites, we're talking sites like Yahoo and CNN) have issues in FF. While you could argue that that's the webmaster's fault (and you'd likely be right), the fact is that for the end user (the person you're accentuating) they lose a consistent browsing experience (for now).

Anyways, I'm really not disagreeing, and I'm pretty sure this'll get lost in the flood of the curfuffle. I don't want to shut this discussion down because discussions around IE are important.... It's just that I'm sure the team is even more aware than we are of the issues with IE, and with user's preferences...

I've never heard of a tabbed browsing plugin for IE. I've heard of 3rd party browsers (MyIE2) that use IE as a plugin but not the other way around.

Those sites don't have trouble when I view them in Firefox but then again, I don't do heavy viewing on those sites.

You're right but if we don't ensure that Microsoft knows what needs to be done, it might take a very long time to fix it (one case I read about on winsupersite.com took them 25 years to get right; an MS employee mentioned it in an interview).

travis
eo

Shining Arcanine wrote:

You have to admit that webmasters have a great influence and if enough (if people value the content it just takes 1 webmaster to get some people to switch) drop support and nag people to switch, an increasing number of people will grow dissatifsied with Internet Explorer and switch. As after all, what do they lose by switching?

Webmasters aside, the three largest MS evangelists I know of have switched to FireFox (listed in what is probably their order of influence):
Scoble (he even mentions channel9)
Paul Thurrott (he mentions more IE problems in his lastest email)
Ern (one of my co-workers, MSFT shareholder for a long time)

I've been attempting to develop against the W3C standards more and more, and the more I do the more I realize how much better FF is than TNN. The web developer toolbar alone makes FF indispensable. I'm growing tired of yelling out "damn IE" when it comes to testing. I'm sick of degrading my code in order to support IE. I've even stopped using the embedded version of IE in RSSBandit because I can right-click > block image (and the flash click to play).

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Travis: I use, and like, FireFox, but not for the majority of my surfing yet. It crashes a lot on me (IE never has crashed in an entire year of surfing for me) and it doesn't display all sites well.

Bogusrabin

scobleizer wrote:
and it doesn't display all sites well.

Can you give me one?