
The Decline of IE and Firefox - putlake
http://blog.diffen.com/post/71506995804/the-decline-of-ie-and-firefox
======
chasing
Those graphs are misleading. The first one visually indicates that Chrome
currently has something like 100x the share of Firefox -- while the numbers
indicate it's more like 3x.

You should at least have the base of the graphs at 0%. Probably even better to
have to top line of the graphs at 100%. That'd give a truer visual
representation of the data.

~~~
dspillett
That and the use of "Windoze" without a hint of irony makes me label this an
unreliably biased source. As much as I'd love to se IE8- vanish and don't care
what happens to IE9+, if this article said the summery sky were usually blue
I'd want to verify the facts with other sources before taking them as stated.

~~~
putlake
The blog post links to several other sources of browser market share. You are
free to look them up. I have nothing against IE and there is no cause for bias
in something like this.

"Windoze" is general humor, it's not irony. Check
[http://www.isitironic.com](http://www.isitironic.com)

~~~
dspillett
You seemed to have missed the words "without a hint of irony" in my post. The
use of "windoze" did not give me the impression is was used purely in jest
(intentional irony or some other form of humour). It, like other such
respellings such as "M$ Widnows", tends to scream _BIAS HERE, ENGAGE LEVEL 2
SALT PINCH BEFORE READING FURTHER_ in most cases.

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jgalt212
The stats are dramatically different for an enterprise focused website. As a
counterexample, we show for our site:

IE (all versions) is 52% of visits in the last month. IE 8.0 is 25% of IE
traffic

For the same month in 2012, IE traffic was 62% of all visits, so we are
showing drops as well, but not to the extent we can ignore the needs of our IE
customers.

In short, know your customer.

I don't like IE, but we like our customers a lot more than I dislike IE.

~~~
Bahamut
Wow, that is high.

I work in the edtech space myself, and supposedly the IE 8 stats are around
~10% for us, which is high enough to not ignore (unfortunately).

~~~
dspillett
With the clients of out main money making application (investment banks for
the most part) IE8 is well over 80%, possibly even 90%, though we are
increasingly seeing the use of Chrome too as that has started making its way
into standard desktop builds to deal with the increaing number of apps that
are out right refusing to support IE8. MS are starting to lose a chunk of
corporate use here: by not offering an easy way to run modernm IE and legacy
IE side-by-side they are essentially giving market share to Chrome as some
corporates _can 't_ drop IE8 easily (due to some intranet apps they still rely
on) but are starting to _need_ to have something more modern at the same time
(they would use IE10 instead if they could easily run that along side IE8).

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silvestrov
All those graphs should start the y-axis with 0%, starting at 5% or 10% makes
the decline/increase seem bigger than it really is.

~~~
putlake
No, it shouldn't start at 0% and shouldn't go to 100%. If I did that then a 4%
drop wouldn't register at all. I know Y-axis scams all too well and this isn't
one of them. Browser market shares move very, very slowly and on a 0-100 scale
all you would see are (almost) flat lines. The story will be lost.

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simbolit
if i get this correctly these stats are from one site (diffen.com) - why is
this relevant for anything?

~~~
dserban
I would give it at least a little bit of credibility just based on the fact
that it's a consumer-oriented site with a wider audience than just us
technical people. But I agree it's just one data point among many.

Which brings up an interesting question, since we're on a site for startup
founders: what kind of traffic patterns do you guys see on your websites?

~~~
ams6110
My guess would be that among tech users, Firefox has gained over the past
year, given concerns about privacy and Google's relentless slurping of
browsing behavior from anywhere they can get it. That's the reason I switched
from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago; I now only use Chrome for Google
apps.

~~~
nerraga
It's interesting that you'd say this as I've found myself doing the same thing
for very much the same reasons. I'm actually a little hesitant to use Chrome
at all except in those cases where I need flash (I don't tend to install flash
and usually rely on Chrome's bundled plugin).

Chrome is a great browser and the built-in developer tools really seem to be
raising the bar but for casual browsing I've pretty much switched to Firefox
or Safari (depending on the platform).

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Kequc
It's kinda too bad in the case of IE. It has always been a sword in the side
of every web developer that we must develop twice. Once regularly and again
for IE. Recently I was pleasantly surprised to open up IE and not only did
everything look correct and work, but everything worked faster.

Why didn't everyone switch away from IE ten years ago? That would have been so
helpful. Now it doesn't matter.

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angularly
Seems to be wildly misleading numbers. Why not use something like
gs.statcounter.com to get more correct numbers.

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stcredzero
One question I have in mind: Will Safari be able to keep up, or will Apple
become complacent because they're satisfied with being the best option for OS
X? (Which they can achieve by being insiders on that OS, and not by being more
awesome.)

~~~
Touche
Apple already has become complacent. They are by far the slowest browser to
adopt new web features (including IE). For example IndexedDB has been around
for like 4 years now and there are no signs of Safari implementing it. WebRTC
is another where they are behind the other browsers.

Very rarely is Safari the first to adopt _anything_ , because frankly they
almost never are the ones working on drafts. I firmly believe Apple sees the
web as "that thing we have to have but don't want to devote too many resources
to."

~~~
ris
I will add to this that Safari 6 added a host of horrible (and bizarre) bugs
which seem to have received no attention or even acknowledgement from Apple.

~~~
stcredzero
Off-topic, but your screen name is the name I chose for my first fictional
character, ever. (From almost 4 decades ago.)

~~~
dsego
Off-off-topic, ris means lynx in croatian.

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frickentrevor
Ive always wondered why people stick to a browser, for instance why hang on to
IE 10 when you can switch to IE 11?

~~~
StavrosK
Because switching is harder than not.

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nyar
Here is a chart from my tech site on which people troubleshooting tech things
go:

[http://i.imgur.com/KqYcypZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/KqYcypZ.png)

~~~
kevingadd
Two data points? really?

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pastpartisan
Firefox has become too slow with too many updates and internet explorer merits
no further comment

~~~
Arelius
If you think this is still true, then clearly you haven't used Firefox as of
recent.

~~~
Teckla
I wouldn't say Firefox is slow, but the UI still has weird latency issues that
I don't see in Chrome.

For the record, I use both Chrome and Firefox, heavily. The Chrome UI is very
rarely laggy. The Firefox UI is often laggy. It's maddening, and I wish
Mozilla would fix it.

