
Internet Explorer falls below 50% market share - CyrilMazur
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/microsoft-internet-explorer-browser-falls-below-50-perc-of-worldwide-market-for-first-time
======
pilif
Unfortunately, I have to deal with a much different picture in my case. The
web application is often used by either complete computer illiterates or users
in large corporate installations (or both).

My IE numbers (looking at the three biggest installations):

IE percentage: 80, 90, 98 - IE6 percentage: 30, 50, 40

No Chrome. No Safari. Rest is Firefox (2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 3.6).

I weep when I consider the amount of development time we waste catering for
these IE users refusing to (or unable to) update.

~~~
ErrantX
I nearly fell off my chair when one of our new enterprise customers asked me
if we could provide them the app... but with Firefox support because that was
all they used.

Heaven :)

~~~
megablast
I worked for this large company, who had just bought another smaller company.
Wisely, the smaller companies IT department had moved everyone onto Firefox,
but since they had to have access to our new system, which was IE, we had to
tell them to move back to painsville.

It broke our hearts, the IT people, and the users. The new system will work on
all browsers (except IE6), whenever that will be out.

~~~
weavejester
Out of curiosity, did you look into using something like IETab? You can
configure it to render specific sites in IE's Trident engine, and all other
sites using the usual Gecko engine.

However, I'm not certain how easy it is to push a Firefox extension +
configuration to a large number of Windows machines.

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swombat
Woobius traffic specs (quite representative of the enterprise space, so more
realistic if you're doing an SaaS that also targets enterprise
users/customers), are not too far off, but not 50% yet.

IE: 56% Chrome: 20% Firefox: 16% Safari: 5%

IE versions are broken up as: IE6: 10% (= 5.6% absolute) IE7: 25% (= 14%
absolute) IE8: 65% (= 36% absolute)

In other words, dropping IE6 support is not yet plausible. But we've already
opted to provide only functional support for IE6 - i.e., things need to work
in IE6, and not look totally broken, but they don't have to look great.

~~~
armandososa

        In other words, dropping IE6 support is not yet plausible.
    

Why? 5.6% does really justify the costs of supporting IE6?

~~~
mcav
It all depends on how much work goes into supporting IE6. If the amount of
time is substantial, personally I would consider dropping it. But even until
the bitter end, that decision depends on your target audience and how much you
want that group to be forced to make a choice: upgrade or leave your site.

That's for functionality. I think we're long past the stage where you should
care whether or not IE6 gets the same exact _visual_ experience.

------
kemayo
At deviantART we're dropping IE6 support shortly... it wound up representing a
tiny percentage of our traffic, and we like the idea of being able to use the
crazy innovations of IE7.

It's slightly painful, because we've been forcing IE into quirks mode for ages
(with a comment before the doctype) so that all IEs behave like IE6, and thus
we only had to test one IE.

------
dolinsky
For <http://www.zootoo.com>, which is representative of a non-computer savvy
audience, our IE traffic is now below 50%.

IE : 45% (IE8 - 65% IE7 - 23% IE6 - 12%)

Firefox : 35% (3.6.x - 85% 3.5.x - 10.5% 3.0.x - 5%)

Chrome: 9%

Safari: 7.5%

Opera: 1.6%

We were also able to reduce the IE 6 traffic on our site by 50% by
implementing a friendly 'please switch to a newer browser' campaign.

------
r7000
I noticed IE drop below 50% last spring on <http://flashcarddb.com>

It dropped from 50.17% in March to 49.05% in April, continuing to steadily
decrease since then.

My traffic is about 70% North American. I have many students. Macintosh is a
20% slice of my OS pie and Safari isn't too far behind Firefox in browser
share.

September => IE: 48%, Firefox: 24%, Safari: 16%, Chrome: 10%

~~~
r7000
Interesting stat tidbit:

Browser stats for Mac users only:

Safari: 75%, Firefox: 20.2%, Chrome: 4.5%

~~~
Timmy_C
That makes sense seeing as Safari is the default browser on ever brand new Mac
and Google Chrome has only been available on the Mac for a year.

~~~
chc
On top of that, Mac users have less need to even think about what browser they
use because IE isn't the default, which weights things disproportionately in
Safari's favor. Safari is "good enough."

------
davidedicillo
The biggest problem with IE6 that I see with my company, is that a lot of
corporate clients still have IE6 on their machines because of their lazy IT
departments. So they don't care if only 0.0000000000001% of the traffic is
from IE6 because it happens to be them.

~~~
sievert
Yep! Started a new job on Monday with a fresh install of IE 6. I couldn't
believe it, I'm now working at one of the companies where ie6 is forced upon
all staff, even the web dev team. I complained that the majority of users are
using a newer browser, and I was told that IE7 is currently being beta tested.
I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
robin_reala
Seriously? I wouldn’t have taken the job in the first place. Nightmare.

------
tyng
Another obvious but often overlooked factor that contributed to the decline of
IE is the increased number people converting to Mac (anybody have a figure for
this?). Because MS discontinued supporting IE on Mac years ago, there's not
way to recover users lost to Safari and other browsers on the Mac front.

------
wmoxam
I just checked Learnhub's numbers (<http://learnhub.com>) and IE is now at
40%, it was 54% a year ago. Most of the traffic comes from India.

Chrome went from 7.5% to 20% in the same time frame.

------
fertel
In my small subset of the enterprise market, amongst my clients (large
financial services firms) IE usage is 100%. Unfortunately I don't see this
changing any time soon.

~~~
igrekel
It is not completely impossible but there are 3 big reasons they stay with IE
that I heard of.

Transparent Identification/Authentication, its is possible to support the
protocols with Firefox but it is not as transparent.

ActiveX like stuff... sadly several enterprise applications use that.

Justifying the tests and rework of switching to a different browser.

------
imagii
Does anyone know what the browser market share of HN is?

~~~
r7000
My recent traffic from HN (a few hundred hits):

Chrome: 55% Firefox: 30% Safari: 9% IE: 4% Other: 2%

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spenrose
Anyone have good stats for the browser-vs-non-browser (i.e. dedicated
FB/twitter client, Instapaper, etc.) use of HTTP to consume HTML. I bet you'd
find that c. 2002 IE had 90% of the browser and browsers had 99.9% of
HTTP+HTML, but that now browsers have more like 90% of HTTP+HTML. Then there's
the desktop browser vs mobile browser issue, and RSS ...

------
scrrr
<http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp> W3Schools sees IE below
50% since September 2008. However, it's not representative.

But as they say on their page: _"Anyway, our data [...] clearly shows the long
and medium-term trends."_

~~~
xorglorb
Also, W3Schools is most visited by web developers, who by nature want to burn
IE at the stake.

The most objective measure we could get is if someone from Google released
their Browser/OS data.

------
code_duck
The site I work for has been running at under 40% IE for over a year and a
half. We're at about 15% Safari, 40% Firefox, 38% IE, and 7% Chrome. IE6 is
under 4%, thanks goodness!

------
lwhi
I always find announcements like this ridiculous. It's like saying 50% of
people wear blue jumpers - because it's so dependent on the sample group.

------
lovskogen
We develop our products for the latest version of popular browsers: IE,
Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera. If a customer has a problem and is using a
older browser, we simply ask them to upgrade.

In order to stay modern and write good code with as few hacks as possible, you
have to let older browsers go.

------
fierarul
It was unexpected to see that StatCounter is headquartered in Ireland.

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kgosser
This means nothing to those who develop for the Enterprise world :-(. We still
have clients who are on Windows 2000+IE6.

In a way, I can't wait to go back to consumer development.

~~~
rbritton
The end of life of Windows 2k in July hopefully will mean this will change
soon. Thankfully many companies will upgrade once there is no support
whatsoever for their current OS.

------
Nick_S
a blog I run had 125,266 visits from 10/4 - 11/4. The browser usage
percentages are as follows: firefox: 41%, chrome: 22%, internet explorer: 19%.
Most of our traffic is referred from tech inclined sources. Personally, I have
heard a ton of complaints about the amount of memory firefox uses while
running compared to chrome...

------
jasondavies
Breakdown for <http://www.jasondavies.com/> over the past month:

Safari: 4%

Internet Explorer: 5% (!)

Mozilla-compatible agent: 6%

Chrome: 20%

Firefox: 65%

------
dpnewman
I'd like to see a well researched, estimated total national/international cost
to the industry for support of IE.

~~~
emehrkay
Shhhhhh, keep that on the low. IE6 is paying my bills right now

------
maguay
I'm seeing around 30% IE (all versions) usage on tech centric blogs I run.
Chrome's inching up on 20%.

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ck2
I bet a good percentage of that 50% are bots using the IE user-agent.

~~~
eli
Bots that execute analytics javascript? Sure they're out there, but that's a
very, very small percentage.

------
sosuke
IE in North America it is still at 52.3%, so close.

------
motters
Surely this must be a sign from the gods of Silicon Heaven.

------
tomjen3
Am I the only one who would love to see Partio11s numbers? They are properly
biased in the other direction, but still.

