

Chrome continues surge as IE drops below 60% market share - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/chrome-continues-surge-as-ie-drops-below-60-market-share.ars

======
pavs
Waiting for the day IE goes down to single digit. Even if IE8/9 is the most
compliant browser in their history, you can never trust them when it comes to
embracing open standards. For the longest time they held the whole web back
from innovation.

I still remember countless hours of IE hacks. DIE, DIE!

~~~
thezilch
I've cursed IE every bit as the next guy, but your hatred is astonishingly
misguided. ActiveX aside, during '96 through '00, Microsoft innovated web
properties more than any browser since. It wasn't until standards zealots and
the DOJ were breathing down Microsofts back that MS fell into a rut.

And how are those standards working for us today? Still stuck in '99 with
4.01. HTML innovation stalled time and again. ECMAScript innovation stalled
time and again. CSS innovation stalled time and again. Staggered feature
support everywhere -- not just IE.

Let's face it, every "standard" at the front of web browsing has, for the
better part, failed. I'm no proponent for Flash -- in particular, how some
people use it, but Macromedia/Adobe got it right -- moving extraordinarily
fast compared to the glacial pace at which the Microsoft, Mozilla, or the W3C
have moved.

~~~
megablast
How have those standards worked out for us today?

Now I can develop for Firefox, and know it is going to work in Safari, Opera,
Chrome, etc... I know it is going to work on most mobile devices, TVs, and
iPads.

We can do amazing things like Google Mail, which is still faster and better
than Outlook. All these without having to worry about ActiveX crashing the
browser.

I am not sure what you are looking at, maybe you are only interested in Flash
games and vector animation.

~~~
thezilch
Let's talk about "standards" _clear (working drafts) throat_...

I seriously doubt one can innovate on the web, without using cross-browser
hacks to only support the non-IE crowd. Even "standards" as simple as the DOM
would have you jumping through hoops, but don't believe me...
<http://ejohn.org/blog/the-dom-is-a-mess/>.

Or something as simple as .nodeName from the HTML 5 spec?
<http://ejohn.org/blog/nodename-case-sensitivity/>

How about something as "simple" as border-radius? That's right, I can easily
make a mess of every browser.

Google Mail, as a browser front-end, is only amazing by virtue of innovations
made by Microsoft and very little to do with anything since. Little to do with
"standards" of today. Faster than Outlook? No; how? Better? Sure, but only
because it is more accessible to me. Nothing to do with ActiveX, or shall I
pontificate how GMail sucks because Firefox is a hungry beast and crashes
under its own weight? No, that would make zero sense.

I am looking to create good and fun websites and not sitting around to
complain about how my job isn't made easy, because every browser has different
levels of support. And believe me, I've been waiting a long time -- longer
than you seem to grok -- for the W3C to "standardize" vector animation. Still
waiting. Can't wait for the web to be free of these working groups and
zealots.

~~~
megablast
OK, so your point is that it is not perfect? Well what API is?

Things are a lot better than they have been, things are getting better every
year.

~~~
thezilch
Correct, and all I am presenting is that it is very shortsighted to suggest IE
hasn't, doesn't, or won't innovate. And frankly, and again, the IE4 through
IE6 era saw more innovation (and speed of innovation) than we have seen since.
It's hardly Microsoft's fault they were asked to stop innovating, after IE6,
and it is much less their fault no one has been "innovating" until just
recently.

Flash filled -- fills -- a lot of gaps.

ECMA tried to make a splash with CLI.

Me? I stopped support of IE6, outside of what is easily hidden in libraries /
wrappers, which means I can support almost everything still. As well, I use,
support, and contribute to Chromium.

------
hartror
Good news IE continues to lose market share. Bad news IE6 continues NOT losing
market share. _cry_

Though it really depends on your market as their final pie chart shows. I know
our stats show that IE6 barely gets a look in so we have dumped supporting it
as the hassle was too great.

~~~
krschultz
The more people that dump supporting it the better. Once enough sites break
and pop up a "Your browser is too old!" message, it will eventually piss off
the right executives to get IE6 dumped out of corporate environment.

An anecdote that you can extrapolate at will. I remember a while back my dad
(an EVP at a large chemical company, not exactly bleeding edge IT considering
they had Windows 2000 after Vista was out) was astounded to find out YouTube
was blocked for _most_ of the employees, but not for him. They started posting
instructional videos on YouTube and he only found out because his marketing
guys couldn't open the videos they had created. The ban was gone within an
hour, after it had been in place for who knows how long.

Enough websites break and you get the executives calling their IT guys saying
"why doesn't this work for me, I need a new computer" and eventually things
will get changed. In the meantime, a lot of IT departments hunker down and
don't want to change anything because people ALWAYS complain when there is
change.

Simple truism of office politics - if it is the executives idea it is "great",
if it is the IT department's idea, it "sucks", regardless of technical merit.

~~~
Goladus
A more relavant truism to the IE6 in business debacle is that upgrading a
platform is costly and enhancing users' web-browsing experience is rarely a
top priority.

~~~
houseabsolute
Actually it's probably an anti-priority more often than a priority. I would
not be particularly interested in making surfing the web a more enjoyable
experience for my employees. The one thing that will end IE 6 is when
Microsoft stops supporting it with security updates. Until then, I expect it
to be a significant player in the browser market.

~~~
hartror
The enforced restriction (your suggestion is more of a passive aggressive one
I know) of browsing is an oft cited reason for discontent among my more
corporate, non-startup friends.

It seems to me a both an admission of defeat by management and a statement of
distrust of employees when it is done.

~~~
houseabsolute
True. And, I don't really have any employees, nor would I, I hope, work in a
field where keeping people on old browsers makes business sense. But there may
be such fields, and in those fields I don't see a likely cause of a big
investment in technology updates until the old tech is truly untenable.

------
houseabsolute
I remember when people saying nobody needed another browser and Chrome would
never get adoption.

~~~
cookiecaper
Chrome is only worthwhile because of the speed not only of its JavaScript VM
but also the speed (and to a lesser extent, design) of its UI.

It's a night and day difference from Firefox on my machine. It's been _years_
since Chrome made it on the scene and the response from Mozilla is still
abysmal; Firefox is still at least twice as slow than Chrom(e|ium) for me.
Firefox's UI is still clunky and huge and slow; dragging tabs takes forever
and breaking them out forces a page refresh (bad when watching videos etc).

If Mozilla doesn't want to get crushed by Chrome they need to put together a
serious response and fix their issues. The only thing keeping users on Fx
would be extensions, but equivalents are quickly showing up for Chrome.
Mozilla is going to completely lose its relevance if they don't get real about
fixing things.

I started up Ubuntu 10.04 and was disappointed to see Firefox as the default
browser. I think Linux distros should use Chromium as the default.

~~~
jokermatt999
There's still the issue of Chrome's addons not being as powerful as Firefox's.
I dearly want to switch to Chrome (or ium), but I've grown quite attached to
the Tree Style Tabs addon, and I've found the attempts to replicate that
functionality in Chrome somewhat lacking. The speed difference is absolutely
huge though. It's like opening MS Word vs Notepad: Chrome is just there, but
Firefox takes at least a few seconds to open up, even without (m)any addons

------
astrec
Pretty close to what we're seeing:

    
    
       1. Internet Explorer  5,493,047    64.03% 	
       2. Firefox            1,796,239    20.94% 	
       3. Safari             742,371       8.65% 	
       4. Chrome             489,051       5.70% 	
       5. Opera               38,441       0.45% 	
       6. Mozilla              6,603       0.08% 	
       7. Mozilla Compatible   5,320       0.06% 	
       8. Playstation 3        1,710       0.02% 	
       9. Camino               1,142       0.01% 	
      10. Opera Mini             890       0.01%
    
    

For mobile, Safari is 86.88% and IE: 1.02% :)

~~~
qq66
Who said Apple doesn't have a de-facto monopoly in smartphones? For some
definition of smartphone, they seem to own the market.

~~~
nudge
A very large market share isn't the same as a monopoly. People are very free
to buy android phones or windows mobile or whatever they like.

~~~
qq66
Similarly, people are free to buy Mac OS, Ubuntu...

------
driekken
> During April, only Internet Explorer and Opera failed to show positive
> growth.

It would have been quite a feat for them all to show positive growth :)

------
evo_9
Does HN ever publish their browser stats? Would be interesting to see the
breakdown.

------
elblanco
It would be an interesting investigation into why Chrome and Firefox have done
so well in growth and Opera (a quite nice browser) never seems to have done
well.

~~~
chaosmachine
Google pushes Chrome on the front page of Google.com. And they pushed Firefox
for a few years before Chrome.

Also, Opera has a terrible name in comparison to the competition. Makes word
of mouth less effective. That's also my theory on MySQL vs Postgres.

~~~
tocomment
I'd kind of agree with you on the names. I can't even pronounce Postgres so I
tend to sit quietly instead of recommending it when the topic comes up.

I'll be sure to run my next product name by you.

~~~
mattyb
Just listen to this: <http://twit.tv/floss18>

TL;DL: It's Post-Grez-Que-Ell

------
MikeCapone
The latest beta of Chrome for Mac (5.0.342.9 beta) has been crashing (or
rather, freezing a few tabs and then not working right until I kill it) pretty
often, but other than that, I'm very satisfied with the browser in general and
all the past versions have been rock solid.

~~~
MikeCapone
Could the person who down-voted me explain why? What's the problem with
sharing my experience with Chrome?

------
Shorel
60% is still huge.

~~~
melling
What is important is that IE is no longer the de facto standard. 60% is much
better than 90%. I remember 6-7 years ago when developers thought they were
done when it worked in IE6. They didn't feel the need to support other
browsers. Browsing in Linux was difficult because things never looked (or
worked) right.

Now with so many options, developers need to target standards.

------
terrapinbear
IE must have spell check!!!

------
papachito
netmarketshare has biased stats (very US centric). I prefer the wikipedia
stats which is a generalist and international site. There, IE is already at
50%
[http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2010-02/Squ...](http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2010-02/SquidReportClients.htm)
yay!

------
TotlolRon
Where is mobile in this? Is mobile safari a safari? Is it in all others?
Something seems missing. (sent from my iPod)

~~~
CrazedGeek
The data seems to come from here: [http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-
market-share.aspx?qpri...](http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qprid=0) , which requires a subscription to see mobile statistics.

