

Internet Explorer market share surges, as IE 9 wins hearts and minds - abraham
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/internet-explorer-market-share-surges-as-version-9-wins-hearts-and-minds.ars

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lmkg
That's not a gain in marketshare, that's some random statistical noise.

Take a look at the graph[1]. IE6's segment is generally trending downwards,
but the "wiggle" from month to month is a bit bigger than the trend. This
month it happens to be wiggling up. Next month it will probably wiggle down,
and ars will get to write a breathless article on the impending demise of IE6.

The correct take-away is that IE6 is declining, but slowly. So slowly, that on
a monthly timescale, the change is smaller than random variations. So stop
measuring it on a monthly basis.

[1] [http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/internet-
explorer-a...](http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/internet-explorer-
adoption-2012-03-4f7a134-intro.png)

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yuhong
The only time IE6 was mentioned in this article was in: "and Internet Explorer
6 picked up 0.66 points."

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mindstab
The title is pure linkbait. The article doesn't make any kind of deal about
that it it's such a small amount alot of sampling errors could account for
that. The article tries to justify it's > 10 point difference from other
surveys re: chrome vs IE so I don't think a sub 1 point gain is worht spending
too much time talking about and the article doesn't.

Can someone change the title?

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lucisferre
Even the actual title is reaching. They have a very interesting definition of
the word "surge".

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olalonde
As a web developer, this graph is simply beautiful:
[http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/chrome-
adoption-201...](http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/chrome-
adoption-2012-03-4f7a134-intro.png)

~~~
Bockit
I thought it was interesting seeing the cruft of earlier versions in the
automatic update cycle (more noticeable in FF than chrome, about 2% total of
market share) that doesn't seem to be disappearing. It would be interesting to
see how that changes over the next, say, 5 years. To see if it decreases and
finds a level that it stays at, or to see if it increases and becomes an
issue.

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ericlevine
Something seems a bit fishy about the latest data points in those graphs.
Firefox 3.5, Chrome versions < 10 and IE6 all had superb months.

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abraham
Anyone have any theories why IE6 would be gaining marketshare?

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vgnet
If you go to <http://marketshare.hitslink.com/>, it also shows that Windows XP
had an increase in marketshare. So my guess would be that some huge market
(China?) added noise to the numbers, due to their methodology based on
"estimated internet users per country".

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redthrowaway
This is what I was thinking. This is (hopefully!) not due to people _choosing_
to use IE6, but likely due to people installing a likely pirated copy of XP
who were not previously Internet users.

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HyprMusic
When I read the title, a part of me was hoping that somewhere in the world it
was still April 1st and this was a very distasteful April fools joke!

Interestingly enough, if you look at the "Internet explorer version adoption"
graph, IE6 and IE7 appear to have identical adoption trends. Maybe this is
some kind of sniffing error?

~~~
ericlevine
I think that's actually a shortcoming of that type of line graph. The lines
move in parallel, but only IE6's adoption is changing. It's even worse for
Firefox's graph -- it's really hard to determine the absolute adoption change
for any given delta.

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BerislavLopac
It will take much longer than most people expect to dethrone IE, thanks to the
situation well illustrated by this graph: <http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-
CN-monthly-201104-201203>

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melling
Isn't Microsoft doing silent updates for XP users too? I thought everyone on
XP was getting IE8?

~~~
freehunter
only if you're pulling from Windows Update. Many of the IE6 installs (large
corporations) use WSUS, where they can pick and choose which updates to push
to their users. I can see them rejecting the update if their business still
needs IE6.

My company pushed out IE7 to all XP users, and that's as far as XP will get
for us. The users still on XP (like me) have apps we use which will only
support XP and only support up to IE7. Apps are being rewritten to get around
this, and XP support will be dropped when that occurs. From talking with other
companies at various Cons, many corporations are still working through this
process. It goes slower if they don't have an application security team
willing to push this every quarter.

I would wager there are very few home users who still have IE6.

