Wahey!
Let's all let microsoft define all the future html and css standards then. And don't forget, you've always got compatibility mode for when its, err, not.
Internet Explorer's share of the browser market went up last month, by 0.99 per cent, according to new data from Net Market Share. Microsoft's slow claw-back of market share from its rivals puts Internet Explorer's global market share at 53.83 per cent, saving it from plunging below the 50 per cent mark and marking an overall …
Let's all go for the memory leaking update to a new major version every blink of the eye browser with really unforgiving rendering.
Or let's go to the phone home to a major search engine browser.
How about the whiny pay for me or endure adverts one?
Or the iDontBelongOnAPC one?
Each browser has its problems.
You say "unforgiving rendering" like it's a bad thing. Code your pages properly and there's no issue. ;-)
Interesting to see this reversal of fortunes for IE. People are playing it up all wrong though. Surely this is a sign to Microsoft that developing a fast, reliable browser that complies well with standards is a far better and more welcome strategy than their previous efforts? People are more savvy these days - Firefox and Chrome taught them that - and it's led Microsoft to create a much improved browser. Isn't this the end-result benefit of competition in the browser market that we all wanted? What the hell are you all complaining about?
I don't personally use IE9, but if I meet someone out there does, I don't actually mind. In the past, the developer in me would have gotten irritated and tried to persuade them away, but now IE has improved to the point that I don't have to worry about it so much.
Wow that sure is outdated info, I don't even know where to start but let's try:
Re: Or let's go to the phone home to a major search engine browser
well there are alternatives, SRWare Iron is one such browser, Chromium is another, and they ALL feel exactly like Google Chrome but without the Google spyware.
Re: How about the whiny pay for me or endure adverts one?
Opera stopped being the 'adverts in your face unless you pay' browser a LONG time ago.
Re: Or the iDontBelongOnAPC one?
Which one is that? too incoherent to answer.
So IE defaults to Bing? Every bloody time I upgrade Firefox, it switches my search provider in it back to Google. Last time, it didn't even have Bing as one of the options in the drop down menu to select meaning I had to go searching for a plugin. Whereas with IE, switching it from Bing to Google is trivial. (Not that I have, as I actually prefer Bing for everything except searching news groups).
"Internet Explorer the Ford Focus or browsers, everyone's got one, but it's not very good.
Opera, the Ferrari of browsers, really great, but only a small amount of people know how good it really is.."
Except a Ford Focus is a better car than a Ferrari in terms of reliability, usefulness, etc as well as cost.
Do you keep that Focus garaged and does it see much rain at all? If not, I'm amazed quite frankly. British weather usually causes Fords to rot quicker than the bits in a Microsoft product.
I have been testing an unwieldy legacy JavaScript application in IE10 under Windows 8 just last week and performance when IE can be coaxed into executing anything at all is frankly abysmal. This is something that works ok in the current crop of browsers too, including IE9. Oh, and hate to admit it, but Opera and Chrome the fastest at rendering it. Firefox is the laggard by quite some margin.
People are basically lazy, so most (50%) will not bother to run a different browser. The problem lies when they go to a site that was built using Microsoft's tools using defaults. Especially older sites. It uses activeX and other proprietary bits that make it not work with other browsers. When somebody runs into that enough times, they will see it runns fine on IE and there must be something wrong with the other browsers.
As we speak about ie 9 here, it has standards support and decent amount of backwards compatibility. It also uses low amount of RAM.
"but people are lazy/ dumb/ slave" should be carefully used.
I default to opera on every device, not a fan of ie but seriously, memorized like arguments doesn't work.
What they did wrong was not shipping for xp, a version that didn't have all bells and whistles like vista/7 version but worked.
Well this morning I used the Companies House website (a government site) and discovered that it DOESN'T WORK unless you are using IE. They know about it, don't seem to see it as any kind of problem.
It isn't a particularly complicated site (just gathering a few basic details that form the annual return), and I bet they paid a fortune to have it developed. They really should have made it standards compliant.
So please cross one user off the IE count because I wasn't using it out of choice.
A week ago there was a headline reading Chrome was the worlds leading browser, and I responded with a link to the stats used as the basis for this article, and instead of writing a piece about how stats are not solid you "announce" IE now has the greatest market share. Holy moly El Reg, get your act together.
I think that the competition is more responsible for this change in market share. Lets start with Firefox; many people like myself dropped it because having to deal with upgrades on such short notices eventually gets too annoying. You start your browser but you "can't" visit a website because your attention has been drawn away by an update. Worse; often some of your plugins will stop working after the upgrade due to version conflicts. And that's not even getting into the issue of Firefox which more and more seems to look like Chrome.
Speaking of which; there is also a slowly growing concern when it comes to Google and the data they're collecting. It wouldn't surprise me if this issue also resulted in some people moving away from Chrome.
And considering that Windows is still heavily used it isn't that strange that people who are unhappy with their current browser also end up trying out MSIE every once in a while. However, while this may sound like good news for MS I'd say give it a month or two. Expanding your market share is one thing, but maintaining that newly acquired position is something else...
An honest, not-trying-to-start-a-flame-war question: have you tried Opera? Ok, yes, I know, lots of people hate its guts for not being Firefox, but I keep hearing people whine about Firefox's annoying upgrades, or grumble about Chrome's "please track me" capabilities. Opera updates regularly, but not daily, it has lots of very useful features, it's free, and it's not Google or Microsoft.
I'm not trying to march about with an "Up with Opera!" sign - I just wonder why people that call everyone who use IE "lazy" or "stupid" refuse to even try another browser (or try it again, if they tried it 10 years ago and quit because they hated the ads) when theirs doesn't work the way they want...
@ShelLuser thank you for an intelligent and balnced post.
"...there is also a slowly growing concern when it comes to Google and the data they're collecting. It wouldn't surprise me if this issue also resulted in some people moving away from Chrome."
I'm one of those people. Having switched to Chrome years ago (for its speed) from FF I thought I'd try IE9. No issues so far after a few months of use.
@ArmanX you make a good point and I will take a look at Opera again when I have time.
Lets keep these figures in perspective. IE is the default browser, ummm by default on new Windows installs. Most current IE users are not people who like IE they are just lazy in using what comes to hand.
Give people a choice of browser at initial login and these numbers would decrease to single digits in a heartbeat.
Um, I thought MS did that now? Most people would still pick IE if they knew nothing about it since it's the official one by the OS company.
The fact people switch from IE9 less than they do IE7/8 shows your argument is not totally good - people are less dissatisfied with IE9 than other versions. That's because IE9 is now at worst tolerable - no strong incentive for people to switch.
So... Statscounter has Chrome and IE nearly tied, with chrome holding the advantage on the weekend ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/22/chrome_number_one_for_a_day/ ), while this study reports that IE has an outright majority...
Further investigation indicates that, among the major differences:
* Statscounter uses page views, Net Market Share uses unique visitors (as best it can identify them).
* Net Market Share explicitly adjusts for Chrome's prerendering; statscounter does not, and notes that there was no jump in chrome's ranking when pre-rendering was introduced (which you'd expect, considering how aggressive Chrome is at updating). Net market share actually just recently introduced a "correction" for this - well after Chrome introduced prerendering - likely this is the cause of at least part of the recent decline in Chrome's marketshare by their count.
* Statscounter has a much larger network (3m sites vs 40,000).
So this would imply that chrome users produce about 2-2.5x as many page views each as IE users, with FF users somewhere in the middle... Which I suppose is hardly profound - I wouldn't use the internet as much either if I was stuck using IE to do it!
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The big problem here is that there is no way to accurately measure browser usage everywhere. Although the reported number for IE went up marginally, my guess is that the uncertainty error bars out to 95% accuracy are really, really large.
The point is that a reported 1% change is actually swamped by the uncertainty in the figure they are reporting.
Offhand, I can think of several reasons votes are mis-counted:
-AVG used to report itself as IE when it pre-checked links
-Opera and FF both have the option of reporting the browser as something other than what it is; since it helps fix stupid websites, some people will leave it on all the time
-Various companies (businesses, Internet cafés, etc.) force their users to use IE, thought many of those users use a different browser at home
-AdBlock/No-Script (and other do-not-track software) make it much harder to track browsers, which means browsers with those plugins (everything but IE, basically) are under-reported
-"No browser given" is, on some sites, throw away, instead of being counted as "unknown"
-Different versions of the same browser may be counted in different categories (old version is counted as 'unknown', for instance)
-Mobile, desktop, and embedded versions are occasionally misreported in the wrong category
-Some browsers 'cache' links you'll never click on, or use multiple sessions to download pages, or conversely, reuse sessions to download multiple pages
-anyone using more than one browser dilutes the pool; they get one 'vote' per browser, rather than a weighted vote
Obviously, some of these may not apply, or make minimal difference, but when you can look at five different browser-stats websites and get six radically different breakouts, there's obviously something wrong. I couldn't tell you which one is underreported, if any... I just don't trust it beyond "very rough estimate." Currently in the lead for "first place" are Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer, depending on who you ask; whenever someone moves into first place on one of the many browser-stats sites, there is a media hubbub, followed by the other browsers pointing out how it was measured incorrectly, followed by accusing the stats site of favoritism, followed by the stats site defending their position, followed by someone else moving into first - wash, rinse, repeat.
Of course they're not 100% accurate but when you consider the % of PCs which are just running a plain install of the browser compared to those which are in internet cafes or belong to nerds who do fancy things, I imagine such effects are very small.
We can assume browsers like Opera are hardest hit since that's probably the most technically savvy/paranoid choice - i.e. a greater proportion of Opera users don't want to be tracked.
If IE9 ran on XP think of the share MS would have ???
None from me. They've abandoned Windows Style font rendering, and have adopted accurately scaled, high resolution rendering. Printer rendering. Apple Mac rendering. Instead of nearest-pixel rendering
I understand that the new technology will be able scale pages well, and pages will have exactly the same size and shape in every browser on every OS on every monitor, and the end user will see exactly what the web designer sees. So I understand the attraction for web designers. Who seem to be in charge of browser design now.
And when I get a very very very high resolution monitor I'll be happy to see high-resolution font rendering.
But right now, IE and FF on a new mid-range LCD monitor show bands of bold and faint text when viewed from any angle other than dead centre, due to poor reproduction of sub-pixel rendering, and there is absolutely no way I would choose to use a modern browser on XP.
And that's before I even consider the pale, washed out, invisible, hard to identify control icons in the new browser interfaces.
Poor HTML performance compared to FF11 or Chrome 18.
Also, I like to save some webpages complete with its images.
They open fine in Chrome and Firefox.
In IE9... it takes a LONG time and usually it does not open. The browser would simply stop responding, and I have to end the task or kill iexplore.exe.
Still a crappy browser after so many years. Remember what you're getting into if you buy a Windows phone (I hope you won't).