IE9 beta not enough to keep IE market share over 60% mark | Hacker News Reader

IE9 beta not enough to keep IE market share over 60% mark

arstechnica.com

26 pointsabraham11 comments

Well... yeah. It's a beta. At 0.1% use across the internet, that's not too bad of a market presence for a beta, really, but betas just plain don't count noticeably.

I quite like Ars' list of browsers. IE combined comes out at ~17%, as opposed to just below 60% universally.

One thing I always find interesting is that the % of Opera users on Ars is always close to the universal %. I always assumed that Opera users were more technical, and therefore more likely to visit the Ars site, than the average user.

By universal, do you mean the US average or the world average? Opera is very popular in some parts of Europe like Russia and Scandinavia, and significantly less popular in the Anglosphere. The higher use among technical users could push it Opera representation from the US average to the world average.

The article provided "universal" and Ars specific stats. All the % are drastically different between the two, except Opera.

I think (don't know) that the Opera user stereotype is a bit off; most Opera installs are on phones.

By comparison, Firefox 4.0 beta is 0.26% in the same survey.

The most interesting part of these figures is that despite the growth of iOS devices and Mac market share, Safari is virtually flat and now only the second most popular Webkit based browser.

Apple hasn't pushed Safari on Windows very effectively, even with a decent version of Safari 5. I like Safari and Chrome on the Mac equally, but Chrome on Windows feels more natural than Safari to me.

Chrome has been quite successful on Windows, and of course Windows users greatly outnumber Mac users. I think this accounts for those numbers.

I think Safari for Windows isn't really something that Apple cares if people use much. It's not like they make much money for it directly. But it does mean that designers who work on Windows can test for Safari compat without the expense of a Mac, which greatly increases the chances of websites being tested on Safari.

I agree, Chrome for Windows is a lot better than Safari. On my Mac, I use Chrome and Safari about 50-50 (my RSS feeds are still in Safari, which is a large part of why I still use it). Chrome's extensions have been making me slowly drift towards Chrome, but there are still some Safari features I find nice (like Reader, Safari's adaptation of the Readability bookmarklet).

Yeah, that's the thing - Apple doesn't seem to care whether people on Windows use Safari, even though they took the time to make decent version of it. Google, on the other hand, really wants Windows users to use Chrome.

I'm exactly the same, 50-50 Safari/Chrome when using my Mac. Well, plus maybe 3% Opera and 5% Firefox. I mainly like Safari's Top Sites page, it's pretty slick.

Safari has extensions too now. https://extensions.apple.com/

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