Internet Explorer falls below 50% market share | Hacker News Reader

Internet Explorer falls below 50% market share

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319 pointsCyrilMazur67 comments

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.

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 :)

You are very luck.

You are very grammar.

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.

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.

Chrome is a disallowed program on our network by "Symantec Endpoint Protection". You can install Firefox but it's discouraged by the IT department. I wouldn't doubt if these setups are common among larger corporations.

If that's this issue:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=38

Then it appears to be resolved for some time now.

Another workaround here:

http://www.vaidy-dyngp.com/2009/02/google-chrome-symantec-en...

I suppose the issue was more that there are barriers which require the effort beyond that which the 98th percentile will exert for the benefit that Chrome gives, and therefore 98% of users will stick with what's given to them.

That's what it's like here. Fortunately, you can just rename chrome.exe to not-chrome.exe, then everything works fine. The "protection" software works just well enough to get the contract, but not so well that you can't work around it.

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.

20% Chrome is surprising. I would've guessed Firefox's share to be much larger.

I'm not sure, but Woobius might be UK-centric, and Google have been heavily pushing Chrome in TV advertising there.

Wow, Google runs ads on Television? I consume all of my video media from the Internet these days so I guess I just didn't know, but that's surprising to me. Do they run the same type of promotional videos that you find on YouTube about Chrome, or are they totally different adverts?

You make a good point, I consume all my television via streaming services, too. It's possible that the adverts are different for that compared to broadcast TV. A cursory web search for Chrome TV ads does appear to confirm they're broadcasting them though.

Here in India, Google has run a full-page print ad recently.

http://www.labnol.org/india/google-chrome-ads-in-indian-news...

I noticed that their print ad drops the http:// from the URL just like the browser itself.

Google ran an ad during the Super Bowl this year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cekQrMEh1wY

That was a very good ad. On top of being well-produced and sweet, it taught people how to use the auto-suggest feature.

they ran a massive campaign in the parisian subway a couple of months ago

And in the London tube over Christmas. Chrome marketing is pretty awesome.

Yep, we are fairly UK-centric. I should have mentioned that.

and they had a road-side billboard near my house recently. Clearly going after the IE6 demographic :)

The power of cross-promotion + The power of the brand.

I run a business blog that is in the Alexa top 10K for US users. It probably leans slightly more techie than average. Most people read it at work. Here are its stats for the past 30 days:

Firefox 37.78% IE 26.63% Chrome 18.11% Safari 12.24%

OS: Windows 74.55% Mac 16.01% iPhone 2.63% (does not include iPad/iPod) Linux 2.5%

Any way you could break down the specific IE versions?

Sure. Of the 26.63% who used IE, here's the version breakdown:

8.0 72.07% 7.0 20.93% 6.0 6.57%

There was a fraction of a percent using the IE9 beta, and one person using IE 5.5. :)

So it looks like about 1.7% of all traffic to my blog is using IE6, if I did that math right.

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

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

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.

For us, it certainly does. Our product's success depends on it working "for everyone". If you invite your structural engineer to the project and they can't use Woobius, you'll revert back to email or some other method, and Woobius will have failed. Therefore, if 5.6% use IE6, given that those 5.6% include some of the largest engineering firms in the UK, we have to support IE6.

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.

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.

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%

Interesting stat tidbit:

Browser stats for Mac users only:

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

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.

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."

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.

There are also apps that rely on IE6 and simply do not work properly in IE7 nor IE8. These apps would also have to be updated which, with tight purse strings in some companies, is not bound to happen soon.

We had this problem with publishers sticking with OS9 and Quark 4 a few years back: that kept them on Mac IE5. In the end we told that that while the admin system would continue to work in Mac IE5 the front end would not be viewable. Didn’t go down too well, but it simply wasn’t possible to provide the layouts they wanted in a format that worked with that browser.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Like r7000, my recent blog post featured on HN had this data for 1680 hits:

Browser - hits - percentage

1. Chrome - 805 - 47.92%

2. Firefox - 521 - 31.01%

3. Safari - 270 - 16.07%

4. IE - 45 - 2.68%

5. Opera - 23 - 1.37%

________________

Also of note, here's the OS breakdown:

1. Windows - 636 - 37.86%

2. Macintosh - 562 - 33.45%

3. Linux - 382 - 22.74%

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 ...

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."

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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

Safari: 4%

Internet Explorer: 5% (!)

Mozilla-compatible agent: 6%

Chrome: 20%

Firefox: 65%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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