IE10 grabs 0.51% market share, Firefox passes 20% again | Hacker News Reader

IE10 grabs 0.51% market share, Firefox passes 20% again

thenextweb.com

17 pointsgregpurtell11 comments

Does it matter what is the most popular browser? For me the only thing that matters is <= IE8 loses market share. A modern browser is pretty much a modern browser today and for 99% of web browsing it doesn't matter which you use.

As a sign of changing times my Dad installed Chrome by himself! Blew my mind that he knew what Chrome is and actually managed to find and install it without help.

I still use Firefox. I am getting less keen on it. Tabs aren't sand boxed. I find their developer tools unintuitive and phpmyadmin keeps making the browser hang when I inspect a 200 column table...

Yes, because that is how customers make their project orders on which set of browsers are to be supported.

What the most popular browser is doesn't matter on its own. But I would still expand your <=IE8 to include all of IE because, while IE8 and lower are hopelessly outdated, IE9 is still a poor HTML5 browser and new and shiny IE10 is already behind both Chrome and Firefox.

Now IE is not batshit insane, the biggest problem is that is has a very slow release cycle. The second being that MS shuts out all its users on their older OS-s.

Chrome is very aggressively advertised and promoted in newspapers, magazines, on billboards and even on TV, not to mention on Google's Search and Youtube sites. I'm surprised its market share not higher, its actually falling. http://gs.statcounter.com/

In what world is 34.77% to 35.72% "falling"? I think you are looking at the IE line.

Also, IE is way more aggressively advertised and promoted than Chrome is. I've probably seen this ad over 100 times since March:

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

There's still a heck of a lot of new features we can't use because IE10 is lagging behind most other browsers. Examples:

http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-canvas

http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-filters

http://caniuse.com/#feat=border-image

http://caniuse.com/#feat=webgl

http://caniuse.com/#feat=audio-api

http://caniuse.com/#feat=fullscreen

http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-masks

http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-resize

There's also the question of whether history will repeat itself. Will IE10 stay still and in a couple of years time we'll be bemoaning the fact that we can't use CSS temporal olfactory backgrounds because IE users aren't upgrading?

These numbers are intentionally deceptive and sensationalized without more information – at the very least standard deviation, without which it's unclear whether "Firefox gained 0.45%" means "unchanged, so far as our sampling accuracy allows, please click our ads" or "whopping increase".

Do you remember when IE9 was released, and Microsoft got into a bit of a blog-fight with Firefox over which was going to grow the fastest, IE9 or Firefox 4(!)?

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2011/05/just-wai...

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2011/05/firefox-...

Here we are now with the launch of IE10 and IE9 is neck and neck with Firefox version 16 alone, and the combined total of recent versions of Firefox comfortably in the lead at about 125% of IE9s share.

(Of course that's global, in the USA they caught up to them about a year after launch and now tie Chrome at 25%, in Europe they've got half the usage of Firefox and Chrome, roughly 30 compared to 15 percentage points)

How representative are the "160 million users" that Net Applications is using (yes, I did read TFA and I find it very light on their metodology and on what they're actually measuring) to produce these numbers?

Last time I checked there was this "mobile" thing and there apparently isn't a single day where there's less people browsing using their phone than the previous day. Heck, even my girlfriend is now using FaceBook from her Android phone and she isn't anywhere near a tech-savvy person.

I receive mails from family members sent from their mobile phones and I know they do read news, use GMail, use FaceBook and even check eBay listings from their phone.

I've got a hard time imagining this trend changing.

And what about the tablet market?

So are these stats done by monitoring 160 million desktop users and totally disregarding tablet / mobile?

This seems like a glaring error on their behalf, they made no explicit exemption of mobile browsing, so their data is highly misleading to anyone who reads it.

I would almost bet that this post was urged by Microsoft in some way, as their lack of success on mobile would have resulted in a major hit to IE's true market share .

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