Firefox Passes IE6 In Market Share | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Passes IE6 In Market Share

electronista.com

51 pointsnategraves26 comments

Forgive me for being that guy, but:

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

From: http://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Dont' worry about being that guy. You were very much in the right.

Was the title edited? I don't see any of those things.

I believe it was.

I believe the original title was: Firefox Passes IE6 In Market Share (FINALLY)

Be that guy more often; HN needs all the help it can get to keep it in the environment we all came here for. Just like we clean up trash to keep our gardens clean, we have to clean up some titles and comments from time to time.

According to StatCounter. It's numbers are much different from the other big players (Net Applications, Alexa etc.):

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/statcounter_launches_gl...

Their numbers for Safari are hilariously wrong; they suggest Opera has a bigger share (at 1.9%). Considering all other metrics seem to indicate Safari has a 3-6% share now, this leads me to question all of their other numbers.

Hi,

Thanks for the comment. StatCounter tracks over 10 billion pageviews monthly from across the entire world. The current global stats are based on a sample of 4 billion monthly page views from it (to be expanded shortly!).

There are very few other web stat providers out there who would have anywhere close to that reach we have. The ones that are currently providing global stats would be very us-centric and if you check our US stats they will more closely match them.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-daily-20080701-2009030...

I hope that helps.

Aodhan Cullen

StatCounter

*Results may vary.

Here's a hint: Look at YOUR traffic and determine what browsers to support.

Well spoken. It's interesting to see how different browser usage and resolution settings can be from one market segment to another.

The title seems a little triumphant for my tastes - wouldn't it arguably be more accurate as "IE6 dips below Firefox in market share"?

"dip" implies it may recover. I'm pretty skeptical that we'll see a resurgence of IE6 usage.

IE6 is like vinyl, man. It's a timeless classic. The pages just look better through it, like they did when I was a kid!

Does anyone know where to get current stats on IE5.0 and IE5.5 use? I'm guessing it's below 1% if you look at a wide variety of "general use" sites, like portals and news, but it'd be great to have some solid data on that -- especially to show to clients who request that their sites support it.

Microsoft dropped support for IE5.0 and IE5.5 on their websites. I think that's a sufficient argument right there. :) Haven't had anyone argue with that so far...

Thanks for that info -- definitely a helpful bit of ammo.

Would still love to see some stats from a general pool, though, if anyone knows where to find them. You could argue that just because MS stopped supporting the versions doesn't mean there aren't people who just can't figure out how to upgrade or don't know they need to out there. Knowing that that number is some trivial percent would be very helpful.

Barring that, maybe the argument can be strengthened if Google and Yahoo have also dropped support. Will check it out.

Not sure about Google, but Yahoo dropped IE5 and IE5.5 support long, long time ago.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20080701...

That graph shows that ie6 usage dips on weekends (while firefox usage peaks). This seems to suggest that most of the people using ie6 are using it at their workplace and many of them tend to use firefox at home.

It's sort of sad how technologically uninformed most people are, considering how important this stuff has become.

I don't see it as the fault of individuals, more the fault of the industry.

I do agree that the industry plays a large part in the continuation of bad practices. I'm always amazed at how apathetic some browser developers have been in responding to developer requests. It seems that, ultimately, the browser developers would benefit from more websites working on their product.

At the same time I'm optimistic that as users become aware of some of the great plug-ins that are available for Firefox and the great speed and usability of Safari and Chrome, they'll be more inclined to finally make the switch.

The thing is, it's not important for the users. I still have to use IE6 occasionally while at college (although this is only the case on the ThinClients, everything else is on IE7) but apart from lacking tabs there's not a lot (on the face of it) from IE7.

Important for web developers and those that use the internet frequently but not for those that only use the net occasionally.

I'm sure mechanics feel the same way about the rest of us when we bring our car into the shop. Browsers are important to us but they'll never be important to "most people".

Microsoft still owns about 20% of Firefox I think.

It's about time!

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