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Comment by davidjgraph | Hacker News Reader

"The policy is not useful for Internet Explorer, which doesn't update automatically and has limited OS support."

First point is wrong, from IE 11 the default is automatic updates.

The second point is an unusual way to phrase it...

On the overall topic, I find this strange. Google Docs seems to make efforts to target Microsoft Office users by writing importers for what are very complex formats. It then pretty much cuts itself off from most medium and larger Microsoft based companies, very few of which, in my experience, are up to IE 10.

I wonder if this says something about them really targeting the small, but fastest growing companies and anything really big is nice, but not the priority.

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That description is pretty accurate. 58% of the market is using Internet Explorer currently. Of Internet Explorer users, the breakdown by version is:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 11.0: 2.57%

Microsoft Internet Explorer 10.0: 32.63%

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0 : 16.34%

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 : 37.48%

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 : 2.26%

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 : 8.49%

Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 : 0.23%

(Source: NetMarketShare. Note that this is global so skewed a bit by all the pirated copies of Windows XP in China, etc)

IE is a bit of a mess browser-wise because we've nearly always had a ton of users not on the latest version. The reason? IE doesn't automatically update to a later version. Every other browser on Windows and Linux does. The only other exception is Safari on Mac OS X, which has specific versions artificially pegged to the OS like IE is with Windows. That's why we have 38% of IE users on an outdated browser like IE8 and 8.5% on IE6. Like IE8, IE9 is lacking in many important areas that users of Firefox, Google Chrome, etc don't need to worry about. IE9 lacks several CSS3 tags that have been supported for a while by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. IE9 lacks columns support, animation support, transform, and transition support. IE10 and IE11 properly support it.

In short, Google can keep making Google Apps better by dropping support for dead browsers like IE9. I mean dead as in they're not being developed further. They're stuck with broken or non-existent CSS3 support. And, as pointed out by others, the type of organization that's going to try out Google Apps as a MS Office replacement, isn't the type of organization that's going to be stuck on IE8/9.

NetMarketShare's stats wildly contradict everyone else's [1]. If you believe them, IE is used almost 3 times as much as Chrome/Firefox. If you believe anyone else, Chrome is ahead of IE.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...

NetMarketShare's stats are more accurate than any of the others listed there. The mere fact that W3Counter, StatCounter, and Wikimedia are listed there shows that whoever compiled it has no understanding of global web stats. Chrome is only the dominant browser in two countries and elsewhere only dominant amongst a specific subset of demographics.

If that's true, maybe you could correct the Wikipedia article? Honestly, I'll hold my hands up: I don't have an in-depth understanding of how each of those stats companies gathers their data and, having heard widely-reported statements about Chrome exceeding IE's market share, my natural instinct was to accept the majority's figures over the minority. If I - and, no doubt, many others - are being misled, it would be nice to correct our misconceptions.

I gave up editing Wikipedia years ago after someone kept subtly vandalizing a page for one of my big websites and removing mentions of it on other pages which had been placed organically by multiple editors in favor of a competitor's site in another country operating illegally. To the point that demonstrably wrong information was in wikipedia and demonstrably correct information was removed. This went on for months and there wasn't a thing I could do about it, so I just stopped bothering. Essentially, most pages wind up self-selecting among people with similar viewpoints or people who feel like sticking it out the longest in edit wars.

As far as the wikipedia stats links, jeswin correctly points out why the other measures are inferior (and useless when talking about overall web usage) above. You're free to update the page to reflect this, but I think I've had enough of wikipedia egos and edit wars to last a lifetime.

They are not "more accurate". Just different. They measure 2 different things. I think pretty much any website owner can tell you their stats look a lot closer to what StatCounter says than what Net Apps says, though.

> NetMarketShare's stats are more accurate than any of the others listed there

On every site I've monitored (none of which cater to technical users, one of which is aggressively non-US-centric), NetMarketShare's stats wildly inflate IE's market-share, particularly internationally. That's not to say that they're fictitious but rather that they reflect a certain viewpoint and methodology which is only relevant for a few customers. I've found Akamai's numbers to track very closely with what I measure:

http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_dataset.html

They don't publish technical details about their methodology but I suspect you're seeing a sampling bias: NetMarketShare is used by a modest number of large companies, almost exclusively North American and mostly related to media, and their stats appear to depend on an embedded JavaScript tracker:

http://netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#Methodology

There are some apparent technical botches: they didn't appear to use a CDN at all — when I last traced counter.hitslink.com in the spring everything went to Los Angeles and was correspondingly slower globally but it now[1] appears that they might be using CloudFront — or set Cache-Control headers, so if you're outside North America or on a slow connection you were going to see a higher rate of their JS failing to load and for the tracker ping back not to load by the time the user navigates to a new page:

http://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcounter.hitslink.com%2Ft...

(In contrast, the Akamai numbers reflect direct HTTP traffic for sites like microsoft.com, iTunes, etc. so they avoid the issues related to JS trackers but do require care to filter robots which spoof a browser UA)

They also listed some major sites like CNN or Mozilla which didn't use that JS bug so they either have an unadvertised bulk log delivery service or are portraying smaller side sites as representative of the massive high-traffic main sites.

The real question is the way they interpret the data, and in particular the weighting scheme. Because “everyone knows” Internet Explorer is common in China, they weight the numbers to represent this but you're simply hoping their usage of the CIA Internet Traffic by Country report is accurate:

http://www.netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#Country

The numbers I can measure are very close to Akamai, showing Chrome tied with IE even in China:

http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_dataset_v2.html#stat=browse...

1. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131107_2C_PZK/1/details/

Akamai's numbers are simple % of requests, which means 'hits'. So, a single Chrome user visiting 10 pages that happen to make 100 CDN requests is counted 10x as much as an IE user that visits 2 pages that happen to make 10 CDN requests. In short, the numbers are useless if you're looking for % of visitors.

NetMarketShare uses visitors, which is preferable if you're looking at percentage of users, which is what we're discussing here.

Your point is currently technically correct for the public dataset but it's not significant unless the two browser populations have highly variable usage patterns, which is only going to be true for something like a Chrome fan site. As an example, Google Analytics shows visits, unique visitors or page-views all placing Chrome at 85% relative to IE in China within 0.5%.

Again, I'm not saying that NetMarketShare is lying – simply that it's critical that you make decisions based on data which is relevant to your particular site and that you have multiple data sources to compare and make sure that what you're seeing is a real trend and not an artifact of your analysis.

One of the reasons that IE marketshare is so hard to measure is that it depends on whether business users visit the site. You can see this if you can get data that isn't filtered. The only public data I know like that is Clicky [1]. Note the sawtooth wave caused by users who use IE7/8 (and now IE9) during the week but some other browser during the weekend. So IE8 marketshare is almost 2x higher during the week than on weekends.

http://clicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/internet-e...

The same wikipedia page gives the methodology applied for those calculations.

- StatsCounter (hits, not unique visitors)

- W3Counter (last 15,000 views from 50,000 websites)

- Net Applications (stats from 40k websites having 160 million unique visitors per month)

- Wikipedia (page requests)

Only NetApplications is using unique visitor stats, the rest are tracking views. The results are in line with what most people would assume; Chrome and Firefox users are more active users. But in terms of number of unique visitors IE is still far ahead.

> The results are in line with what most people would assume; Chrome and Firefox users are more active users.

It's not true. top.mail.ru (large Russian counter, ~250M views per day) publishes both number of visitors and number of views. Visits/visitor ratio are about the same for different browser families. Also, stats from top.mail.ru are very similar to the stats from StatCounter on Russian Federation [2], while Net Applications hide their per country totals behind pay wall, and their China-weighted totals are completely outlandish.

[1] http://top.mail.ru/browsers?id=250&period=0&date=&aggregatio...

[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201210-201310

The same wikipedia page has a lengthy discussion on the questionable nature of NetApplication's stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Usage_share_of_web_browser...

Those statistics are for the general population. The argument the parent comment was making that a lot of medium to larger sized corporations are still using IE <10.0 so Google is losing that market by not supporting those browsers.

The companies that have draconian policies requiring a specific version of IE are also probably the same organizations that want to run their own mail, sharepoint, etc. So it probably doesn't have a dramatic impact.

Remember, Google has access to their own numbers from actual users of Google Apps. I wouldn't be surprised if IE9 usage looks much different for them.

They also have a sales force that talks to large potential and current customers, and I'm sure their feedback is taken into account.

Sure, but that kind of data can be misleading. If your app works like a dog's breakfast in IE9 already (and it does), then hardly anybody using IE9 will be using it. That doesn't mean there aren't companies stuck on IE8 who would love to use Google but can't.

But if it works that bad on IE9, how is it going to work on IE8?

I don't understand how you can be "stuck" using IE8. If you are in a position to decide to use google apps surely you are in a position to require IT to update the damned browser.

Edit: Not as clear as intended, making a company level decision on one IT choice should surely allow you influence on another.

> update the damned browser

IE8 is the latest version of IE supported on XP, so for people who don't control the OS, they are on the "latest version" already.

That's true, but I think 'Windows = users on IE' is not as much as a force as it used to be. Corporates who have SOEs are on newer versions, smaller organizations don't seem to mind (and sometimes provide) Chrome installs.

Or the companies that force the use of IE 8 or 9 are unlikely to be the kind of companies that want cloud apps.

Google has access to at least half of the web from their free analytics.

I think that's missing the point. If a "Microsoft-based company" is mandating IE9 and disallowing browser installs, they're not the sort of shop likely to be trying new office suite software (!) any time soon. Conservative markets are conservative, in general you simply can't market replacement products to them directly.

The only people switching older systems to Docs are the people willing to try new stuff, more or less by definition. A Chrome or Firefox install for these folks isn't nearly as invasive as junking Word and Excel is.

This isn't strictly true. I work in education and for a large part of our state the network and operating environment is managed by the education department, but services are largely left up to schools. This means we're left with IE9 as the default web browser but lots of students use Google Docs for their work (not to mention staff). I know other states look at or are using Docs across the board.

And Chrome/Firefox aren't installed on those machines?

No. The story I've gotten when I pursued this with the department is the update cycle is too rapid to bother and automated deployment too difficult to manage.

The kids that use them tend to install Chrome themselves since it will install into their profile and they don't need permissions to the rest of the system. A couple of the kids use Firefox Portable.

Since a sad number of our staff (and a fair few students) have trouble just logging into a computer, this isn't really an option for the masses.

but this misses the point that often in these companies what you can install on your machine is incredibly locked down, which makes SaaS the only way to easily get new apps you can actually use. You may very well have users who want new software, but the only way they can do so is through the web, since installing new desktop software requires rolling a boulder up a hill.

Or, just wait until your SaaS is cutoff by the company firewall, something done at large companies with products like DropBox, Google Docs, Evernote, etc...

Yes we do this and we need to keep doing it. This is because despite masses of training, people still think it's fine to upload confidential documents and personal information to public dropbox folders and the like and stick our code on public github repositories...

Only the firewall can account for idiots well enough.

Sounds like your company has far bigger issues than people sharing confidential information.

No not really. Sounds like your ego doesn't match the reality of a medium sized business.

Hello! Welcome to HN.

You make some good points about the ability of naive users to do really scary, damaging things; and about the frustrations of working in medium to big businesses.

Unfortunately, you do so in an unhelpful way. Please consider editing your comments. (Feel free to ignore me or tell me to fuck off. I'm just a user with no power).

Not a new user. Been here for 3 years. I was hellbanned before for saying something positive about Microsoft :)

Get your point though!

I don't think you're actually correct anymore. There's a huge push going on in enterprise right now to get everyone upgraded from WinXP to at least (and typically) Win7, and many companies are including an upgrade to IE10 or IE11 in part of the desktop image. Generally speaking, unless there are specific reasons for requiring an older version of the browser, they're going with the newest available and allowing it to auto-update.

You should feel good knowing that the predominant reason why this sea change has occurred is because of developers and the pace of the modern web: devs are refusing to target old versions of browsers, especially IE, anymore. In edge cases where a specific browser+version is required, that's pushed to the affected user(s) as a one-off.

My team, anecdotally, don't even test against IE for internal-only apps anymore. We make sure things work with FF & Chrome current and current-1 and that's it. For external facing apps we cross-test against IE current and current-1, too, but that's the minority of our work.

I thought IE updates through Windows Update?

Regardless, what a piece if shit! Just fired it up to check the version (it's version 9, apparently no Windows Update update) and it's so goddamn slow!

I'm now on 100mbps fiber, Firefox and Chrome are pretty much instant, IE takes 10 seconds to open the MSN page, and another 20 to perform a search from the address bar in Bing and open the first result (a Microsoft.com page!). Unbelievable.

I think you're doing something wrong. Even my low memory ceiling IE9 test VM doesn't behave like that and I'm on 12mbit ADSL.

Similar to when people believe that a new windows version boots faster than the other, a VM is not a real world test case. Typically windows performance degrades significantly over time in terms of program launch and boot up time. Try using that VM as your main computing environment for 8 months and then check IE launch time.

That's all uninformed hokum.

Firstly newer versions of windows do boot quicker. But TBH I don't reboot them. Workstations get left on. Laptops get hibernated so neither is much of a problem. That's a stupid metric. Anyway, read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/08/delivering-fas...

My primary laptop is running Windows 7 as installed in 2010. I haven't done a thing to it. It's fine. I've gone through Visual Studio 2010 - 2013 on it as well. It has a full SQL server installation and several virtual machines. Still like lightning.

Not only that I have a Dell workstation sitting in the office that hasn't been touched since installed in 2010 that I use for 4-5 hours a day via RDP over a shitty connection. Absolutely fine.

Windows is only slow if you fuck something up, install a million toolbars or are a mac user or Linux user trying for trendy Microsoft bashing for upvotes.

Every windows system I've seen boots more and more slowly over time. It's not 'uninformed hokum', it's a consequence of installing programs that add startup items and registry entries. There is much lousy software for Windows (besides all the spyware with which the average consumer PC is ridden) which fails to cleanup after uninstallation, and also many programs which add startup items unnecessarily. I've seen many people install a new version of windows and marvel at its amazing boot time. Then they actually install antivirus, etc and a few months go by... And the measurable fact is that soon it takes as long to boot as their old computer.

You, unlike most people who maintain windows machines, probably know what you're doing. You're probably not installing and uninstalling a tom of shoddy consumer software. From your description, you're not - so your use is one anecdote regarding an atypical case and not particularly convincing.

The article is interesting, but I'm referring to my personal experience with windows 98-7. Microsoft also wrote articles about the amazing work they were doing to make each of those faster, etc while in real world results, each version performed almost exactly the same as the previous version. I believe that no matter what they do, the challenge is to prevent a legion of developers of poor windows software from screwing it up.

OK, it could've been that I opened it for the first time in a year, but still, there are no addons, no history, no bookmarks, nothing - a new Firefox or Chrome installation never behaved like this. It's on an SSD, too, so what could be the issue then?

I have to agree with csmuk. I have four browsers installed on my laptop (Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and IE) and IE does not take 10 seconds to open the MSN page and Bing searches return results instantly. Something is wrong with your system.

Maybe it would be fast enough if I used it semi-regularly, but it's true what they say, it's the best browser for downloading any other browser :-)...

First point is wrong, from IE 11 the default is automatic updates.

Actually, I think that is from IE 10, or at least so it is on my machine.

Even if the default is to automatically update starting at IE 11 it's irrelevant given that IE 11 is the newest version. Although it is a welcome change going forward.

Alternatively, they may just not have thought about it in that much detail.

Yep, I'm betting on unintended consequence rather than deep plan here.

It would certainly be pretty unwise to exclude the best-paying customers intentionally.

I bet they've more than thought about it. I bet they have data that shows them their customers care more about using Google Docs than they care about using IE9, and will switch browsers.

I also don't think a company as big as Google would make such an important decision without considering the consequences. This decision wasn't made on a whim, they've clearly given it some thought.

Industry-leading professionals don't make technology decisions based on uneducated choices of big masses.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Ogilvy

Slightly taken out of context, but still relevant: "The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife."

Are those updates frequent and steady feature updates, a la Chrome, or merely security and bug fix updates? The former would be a big change from previous IE. The latter would mean Google's statement is still basically accurate, and is what most Windows systems have been doing for years with Windows update.

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