The Decline of IE and Firefox | Hacker News Reader

The Decline of IE and Firefox

blog.diffen.com

37 pointsputlake44 comments

Those graphs are misleading. The first one visually indicates that Chrome currently has something like 100x the share of Firefox -- while the numbers indicate it's more like 3x.

You should at least have the base of the graphs at 0%. Probably even better to have to top line of the graphs at 100%. That'd give a truer visual representation of the data.

Whenever I see one of these graphs that is not zero-based, I'm forced to expend the unnecessary mental effort to decide whether the author is intentionally deceptive or merely stupid.

Usually, to save the expenditure of this increasingly rare resource, I stop reading.

they also take prefetching as unique hits. only chrome does prefetching by default. makes results extremely misleading

That and the use of "Windoze" without a hint of irony makes me label this an unreliably biased source. As much as I'd love to se IE8- vanish and don't care what happens to IE9+, if this article said the summery sky were usually blue I'd want to verify the facts with other sources before taking them as stated.

The blog post links to several other sources of browser market share. You are free to look them up. I have nothing against IE and there is no cause for bias in something like this.

"Windoze" is general humor, it's not irony. Check http://www.isitironic.com

You seemed to have missed the words "without a hint of irony" in my post. The use of "windoze" did not give me the impression is was used purely in jest (intentional irony or some other form of humour). It, like other such respellings such as "M$ Widnows", tends to scream BIAS HERE, ENGAGE LEVEL 2 SALT PINCH BEFORE READING FURTHER in most cases.

No it won't. I hate non-zero based graphs as much as the next guy. Except when necessary. In this case, a customized Y-axis was necessary to really show the magnitude of the drop. 4 percentage points dropping out of a scale of 100 won't even register. But it is a HUGE drop and you need a graph that amplifies the Y-axis to show the difference.

The stats are dramatically different for an enterprise focused website. As a counterexample, we show for our site:

IE (all versions) is 52% of visits in the last month. IE 8.0 is 25% of IE traffic

For the same month in 2012, IE traffic was 62% of all visits, so we are showing drops as well, but not to the extent we can ignore the needs of our IE customers.

In short, know your customer.

I don't like IE, but we like our customers a lot more than I dislike IE.

Wow, that is high.

I work in the edtech space myself, and supposedly the IE 8 stats are around ~10% for us, which is high enough to not ignore (unfortunately).

With the clients of out main money making application (investment banks for the most part) IE8 is well over 80%, possibly even 90%, though we are increasingly seeing the use of Chrome too as that has started making its way into standard desktop builds to deal with the increaing number of apps that are out right refusing to support IE8. MS are starting to lose a chunk of corporate use here: by not offering an easy way to run modernm IE and legacy IE side-by-side they are essentially giving market share to Chrome as some corporates can't drop IE8 easily (due to some intranet apps they still rely on) but are starting to need to have something more modern at the same time (they would use IE10 instead if they could easily run that along side IE8).

Yep, in the medical world (US hospitals, etc...) you're still looking at a significant portion of IE8 users, and even some IE7.

All those graphs should start the y-axis with 0%, starting at 5% or 10% makes the decline/increase seem bigger than it really is.

No, it shouldn't start at 0% and shouldn't go to 100%. If I did that then a 4% drop wouldn't register at all. I know Y-axis scams all too well and this isn't one of them. Browser market shares move very, very slowly and on a 0-100 scale all you would see are (almost) flat lines. The story will be lost.

if i get this correctly these stats are from one site (diffen.com) - why is this relevant for anything?

I would give it at least a little bit of credibility just based on the fact that it's a consumer-oriented site with a wider audience than just us technical people. But I agree it's just one data point among many.

Which brings up an interesting question, since we're on a site for startup founders: what kind of traffic patterns do you guys see on your websites?

My guess would be that among tech users, Firefox has gained over the past year, given concerns about privacy and Google's relentless slurping of browsing behavior from anywhere they can get it. That's the reason I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago; I now only use Chrome for Google apps.

It's interesting that you'd say this as I've found myself doing the same thing for very much the same reasons. I'm actually a little hesitant to use Chrome at all except in those cases where I need flash (I don't tend to install flash and usually rely on Chrome's bundled plugin).

Chrome is a great browser and the built-in developer tools really seem to be raising the bar but for casual browsing I've pretty much switched to Firefox or Safari (depending on the platform).

any particular reason you do not use chromium, the OpenSource version of Chrome?

It's kinda too bad in the case of IE. It has always been a sword in the side of every web developer that we must develop twice. Once regularly and again for IE. Recently I was pleasantly surprised to open up IE and not only did everything look correct and work, but everything worked faster.

Why didn't everyone switch away from IE ten years ago? That would have been so helpful. Now it doesn't matter.

Seems to be wildly misleading numbers. Why not use something like gs.statcounter.com to get more correct numbers.

One question I have in mind: Will Safari be able to keep up, or will Apple become complacent because they're satisfied with being the best option for OS X? (Which they can achieve by being insiders on that OS, and not by being more awesome.)

I only skimmed at the charts in the article, but I'd assume the underlying reason highlighted by OP is the only one that makes sense, i.e. that old Windows boxes get replaced by tablets (usually, but not necessarily, iPads), on top of smartphone sales; just less frequently for geeky users (who are more likely to be using FF or Chrome than IE).

If so, "best" option for OSX seems somewhat moot: what really counts is being the "only" option on iOS. (Technically, you can install another Webkit-based powered browser on an iDevice, but I'd wager hardly anyone does so because http links in apps would probably keep opening Safari anyway.)

I have Gmail and Chrome installed on an iPad. HTTP links in Gmail open in Chrome if that browser is installed. Just FYI.

Yes, but that's due to specific effort of the Gmail team.

Links from other (non-Google) apps still open in Safari.

Apologies for communicating my thoughts poorly. I was confident that the integration was intentional.

I had intended the trivia about gmail:chrome integration as a way to illustrate the parent's opinion that Apple controlling the user experience on the iPad is, ultimately, a moot point.

If Apple cannot prevent the distribution third party browsers (note: see caveat in comment above), and they cannot prevent other apps from invoking those third party browsers, then Apple cannot prevent a company with sufficient drive and resources from creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem on top of iOS. All they can do is raise the barrier to entry, to increase the likelihood that smaller players will build on top of the iOS ecosystem, rather than do an end-run around it.

Just in case there is any ambiguity, I am glad that Google is innovating (to the extent that they are permitted) on top of iOS. I tend to buy Apple gear because I think that Apple makes very good hardware, and I use OS X because it's a desktop-centric Unix that runs software from Adobe and Microsoft, and lets me watch videos from Netflix and Amazon.

As someone who has used Apple services since iTools debuted in 2000, I think that Apple's services (iCloud, iTunes, etc) are strictly "ehh." I'm glad to see the competition. If Safari usage numbers tank as a result, well, that's a solvable problem.

Google had to do that specifically, iirc, since Apple doesn't like other browsers.

It's also worth pointing out that Chrome on your iPad is just Mobile Safari (the slower version for 3rd party apps) with a Chrome skin/UI on top of it. It's not the real Chrome/Blink engine used on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, etc, which would be faster.

Very interesting. Thanks!

I don't know on OS X but on iOS while Mobile Safari is quite good, it lacks one mandatory feature: a way to install extensions or at least a way to install Adblock.

I find myself using less and less my iPad (last generation with A7) for a single reason: because how much web sites are actually cluttered with pop-ups, ad banners, and modal sheets masking contents. This has a serious impact on loading times and on usability, this is maddening.

This is becoming a serious problem aggravated by the fact developers of these websites / ad networks know very well there is actually no mainstream way of bypassing this garbage on iOS and thus they abuse their situation. Apple needs to do something to restore a balance. I won't hold my breadth though, but long term as it drives more people nuts I think it will become a serious issue.

If you're at home use privoxy to filter the ads out. You can also use privoxy to filter out onswipe garbage too.

http://misctechmusings.com/ipad-ad-blocking-using-privoxy/

Apple will need to be anything but complacent after Google forked Webkit to become Blink, now used by Chrome and Opera.

Apple already has become complacent. They are by far the slowest browser to adopt new web features (including IE). For example IndexedDB has been around for like 4 years now and there are no signs of Safari implementing it. WebRTC is another where they are behind the other browsers.

Very rarely is Safari the first to adopt anything, because frankly they almost never are the ones working on drafts. I firmly believe Apple sees the web as "that thing we have to have but don't want to devote too many resources to."

I will add to this that Safari 6 added a host of horrible (and bizarre) bugs which seem to have received no attention or even acknowledgement from Apple.

Off-topic, but your screen name is the name I chose for my first fictional character, ever. (From almost 4 decades ago.)

Off-off-topic, ris means lynx in croatian.

Ive always wondered why people stick to a browser, for instance why hang on to IE 10 when you can switch to IE 11?

Because switching is harder than not.

Ever heard of that thing called inertia?

Here is a chart from my tech site on which people troubleshooting tech things go:

http://i.imgur.com/KqYcypZ.png

Two data points? really?

Firefox has become too slow with too many updates and internet explorer merits no further comment

If you think this is still true, then clearly you haven't used Firefox as of recent.

I find this true, and I've been an old Firefox user. Stopped for a while after a bunch of issues after 4, and after that I've been off and on really TRYING!, but nah.. sticking with Chrome.

Not always worth the effort of switching back and forth. I stopped using FF when it was a slow memory hog. I've heard good things about it recently, but I have no real incentive to switch back.

I wouldn't say Firefox is slow, but the UI still has weird latency issues that I don't see in Chrome.

For the record, I use both Chrome and Firefox, heavily. The Chrome UI is very rarely laggy. The Firefox UI is often laggy. It's maddening, and I wish Mozilla would fix it.

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