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Comment by joshma | Hacker News Reader

Pretty misleading title, since IE10 isn't the latest version. IE11 is the latest and went from 11.51% to 12.80% (big jump compared to Chrome, 16.28% to 16.84%). Interesting (and slightly sad) that Firefox isn't gaining - in light of these stats, I'd say things don't look too shabby for IE.

I'm not too familiar with IE (heh), but is the upgrade mechanism better in IE10? That might explain the higher drop.

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> Interesting (and slightly sad) that Firefox isn't gaining

I'm guessing this has more to do with Chrome being easier to integrate into enterprise/group-policy-based deployment than anything to do with the choices of individual users, though. The only place I see Firefox on a PC in a "computer lab" or "thin-client" setting any more is when those PCs are also running Linux.

I wonder if any of the gain can be attributed to the bundling deals. Had to install adobe acrobat reader recently and noticed they try to install chrome and the google bar for IE

Also, if you're using an older browser on any Google web service they promote Chrome heavily.

They promote it heavily regardless of whether or not your browser is older. But that's to be expected.

I thought Chrome deployed on Windows as a ClickOnce app. ClickOnce is actually pretty awful for Group Policy deployments.

Google publishes an .msi that can be pushed to pc's.

Surely nothing to do with the fact that there's television commercials for Chrome, ads every time you go to the most visited website on the Internet, etc...

Chrome had a pretty overwhelming market share before there were ads for it, didn't it

I don't think it showed them to everyone, but it got the ads pretty early on.

...and the nag ads on the Google.com homepage to install Chrome. It shows up everytime and general public accidently clicks on it.

...and Adobe Acrobat (Reader) that tries to install Chrome like "adware" - one has to be careful to opt-out on the Adobe website. Also many freeware and some open source like WinSCP come with this kind of "adware" like shady auto-installer and often install Chrome (opt-out is available, bit hidden in advanced options).

Chrome is the superior browser, easy to use, syncs nicely, great developer tools. I'd say that is probably why.

Turns out "superior browser" is subjective. Firefox has great developer tools (the built in ones, not to mention Firebug). Firefox syncs nicely (and doesn't spy on what you sync). Firefox is easy to use.

For the vast majority of users, none of this stuff matters. What matters is brand recognition and stuff "just working". In-built Flash probably helps Chrome's case.

It doesn't matter which browser is "winning", the vast majority aren't picking which browser to use based on features. If Chrome is the "superior browser", why is IE dominating in market share?

Chrome has flash baked in; one less install/update to manage in large deployments.

Except when an upgrade to Flash breaks an important site for a lot of users. Then you are screwed. Reverting to the regular windows plugin would be the first change i made for a large deployment.

Yes, IE10 is the first IE that'll auto-upgrade to the next version, an evergreen browser.

IE is hardly evergreen. IE11 is curiously not available on Windows 8.0, although it is available on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. They also publish update blockers [1]. Maybe this is why StatCounter still shows a huge IE10 presence [2]. The point of an evergreen browser is to make older browser version shares negligable as quickly as possible, and it doesn't seem that's really happening.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=4072...

[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially...

> IE is hardly evergreen. IE11 is curiously not available on Windows 8.0, although it is available on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1

Windows 8.0 will automatically update to Windows 8.1 so IE10 on Windows 8 will get automatically updated to IE11.

> They also publish update blockers [1]

You say this like it's a bad thing, some users don't want an evergreen browser. The point of the update blocker is to help those users.

What about corporate installations? Is 8.0 -> 8.1 seemless enough or will there be a substantial delay in a standard enterprisey environment and thus creating a new browser isle?

8.0 should (hopefully) be a very short lived release in the wild. There's no reason at all not to upgrade to 8.1, even in a corporate setting, 8.1 is free, and the upgrade process is very smooth.

At one point CheckPoint VPN didn't support 8.1, now it does. One of my customers uses it so I held off upgrading. There could well be other apps with similar issues and big corporates would prefer others discover them.

Hmm, I think 8.0->8.1 actually isn't an auto update. Windows will continue to upsell you to 8.1 but it won't auto update.

It's free, but, yeah, I had to open the Windows Store or whatever and actually make it update. It did not show up in the Windows Update list (not even in the "Suggested Updates").

A large percentage of non-tech-savvy people seem to hate upgrading.

For them, an update just slows them down or leads to confusing changes. What they already have "works fine."

The difference between "auto update" and "an option to update" is huge.

I didn't mean to imply it wasn't a huge difference. Just correcting someone from above..

You can block updates in Chrome and Firefox too. It's a necessary feature for enterprise IT departments that need to test updates before the deploy.

to be fair they don't test updates, rather they test their internal web app lacking standards compliance or cross browser testing.

>I'm not too familiar with IE (heh), but is the upgrade mechanism better in IE10? That might explain the higher drop.

I think that's the point. Users are actually upgrading from 10 to 11.

Yes, this is a good thing for everyone. You can see the same pattern when Firefox shifted to faster upgrades, the people on the old regime decayed slowly, while people on the new regime transitioned quickly.

Its not even a new phenomenon, IE 9 plunged quickly (well, for an IE version) when IE10 started getting uptake, falling below IE 8:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+tablet-browser_version_pa...

If you want bad news for Microsoft, it's not in the rankings of their previous two versions, but the fact that their decreasing market share is spread across so many versions, each of which is a bit pitiful when compared with a single version of Firefox, with even the last version of Chrome and iPad Safari showing up Microsoft's efforts:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+tablet-browser_version-ww...

That was my immediate thought, the IE9 population reflects the non-upgraders that kept IE6 relevant long past the point it should have been.

IE11 was bundled with windows 8.1, which fixed a bunch of idiotic features/annoyances in win8, so people had more incentive to upgrade.

It is still interesting though. It shows what I think we all know that Microsoft's most vicious competitor is Microsoft and it means that you have a few users who upgrade everything and many many more who never do.

In my opinion it's focusing on the wrong part. Between the two trends (IE11 growing or IE10 vs IE9) the former is more likely to continue and the latter is likely to end as more machines reach end of life.

I don't think IE10 has a better mechanism. If memory serves you can't upgrade past IE9 on... what, XP? Vista? I forget which. But point being, IE9 is the end of the line for some of the Windows versions.

It's IE8 that is the last supported version under XP, hence the big share for that version. I wonder how that looks over time ...

IE8: XP/Vista/7 IE9: Vista/7 IE10: 7/8.0 IE11: 7/8.1

I think it is Vista.

Anyone who can run IE9 can run IE10 or IE11 at this point. IE9 is only supported on Windows 7, which now supports 10 & 11.

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