Soon, Majority of Web Users Will No Longer Use IE
It might take a few more years, or it might happen suddenly, but trends appear to indicate that the time when Internet Explorer is used by the majority of people on the web will soon come to an end.
New numbers from analytics firm Net Applications put IE at a mere 67.5%, having dropped more than 7% last year. The bulk of that loss is coming from users of IE 6, an 8 year old browser that many users now appear to be replacing with Firefox, Safari or Chrome, instead of updated versions of IE.
The remaining 20% of web users still using IE 6 could rapidly defect and switch teams to Firefox or Chrome, changing the market share numbers all the more. Who would have thought that a day would come so soon when only 2/3 of web users were using IE? We wouldn't be surprised to see that number fall below 50% relatively soon.
As CNet reports Internet Explorer's drop of seven percentage point since February last year is a continuing trend. Microsoft lost over nine percent of browser market share in the preceding two years.
Now the world has the leading search company pushing its browser, a new mobile version of Firefox will launch soon and the global market for dirt cheap laptops or netbooks is likely to explode in the next few years. How many of those machines will run something other than Explorer? We expect quite a few.
What would the fall of IE mean? It could mean the rise of open, extensible, safer and more contemporary browsers. Perhaps the new IE 8 will change all our lives, though!
Update: Joe Wilcox at EWeek challenges these and Net Applications' numbers in general. That's an interesting read, too.
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The end of IE can't come soon enough for me.
Yes we can
Ok this is a fun post with a bonafide, large-scale trend ... but majority?? ultimately, how can you win the battle of the bundling of IE? Hard to see market share dipping below 60-70% for quite a while due to default lay consumer behavior when buying a Windows box ...
and that time can't come soon enough...
Posted by: Sarah Vela
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February 2, 2009 10:49 AM
Based on this chart, soon won't be too soon. Also, IE8 is a huge improvement over IE6/7, so, don't be so sure. I am a fan of Firefox and started to use Chrome recently (regardless of its limited featureset and instability), but IE8 is pretty good out of the box and I catch myself using it more often now when I get tired of memory leaks in Firefox and Chrome's problems with Flash, DNS caching, network issues, mouse issue, general instability (freezing and crashing) and especially the inability to restore sessions after it crashed miserably. I hope that Firefox 3.1 will finally reduce the memory leaks and Chrome will become more than just Lynx with a GUI, but I'm sure IE will continue to lead the browser market especially with the upcoming Windows 7, which seems to be a sure winner.
Soon the support hell is over ^^
Agree with @Jason. IE has the majority.
Question should be what needs to be done to end IE's market share reign? This can be accomplished by i.e.
1. educating the average user that IE is security nightmare by emailing every new IE hack/virus/worm story
2. IE is bad for supporting standards
3. costing businesses a whack of cash to develop unnecessary hacks.
4. Make Firefox your personal and corporate standard browser ;)
Anyone else want to contribute more ideas?
I hope you are right! However I think it's going to be a tough battle. IE has an edge because they are distributing it with new computers that use Windows. Most people are lazy and just use whatever is installed. Also, newer versions of Firefox have annoying bugs (even though I love Firefox). IE still has over double the market share of Firefox. I'd be cautious about making huge predictions like that as things can change in just a few months.
Yep, shane. Folks can agree on just one or two (there are likely more, but just pick one or two) Firefox add-ons that don't fit IE. I can't provide convincing help here, as I'm retired and so, don't have a "money-making" business.
I dunno...
IE7 wasn't too bad.
(posted using Firefox)
Thanks for your comments everyone.
Jason M. Lemkin - on bundling. I think for it to have dropped into the 60's is pretty remarkable given bundling. I also think that Google's leverage is big, even when bundling is taken into consideration.
The key to IE dropping below 50% is obviously not in desktops, but in the continued growth of mobile web browsing overall, since ie is far less popular there
I spent the weekend on a friends house. I was shocked when I discovered that both he and his girlfriend, were still using IE6. The poor kid were facing hell, with a cluttered screen, slow loading speeds, etc..
It took me 5 minutes to fully convert them into Chrome... 5 minutes, and they will NEVER look back..
http://the-anti-google-baloney.blogspot.com/
It kills me how many of our big company clients are still stuck with IE6. This transition could not come soon enough.
I managed to convert my dad (a rather stubborn person) to using Firefox, from IE7, after many attempts.
And it seems that at my school, fewer and fewer computers have IE installed (as old ones are replaced).
Can it happen now please? IE should have been killed after the horrid IE 6. I am amazed that anyone still uses any version of IE.
Folks have been saying this for years. Sorry to say that I don't put much faith in this prediction. Would be nice though.
Also folks talk about mobile browsers but yet many sites, including both this one as well as my own, look rather poor on a little iPod touch screen.
Looking at the w3c stats (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp), I'm thinking that Firefox will overtake IE on that site soon, for December it was:
IE6+7 = 45.7%
Firefox = 44.4%
and the January stats are not available yet, so it might have already gone past.
A plea to all Firefox, Safari and Chrome users: switch two friends from IE in the next week.
Imagine doubling the non-MS share in the weeks leading up to IE8 going gold.
East or west?? Firefox is best!!
Firefox is excellent. My experience with IE, has always been terrible.
One word: AVANT - http://www.avantbrowser.com/. Built on the IE codebase...which means it's the only browser other than IE that renders 100% page accuracy...while loading 2-4x faster than IE. No fuzzy or broken images. And no need for "Make Firefox as fast as Opera" blog propaganda. Which is also a lie because with Opera you never know if you're seeing current page content or Opera's last-cached-content-in-the-name-of-speed. We bench test our site with the top seven browsers: Avant, Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, Orca and Safari. We never see current changes unless we manually reload Opera. So if you use Opera, what are YOU seeing every day on the web? And Avant kicks Opera's falsetto butt anyway. One word: AVANT. "Reality: Go ahead, don't be afraid; breath it in."
@Jeff Cotrupe - EPIC PR FAIL. Sorry. You have no idea what you're talking about.
As a web developer, I'm really going to celebrate the day that IE loses majority market share. As soon as Google start promoting chrome properly, it should make a big difference, and if the European Commission succeed in stopping IE from being installed by default on Windows that'll also make a dent.
Happy days!
Looking at browser stats for the last 30 days on my own website, IE comes in at 60% (and 75% of those were using 7.0), FF at 30%, followed by Safari (6%) and Chrome (just over 1%). Opera makes up less than .7% of my traffic.
Interestingly, Playstation3 showed up, and had more users than Netscape!
The corporate environment will remain IE's bastion.
IE6 is still the browser used at work. We *might* upgrade to XP this summer or fall, but I don't expect IE7 or IE8 to be used for some time. The entire intranet is developed for IE6 and moving to another browser just won't be accepted by the IT department.
This is what my site's data say
its 10 month data.
No. of unique visits
1.
Internet Explorer
5,852 48.13%
2.
Firefox
4,728 38.89%
3.
Opera
961 7.90%
4.
Chrome
484 3.98%
5.
Safari
82 0.67%
6.
Mozilla
36 0.30%
7.
SeaMonkey
5 0.04%
8.
Mozilla Compatible Agent
4 0.03%
9.
Netscape
2 0.02%
10.
Playstation Portable
2 0.02%
Internet Explorer and 100% accuracy should not be placed in the same sentence.
Some here also claim that it´s the fastest browser, gee?
Konqueror is the most accurate browser for todays standards.
And safari is by far the fastest.
And when it comes to standards, internet explorer should be illegal.
So don´t preach internet explorer when it costs development companies billions a year to keep a usable standard in ie6!!!
2 days ago FINN.no started a campaign in Norway against IE6 via Twitter. It has evolved to become a huge national campaign supported by all major websites in the Country. All of Norways websites now displays a warning to IE6 users.
Read more of this at this blog post: http://www.cjohansen.no/en/browsers/norway_tells_ie6_users_to_shape_up
It looks like the Norwegian campaign is spreading to Sweden...
why IE will not end:
For newbies internet means "internet explorer"
Many sites that are developed in asp.net/c# technology does not work well in firefox/chrome.(redirect/ajax)etc
IE 8 is awesome! one day i was using it at my friend's place and i did nt even notice there was any difference between in terms of speed and usability.
Bundling- forget about the statistics market research companies provide about OS. If you take into account pirated usages of windows i think still 99% of people use Windows.
When people will get windows 7... the usage of IE will certainly rise... instead of your opinion that it will go down...
I do not understand why people don't like Microsoft. It is because of Microsoft computers became personal...