IE Market Share Drops to Lowest Level in Years

Cultural Mosaic writes "Browser market share figures for September were released yesterday, and the numbers showed a big dip for Internet Explorer, as it dropped to just 82.10%, its lowest market share figure in years. Ars Technica notes that 'it's no surprise that Internet Explorer has been losing ground steadily over the past couple of years. There have been no significant innovations in the browser since XP SP2 was released over two years ago, and most of those were security tweaks.' Firefox grew from 10.77% in June to 12.46% while Safari jumped to its highest figure ever, 3.53%. I wonder how the release of Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 later this month will change the game?"

Re:Site stats

[rolfwind]

I think IE would be even lower, but a lot of businesses and school have IE and "force" it on them.

My college has IE on all of it's terminals, so I guess, at times, I am a dot in their corner, although I consider IE less than useless w/o tabs and with pop-ups.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Queue up the anecdotes

[Tom]

should've posted this:
        Windows 3196755 93.5 %
        Linux 81396 2.3 %
        Macintosh 68457 2 %

Just to illustrate that this truly isn't a "geek site". 93% dumbs. :-)

It's a shame that...

[PurifyYourMind]

...this number may go back up when Vista is released and/or if/when Microsoft pushes out IE7 as a Windows Update.

It would be interesting to see...

[Tarlus]

If somebody were to produce a large-scale statistic of people who use IE because they prefer it over Firefox (or other browsers), I think we'd see much larger numbers in favor of Firefox instead of IE. (Not to sound like flamebait, but this is true.)

It should be noted that IE's share is still as high as it is because it's the default. A large number of PC users aren't even aware that there are alternatives to IE out there, or even what the advantages/disadvantages of different browsers would be, so of course the slice of the pie for IE will be the largest.

Click here to crash Firefox

[Animats]

Try this:

• Go to Entrust [entrust.com].
• Click on "Login".

Firefox goes to 100% CPU utilization, hangs, then crashes if you close the window. That's with the latest Firefox and the previous one. (Some really wierd stuff happened with the previous version of Firefox, including typing going into right-to-left mode for English.)

Re:Click here to crash Firefox

[Animats]

(Apparently it's a Java bug. If you disable Java, the page loads, and complains you have Java disabled.)

Re:FF 2 doesn't seem to have fixed the memory leak

[Com2Kid]

I used to think that FF had memory leaks (and I also have a Toshiba Portege Tablet PC!), but it all turned out to be due to plugins.

Google's plugin for FireFox is the worst offender, but others do it as well.

This add-on [mozilla.org] detects a lot of leaks, but only of one particular type. It can give you a good idea if you have a plugin that is leaking emmensly though (as the Google plugin does...)

I *love* the Google plugin's features, but it leaks memory so fast... It does a damn good job of giving FF a bad name though!

Usage stats for hotels.com

[Anonymous Coward]

These numbers match what we are seeing at hotels.com. Needless to say we get a bit of traffic:

(For 9/1 - 10/11)

• IE: 79.56
• FF/Win: 8.64
• Safari: 3.77
• FF/Mac: 0.84

Safari and FF usage goes up every month, and has been for at least the past two years.

Firefox memory usage...

[pavera]

Ok, I've seen so many posts on this article about firefox using an inordinant amount of RAM... I've been using firefox exclusively since like .9 or something...
I have a browser open on my laptop 24x7.... I've never had firefox crash, and I've never seen it use more than 100MB of ram... just now for kicks I did a small test, I've only got 3 tabs open, my email, slashdot, and msnbc... firefox is using 52MB of ram, so I opened IE opened up the same 3 sites, and wow look at that 47MB of ram...

MS can probably get away with 5MB of savings because they are using already loaded system libraries for a bunch of stuff, that's the advantage they get by integrating the browser into the OS... Now, if people are really going to switch browsers for 5MB of RAM then Firefox is doomed.

Some real world numbers

[porkThreeWays]

I work at a municipality in FL and manage the web server for the main public website. Some months we are as low as 65% IE visits (that month had 23% firefox). I like looking at our stats because I think it's a pretty good mix. It's geared toward the general public and isn't a tech site, building site, music site, but a site for everyone. Mind you this is up to a million visits a month (somewhat large city).

Re:Site stats

[HeroreV]

Actually, WebKit is considered to be superior...

By who? You? Considering that you made up random stupid shit about Gecko [wikipedia.org], I really wouldn't be surprised if you were making up random stupid shit about WebKit.

Re:Probably not much

[Zarel]

Well, middle click or ctrl+w is what most people use to close tabs. I prefer the close tab button on the side, as it's harder to accidentally click, and stays in one place. Of course, if you truly want close tab buttons on each tab, just install Firefox 2, which does have them.

If Firefox is getting slower and crashing more often, you probably have some strange extensions installed. Uninstall them. There's nothing IE7 has that Firefox (Well, Firefox 2 at least) doesn't come with.

Don't hammer nails.

[eddy]

Presumably, they're not [only] caching files, they're caching already processed data structures (parsed documentss). You disk cache only knows files. If you want to be fast when going to the previous page for instance, that is what you have to do.

What memory problems?

[jotaeleemeese]

I have a Firefox Window with 20 tabs opened (mostly /. postings I want to check today). That has a foot print of 146MB

I have 2 sessions of IE, that has a foot print of 46MB

Let me open 2 more of each one, pointing lets say, to Google and the BBC.

FF is now, 147MB
IE is now 75MB

So

FF is 147MB/22 sessions ~ 6MB/session
IE is 75MB/4 sessions ~ 18 MB/session

Now, feel free to throw your anecdotal evidence, but do not tell us that there is a generalized problem unless you can quote serious sources on this regard.

In this little nonsense example it seems that firewall manages far more efficently memory once it is running.

I am pretty sure that launching one session of each would be favourable to IE (well of course, all the MS's kitchen sink is already loaded), but that is not all what memory management is all about.