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?"

macs

[minus_273]

does that mean OSX has at least 3.57%..

Site stats

[From A Far Away Land]

I find that my site gets about 45% Firefox or Mozilla hits, not counting my own of course. At about 130 unique visitors a day, that's not a big enough sample to mean the numbers of 12% are wrong, but definitely demographics play a large role in browser type. As Taco has pointed out, nearly all Slashdot readers use a Mozilla/Firefox browser. Sorry Mac fans, Safari isn't that big yet.

I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Just the other day you said IE's market share was up [slashdot.org], and now it's down? But... but... you both have statistics! I don't know what to believe.

Firefox probably won't increase

[baggins2001]

I already have users who want to try IE7. And I am already hearing some negative feadback about Firefox being slower than IE. So I'm beginning to think that the worm has turned and we are going to start seeing an increase in IE again. I'll have a hard time recommending Firefoz again unless they can find a way to decrease their memory footprint. Of course I'll still use it along with Opera, but I won't be recommending it to anyone for awhile.
Used to be there was a clear performance difference, now I don't see it as much.
Security wise I think there's still a benefit to Firefox, but most users don't see security as that big of an issue. They think we're just making shit up when it comes to security differences between the browsers.

We'll see after IE7 is released...

[Frosty Piss]

As the "code bloat" of Firefox approaches that of IE, and IE 7 is released with tabbed browsing, better security, and all the other whiz-bangs "stolen" from Firefox and Opera, we will see a slowing of growth in Firefox's market share. Public acceptance / perception of IE 7 will have a big influence over Firefox's continued market share growth.

Re:Queue up the anecdotes

[Tom]

Since you asked for it:

        Firefox Nein 2001451 58.5 %
        MS Internet Explorer Nein 1059985 31 %
        Opera Nein 179838 5.2 %
        Mozilla Nein 89402 2.6 %
        Safari Nein 31450 0.9 %

This is October data. As you can see from the numbers (we're talking 3.5 mio hits here), this is not a tiny site. As you can see from the site itself [battlemaster.org], it's not a Linux, Free Software or Firefox site. I've got plenty of AOL users, hotmail users and other "dumb", average, random Internet users as players.

History: Firefox was at 50% in January, 46% in October last year, 34% December 2004 (my oldest data).

Firefox memory use

[CAIMLAS]

Unless firefox drastically decreases it's memory use (or simply more effective management, so it doesn't interfere with user behavior), or at the very least keeps it fairly constant from a current release, I can't imagine Firefox 2.0 being much of an improvement, to be honest. That's got to be the biggest gripe about it (and only then at about 40 or so tabs). I've not compared it to IE, however, and I can't imagine MS would release a product of superior quality in regard to memory use, so...

Other than that, I've not had a single problem with firefox in months, even in Windows. Every couple months I'll encounter a shoddy page with horrid gobs of javascript (myspace profiles, I'm looking at you), which is the only thing which has caused a fuck-up since I-can't-remember-when.

IE vs. FF

[delirium of disorder]

For those complaining about firefox's memory footprint, I suggest you read this [mozillazine.org]. In general firefox will use more RAM only if you have more RAM available; you WANT more of your memory to be used for caching to speed things up (as long as it doesn't result in swapping). That said, there are a few real bugs in plugins, and probably the main codebase too. They are hopefully being worked on. By the way, here are my referer browser stats [no-ip.org] for October so far, for anyone interested.

Re:How the new releases will affect market share

[RAMMS+EIN]

Also, never underestimate the power of bundling. MSIE 7 will come with Vista. Many people will find it an adequate browser and not take the trouble to switch, even those who did switch from earlier MSIE versions. Version 7 is much, much better.

No IE7 for me

[SniperClops]

I'll be using firefox as IE7 won't be released for windows 2000 [com.com].

Re:IE vs. FF

[Ant P.]

Why does FF have its own gigantic memory cache in the first place, instead of letting the OS's disk cache do its job properly?

Re:I'd like to say ...

[Dionysus]

What can IE's competitors use to differentiate themselves from IE (to the average user) in Vista-land?

Security. I have friends (non-geeks) converting to Firefox because of the security issues in IE. They didn't even know about tabbed browsing until I pointed it out to them.

Re:Site stats

[walt-sjc]

A site I work with is not a slashdot / geek demographic. It's a combination of government use (primary), non-profits, education, and business (in that order of heaviest to least % of users.) This site gets on average a million page views / day. Looking at the month of September, 76% IE, 16.3% firefox, 1.9% safari, Opera 0.2%. Back in March, it was 81% IE, 6.3% FF, 2% safari, Opera 0.2%. From my viewpoint, FF has jumped HUGE in that time frame. (Yes, the numbers don't add up to 100% - unknown and other browsers are the remainder.)

Re:I'd like to say ...

[starsky51]

What can IE's competitors use to differentiate themselves from IE (to the average user) in Vista-land? Extensions. I tell friends about increased security, they don't seem too phased. I tell them about tabbed browsing, XP groups their IE windows so they don't much care. However, when I tell them about ad blocking and mouse gestures and show them what a few greasemonkey scripts can do, they see some worthwhile benefits. Microsoft like to offer a solid inflexible interface, because that is what newbies are most comfortable with. Firefox extensions entice users who want to move away from this rigidity.

Similar stats here.

[j741]

I work for a small computer company which mainly deals with people who simply use whatever the default happens to be. In today's computers that means Internet Explorer. So I thought I'd look at the stats from our company website for the month of September and I was somewhat surprised to find the following:

  MS Internet Explorer - 2714 hits - 74 %
  Firefox - 822 hits - 22.4 %
  Netscape - 37 hits - 1 %
  Unknown - 33 hits - 0.9 %
  Mozilla - 25 hits - 0.6 %
  Konqueror - 17 hits - 0.4 %
  Opera - 16 hits - 0.4 %
  Lynx - 2 hits - 0 %

Over 22% of visits to our company website were using FireFox. This from customers who typically just accept the defaults. Quite surprising to me.

Re:methodology?

[briancnorton]

Or I could have just looked under "help" and seen that I really DON'T trust the methodology. It's quite limited, and there is no stated error about random distribution of survey points. (i.e. if they are examinging the OSDL web sites that may overrepresnet firefox for instance)

Re:"dropped to just 82.10%" - JUST ?!?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

OK so 80% is a giant share of the market, but 20% of the market is also far too much to ignore and that means websites are gonna have to cater for the non-IE browser. That means conforming to web standards which means anyone with the skills and desire can write a standards conforming browser and fight for their share of the market on even ground with IE, Firefox, and the rest.

IE may still be the dominant browser but the days of "this browser requires Internet Explorer" are long gone. And thank God for that.

Re:Site stats

[BlueStraggler]

This is an amusing comment for me, because I run on a slower PPC Mac, and I avoid Firefox because it is so much slower than Safari. Just goes to show, I suppose, that impressions of "slowness" have many different causes.

Still using IE and don't intend to change

[archcommus]

Please, do not take my post as flamebait. I introduce general points. Many of you are geeks. Admit that, it's okay. Many of you are developers, too. Many of you are enthusiasts and like to tweak and customize out the wazoo. For all of you folk, browsers like FF are great. They're secure, customizable, not Microsoft, everything you could want in a browser. Now consider everyone else in the world. And actually, this even includes myself, even though I AM an enthusiast and a slight geek. You have IE7, given to you automatically via Windows Updates. No hassles required. It is already on your system, offers tabs and good security, and works without a hitch. It is integrated into the OS so it opens faster and does not introduce any problems. I have used IE6 for years and never once got a virus or spyware because of it. So please, tell me, why should I switch to Firefox? Answer: I shouldn't. IE7 may not pass some Acid2 test or whatever, but I am a user, not a developer. IE7 is secure and does what I need and there is really no reason for me to use any other browser.

Re:Firefox probably won't increase

[mcrbids]

As far as reasons to switch:


1) it was the "cool", "edgy" thing to do
2) it has tabbed browsing
3) it was faster than IE.

There's one more: the "Back Button".

Let's say you're typing some big-assed form with 37 textarea fields. You spend 20 minutes typing meaningful stuff into those 37 textarea fields, and press submit.

And let's say you did a stupid somewhere on the form, and the website rejected your form, and you decide to go back and fix it. So you press the back button.

Using IE: You get to type everything in, all over again. aughghgh!

Using Mozilla: everything you typed is restored, and you can fix the stupid in field #21.

It's this feature alone that I'm personally responsible for several hundred Firefox installs! Users of our web-based application are informed on login that they really should be using Firefox, and that due to the cross-platform nature of our application, we code to Firefox before checking in IE: GET FIREFOX.

I have almost 50% Mozilla in my logs, followed by IE and then Safari.