In the last quarter,
Chrome,
Safari and
Opera all set new personal bests for browser market share with 4.63, 4.46 and 2.4 percent respectively. This period marks the first time Chrome has beaten Safari to third spot, while their collective prosperity comes at the expense of IE, which continues to hemorrhage users at a rate of 0.92 percentage points a month. Microsoft's 62.7 percent slice might still look mighty, but projections from Net Applications suggest it could shrink to below 50 percent by May of this year. Unless
something magical happens. You'll probably also want to know that Net Applications monitors incoming traffic to over 40,000 websites and generates a sample size of about 160 million unique visitors each month -- making the veracity of its claims pretty robust. One hidden sign of our collective laziness: 21 percent of
all users last quarter were still fulfilling their browsing needs with IE
6. For shame.
posted January 2nd 2010 5:09PM
I am surprised my CompuServe browser didnt make the list.
I'm partial to Firefox, but find the Mac version to be buggy as heck and crashes at least once a day. I really don't like Safari or Chrome - although they both seem faster than Firefox. I have no real issues with IE 7 or 8, I do hate that a large percentage of Govt websites and a lot of sites like banking websites still seem to only work well with IE.
I do hate sites like Engadget that won't cater to people who use IE 6. When I'm on a project as a consultant a large majority of big corps still force people to use IE 6 and that's not going to change just because sites like Engadget want to make it so. Every since the new design, I can only check this site out when I'm home.
@malexandria
Reason's why you dislike Webkit....? I missed that part.
@Wesscoast
Don't like Google Chrome because it's too basic and I never could quite figure out how to work with the tabs and bookmark feature.
@malexandria
If you like Fire Fox and you are on a MAC then give Camino a try. It's basically a mac centric version of Fire Fox from Mozilla. It's my favorite browser and its not as buggy as FF from my own experience.
@malexandria : Engadget's comment ranking system hasn't been working in IE8 for awhile...
Too bad my business web portals still require IE to do my job.
Yes, burn for all you're worth, Internet Explorer. I since long classified all of Microsofts browser versions dead to me, the only thing it's good for is to download Chrome or Firefox.
I don't honestly think I've started IE for months now, and I intend to keep it that way.
@Eruanno
So PC users are getting smarter. No wonder Mac market share keeps going up.
"One hidden sign of our collective laziness: 21 percent of all users last quarter were still fulfilling their browsing needs with IE 6. For shame."
To say this is to be short-sighted.
Reason #1: Many people who get on the internet are non-technical and would not know the difference between IE and Firefox! I have known many people to whom I have to say "click on the 'e' icon on your desktop :(" IE works well for most of them whose only purpose of having an internet connection is to check e-mails, light browsing and probably video chat on skype.
#2: Many companies are still enforce IE6 (including where I contract which has ~25K employees). The reason? The admins shove IE down our throats because they say its the easiest browser on which group policy and security can be implemented because of tight integration with Win XP (Yes, my company did not upgrade to Vista too!)
#3: Many intranet portals like our SAP Peoplesoft, Outlook web access and Sharepoint work properly only in IE and while I love FF, there is no way I can use it on most intranet portals on which I depend every work day. (This will not reflect in Net Apps stats count I know, but still one more reason why I am forced to use IE 6)
While 2 of my companies in which I contract for have allowed limited FF or Safari support, both have altogether prevented anyone from installing Google Chrome because it was found to be even worse than IE in terms of security and policy in a tightly controlled corporate network.
The good news: Atleast we will be able to move away from IE6 to IE8 when Win 7 is rolled out to my companies in 2010.
@Xvi
Great comment. However, my company does not place any restrictions on what browsers I can install on my computer. I've got firefox, chrome and internet explorer.
Similarly, I have to use internet explorer for all intranet portals as none of them work on Firefox. However, they do work with Chrome but I have to sign-in twice (first initially using my domain account) and then through another pop-up box which asks for verification. Intranet on Chrome works great. I'd say try installing Chrome on your computer through a USB stick or something and see if the Intranet sites work.
Chrome really is an exception browser. I am impressed. I've tried Safari but did not like it.
There is one small issue with Chrome though. Im in a habit of double clicking the top-left portion of the screen in Windows to close applications. When done with Chrome, it actually sizes the window instead of closing. Wierd. Guess Google is still a little Apple inspired.
I use Safari and Firefox on my MacBook. Safari is much faster, but I like the Dev tools in Firefox and Firefox displays some sites better than Safari. I do some web development, so I have to try to make sure my sites work with all browsers. IE is always the most frustrating to work with, so I see it as a great thing that there is competition to push the browsers to follow standards and just be better in general.
IE 6 may live on for another 5 years. A friend of mine works at a larger city agency. All their computers still use IE 6. The users are not allowed to install software and the IT do not upgrade the computers. I think software only changes when they buy a new computer and then just for that one.
@alFaDark
I would rather be a troll than a moron who compares web browsers 24/7 for a living, How interesting jackass get a life your obviously a self absorbed muppet who thinks he knows everything
Opera has nearly 3%? Really?
I see the occasional Chrome user about, but are there really people using Opera?
@Gregorian
Yeah, thats about what it shows on all of the sites I maintain too. I don't use it on a daily basis myself but give it a try and its easy to see why. I'd say its the 3rd best overall rendering engine behind webkit (safari, chrome, epiphany, Konquorer) and gecko (firefox) and its quite a bit better than IE's horrible excuse for a browser. I can't for the life of my figure out why anybody actually uses IE other than it comes with windows. Thats the weird statistic to me considering how far behind and buggy it is.
@Gregorian
I too can't understand how Opera has hung around. I had some friends that strongly promoted it a few years ago and have had it installed since then, but I have never found it to be better than Firefox or Safari. It's always nice to have another option and I would love to see it become a strong competitor, but I just have never been able to find a reason to use it. Who could these 3% be, Opera devs who browse a lot?
I've been regularly using Chrome for about the past 6 months. Switched from Firefox and I love it. However, I still do use Firefox occasionally for some special surfing if websites dont open correctly but most of the time, Google Chrome is my primary browser. Really works nice.
I have not used Internet Explorer for the 5-6 years. Even though I love Microsoft Windows product and their Office suite, their browser and web services really lag behind their competitors.
Firefox is better than IE... IE had its run, now you will be relegated to nothing.. It was good while it lasted. IE is crap
I'm still using IE8 and happy with it. I do have Firefox installed on both my machines but I don't find it that attractive. I gave Chrome a try, didn't work out either. Don't even get me started on Safari.
That pie chart totals to 101%. Engadget, what happened?
Chrome > All
Why does IT at my company insist on using Internet Explorer?
unless someone is tech savvy, or knows someone who is, they wont even contemplate using anything other than what came with their windows based pc - which in most cases is IE. It's simply a case of market penetration. All the nerds in the world can never equate to 60% of the pc/browser users worldwide... not anytime soon.
Guess the IBM Monopoly can't bail MS out on this one.
Go Chrome.
do you know, why the Internet Explore become #1? i think because it is a included program from Microsoft, isn't it?
http://handphone.tk
These are averages for the whole world!