IE 8 Gains Fans Quickly, but Enough to Reclaim Lost IE Market Share?
IE 8 Gains Fans Quickly, but Enough to Reclaim Lost IE Market Share?
Posted 09/16/2008 at 9:06am
| by Paul Lilly
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According to daily browsing statistics provided by Net Applications, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 has garnered a fair bit of interest from users, with the latest beta increasing market share from 0.23 percent at the beginning of the month to now sitting at 0.41 percent. Still, Google's new Chrome browser (also in beta form) has been more popular, breaching the 1 percent mark early in September and now claiming 0.79 percent of the market.
Looking at the overall picture, Microsoft can't be too concerned. Net Applications notes an average market share for IE 7 and IE 6 of 46.38 and 24.08 percent respectively, which when combined with IE 8's 0.31 percent average, has Internet Explorer still dominating the browser wars with 70.82 percent of the market in the first half of September. In August, IE claimed a slightly larger slice at 72.15 percent.
Meanwhile, open-source stalwart Firefox also noted a slight drop since August, with combined market share taking a small dip from 19.73 percent to 19.38 percent. What's interesting to note here is that Microsoft's IE 6 still grabs a larger share than all three Firefox browsers combined.
Hit the jump and let us know what browser you're using.
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Kulmanari
September 16, 2008 at 3:17pm
N25PHILLY, check out these add-on's for FF3 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=oldbar&cat=all which are designed to make Awesome Bar work more like FF2's location bar. I personally don't mind the AwesomeBar, it comes in handy sometimes, but I can't really remember the last time I actually typed in a URL up there anyway...Bookmarks, Google and Yahoo FTW!
Anyway, I've been using FireFox from the start and will stick with it because it's a great browser, very customizable, has a great development community as an open source browser and gets updated/more features more often than IE and up until now had been the first browser to introduce new features like tabbed browsing, auto spell check, recovers tabs upon crashing/unexpected shutdown/etc (position on the page and anything you've typed as well!) and can save multiple tabs upon being closed.
IE gets all of its market share because as the above poster said, for the average computer user (who far outnumber us nerds) they know only of IE and it's just THERE on their desktop. Others are afraid of change and stick with IE while the rest of the user base is made up of businesses that can't afford to upgrade or don't want to spend the money (which is why we still have IE6 kicking around). It will be interesting to see how these statistics change several years into the future if Mozilla keeps FireFox up to standard, user friendly, secure, flexible and packed with useful new and innovative features (which is deathly important for businesses).
Unfortunately IE is here to stay, with only FireFox giving it a run for it's money at 19% marketshare, but the competition between these two titans and the other two browsers that make up the "Big Four errr is it Five now?" is good for consumers. I expect will see tons of speed enhancements, new features, better compatibility, increased security, become even easier to use and a whole lot more.
lostcause64
September 16, 2008 at 10:10am
I've been using various Mozilla/Firefox, currently Firefox 3, incarnations since the first time I read about them in MaxPC years ago. I believe it's a matter of getting the knowledge out there about alternatives to IE. I spent over 4 years at Best Buy as a pc tech/Geek Squad before moving to a corporate IT position, and ALL of my repeat customers from BB are using Firefox and they love it. Once they found out there was an alternative to IE, and that it was normally more secure, they were all over it.
The only reason, in my opinion, that IE has such a large user base is that most of those users don't realize there is something else, whether it's Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or whatever. They start their pc, open IE because it's there and nothing else is, and go on about their business on the internet never knowing there are alternatives readily available to them that won't harm their pc.
John
Try to be smarter than the object you're working with! It will make things easier, and might just save your life...
Talcum X
September 16, 2008 at 9:46am
I just hope the next iteration
will remember my Oracle password like 1.X did. Ever sence 2.0, it got amnesia and I cant force it to remember.
***********
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