IE10 falls below IE9 in market share (opens in new tab)

> Interesting (and slightly sad) that Firefox isn't gaining

I'm guessing this has more to do with Chrome being easier to integrate into enterprise/group-policy-based deployment than anything to do with the choices of individual users, though. The only place I see Firefox on a PC in a "computer lab" or "thin-client" setting any more is when those PCs are also running Linux.

Yes, IE10 is the first IE that'll auto-upgrade to the next version, an evergreen browser.

>I'm not too familiar with IE (heh), but is the upgrade mechanism better in IE10? That might explain the higher drop.

I think that's the point. Users are actually upgrading from 10 to 11.

Yes, this is a good thing for everyone. You can see the same pattern when Firefox shifted to faster upgrades, the people on the old regime decayed slowly, while people on the new regime transitioned quickly.

Its not even a new phenomenon, IE 9 plunged quickly (well, for an IE version) when IE10 started getting uptake, falling below IE 8:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+tablet-browser_version_pa...

If you want bad news for Microsoft, it's not in the rankings of their previous two versions, but the fact that their decreasing market share is spread across so many versions, each of which is a bit pitiful when compared with a single version of Firefox, with even the last version of Chrome and iPad Safari showing up Microsoft's efforts:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+tablet-browser_version-ww...

That was my immediate thought, the IE9 population reflects the non-upgraders that kept IE6 relevant long past the point it should have been.

IE11 was bundled with windows 8.1, which fixed a bunch of idiotic features/annoyances in win8, so people had more incentive to upgrade.

It is still interesting though. It shows what I think we all know that Microsoft's most vicious competitor is Microsoft and it means that you have a few users who upgrade everything and many many more who never do.

I don't think IE10 has a better mechanism. If memory serves you can't upgrade past IE9 on... what, XP? Vista? I forget which. But point being, IE9 is the end of the line for some of the Windows versions.

The size of the sample is irrelevant for its accuracy. That seems odd and statistics can be counterintuitive, but consider how a random sample of a few hundred people is enough to estimate who will win the elections within a few %.

What matters - beyond a certain reasonable minimum size, which is a few hundred - is if the sample is random and unbiased. Both NetApps and StatCounter are far, far above the minimum size, so the only questions are the other factors.

But more important to realize here is that they measure different things. StatCounter measures pages viewed, NetApps unique users. There is no reason to expect those to match up.

Exactly. Statcounter puts IE9 at 3.6% and IE10 at 4% which matches actual stats for most websites. It is true that in some countries IE has a much higher share than reported, but the aggregate is correct.

Net Applications was taken off the wikipedia page about browser market share because their information sources contained fabricated data. They even admitted in their technical documents.

I wouldn't trust any blogspam that references the data, it's so out of align with other sources that reference billions of pageviews.

Net Applications stats doesn't match at all my websites stats, not even close.

>Yet, unlike the situation with languages, we have a really hazy idea of what browsers are used. //

I use FF27 on Ubuntu, no wait I use FF28 on XP, no IE9 on Win7, no it's Safari, no Opera on Wii, no Opera Mobile, no ... it's all of them. But then I'm a special case, however I imagine that a lot of people use various browsers - home, work, mobile, etc..

As with language just having general stats is no use - what's it matter that Chinese is so popular across the world if I'm selling canoes to Amazonians?

IE7 matters if your users use it and you want to make sure they have a good experience. It's not so relevant that most sites don't have high IE7 numbers, what does your site have; what will that support costs, what revenue will that support gain.

> These figures make no sense to me. The fact that we do not have meaningful browser statistics makes no sense either. Why is it so hard to get meaningful figures and why do the figures from the 'experts' vary so much?

It is hard to get a random sample of internet usage. There is just no easy way - how do you do it?

In theory you would pick a random router around the world, and pick a packet going through it, and if it comes from a web browser, count that. Then normalize by traffic amount in that router. That would, in theory, give the right result with a large enough sample size. But no one (except perhaps the NSA) can do it.

On the other hand, there are at least two companies that pretty much know the truth - Google and Facebook. A huge percent of people visit those sites daily, so much that they don't need to randomly sample, worry about bias factors, etc. - they can just look at the data they have. So internally, they have the numbers. But apparently they consider that information valuable, and do not share it.

The problem is that not all sites see the same kind of traffic. These figures are from NetMarketshare which gets most of their data from a modest number of large corporate sites[1] and uses their estimates to adjust traffic country by country. Their numbers skew heavily towards IE, so I'm assuming that their sites must see a lot of business users. If you run a site which was aimed at home users you'd see a much great representation for WebKit and I'm sure sites like HN, ArsTechnica, etc. have a higher percentage of the latest browsers.

I have never worked on a site where the breakdown is close to NetMarketshare's figures. The ones from Akamai have been much closer, particularly internationally:

http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_dataset.html

1. http://www.netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#Methodology

> Does IE7 matter any more, or IE9? Do people with those browsers almost expect sites to look wrong?

It depends what sort of sites they use the most, and just the sheer number of sites on the Internet, most of which have been around for a long time, means that only the newest ones tend to be incompatible (and as a data point, HN is usable with IE6.)

NetApps measures unique users.

StatCounter measures page views.

Those can be very very different, if some users browser more or if some users use more than one browser, both of which are probably true.

So it is very possible both are accurate. Or that both are wrong.

I'd be surprised if more than 50% of computer users (55% IE * 90% Windows) changed their default browser. The vast majority of computer users are non-technical people, and they use the default browser unless someone changes it for them.

But they also browse (far) less compared to people who use alternate browsers. So statistically, your sites have a much higher chance of registering Chrome and Firefox users than IE users.

Add: OTOH, I think StatsCounter, Clicky and Wikimedia stats are more useful. They represent the "active" Internet population better. The ones who are more likely to come to your/any website.

Most here are forced on IE 8 because PeopleSoft doesn't work on anything greater. It sucks. Luckily, we installed Chrome as a secondary choice for those who want it. And I work in IT so I install whatever I want :P

Sometimes it is corporate policy, meaning if you are on a work computer you can't manually update it yourself.

There are still some legacy applications that require a specific version of IE, or specific IE functionality, in order to work correctly. The cost of "fixing" the application to work correctly may cost too much or be too much effort.

Of course, there may be others who may have no idea how to update, no doubt there is a whole group of (older) users where auto-update may be turned off and no idea the update process exists.

I know how you feel, please sign the petition: http://www.saveie6.com/