Internet Explorer market share falls below 50% - Google Chrome is the new rising star

[Win2Win]

We all knew this was going to happen, but who would’ve thought it would this year? Especially at the heels of positive reviews Internet Explorer 9 has gained after the Beta version was released just last month. Web analytics firm StatCounter, yes the one that offers free stats tools to bloggers and websites, have released [...]




We all knew this was going to happen, but who would’ve thought it would this year? Especially at the heels of positive reviews Internet Explorer 9 has gained after the Beta version was released just last month.

Web analytics firm StatCounter, yes the one that offers free stats tools to bloggers and websites, have released a report saying that Microsoft Internet Explorer’s share of the world market of web browsers have fallen below 50%.
Internet Explorer's share of the world market has dropped to 50% (Click to zoom)




According to StatCounter’s press release:

Microsoft IE fell to 49.87% in September followed by Firefox with 31.5%. Google’s Chrome continues to increase market share at an impressive rate and has more than tripled from 3.69% in September 2009 to 11.54% in September this year.

Two things were the culprits: 1) Regulatory actions in Europe which mandated Microsoft to offer a choice of browsers instead of just Internet Explorer whenever they install a copy of Windows and 2) Google Chrome’s increasing popularity, over taking Apple’s Safari in June this year.

If other experts and stats firm agree, we may have just witnessed another moment in the web browser war history. The first one was the death of Netscape in 2007.

Is Internet Explorer next? Or will the IE 9′s stable release save it and win back converts to the other browsers? Well don’t look at me, I’m a loyal Chrome user since it came out. How about you?

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Content from...

[grahamw48]

Because it's perceived as insecure ?

I haven't used it for years.

(Mozilla Firefox for me)

[les_taxi]

Firefox for me too love it

[Dedworth]

Firefox for me too love it

Yeah I've used it for 6 years or so seems to do the job

[KeithD]

Firefox is just as insecure if you check the main security site.

[JimOttley]

I use both Chrome and IE8 I prefer Chrome most of the time but some sites still require IE so I still use it occasionally.

The IE9 preview looked promising from the javascript performance side of things and they had finally gotten to the point where it pretty much was passing the ACID 3 test.

If the next IE can do this I might move back



I mean open 30 tabs at a time without killing the machines performance.

[KeithD]

I can open 100's of tabs on IE8 .... But then I have a 6-Core system.

I use Opera for some sites.

[JimOttley]

I can open 100's of tabs on IE8 .... But then I have a 6-Core system.

I use Opera for some sites.

IE8 starts to die on my boxes once I have more than 10 instances open with maybe 6 tabs each or just a couple of instances with 15 or 20 tabs.

Admittedly my own machines are getting a bit long in the tooth but I even have trouble on my works relatively new Dell Latitude E6500 bought last year, that's running 64 bit Windows 7 with 4GB of RAM, same problem on my work PC that I use for development.

I'll need to try opening lots of IE8 tabs on my T61, it's an older laptop but it has 64 bit Win 7 and 8GB of RAM, maybe it's just the RAM and swapping but it feels more like an old fashioned system resources issue like it's running out of handles somewhere.

Reason I'm using Chrome is purely for the speed of the Javascript interpreter, much much faster rendering than the current IE.

[stevewool]

lost me , but i am happy

[Terpe]

lost me , but i am happy

Ditto!

[jimeve]

Me three, rendering,tabs sounds like a brickie having a bad day

[les_taxi]

Firefox is just as insecure if you check the main security site.

I like the look and feel of it,I have it customised and when friends have seen it they want it too.

Why would I want hundreds of tabs open at once? the most i ever have is 5 or 6 and thats just coz i forgot to close them.

Reguarding security I don't give a rats ass As mentioned before if you have experience it's unlikely you are going to fall victim,Norton works for me and i'm a big user of newsgroups

[somebody]

IE 9 looks very good from the versions i have seen running and Chrome is good too. Firefox seems to have gone off the boill a tad but has such a large range of plugins.

Have to say I normally have 4 Browsers on most of the Devices I use and Firefox the least used then Opera then IE then Chrome for most surfing but still a lot of corporate sites and Wenb pages bulit into devices which you browse in seemed to work best or sometimes only on IE..

Of course IE 9 has to be a game changer as they are making sure it cant be installed on XP...

[raynaputi]

I use Chrome..

[JimOttley]

Me three, rendering,tabs sounds like a brickie having a bad day

Sorry jimeve, Terpe and Steve, techie speak The boss understands and my reply was really for him

Why would I want hundreds of tabs open at once? the most i ever have is 5 or 6 and thats just coz i forgot to close them.

Les, I am confronted on a daily basis with the need to do vast amount of research in order to develop software, I am constantly asked to write code for new devices or to make an application look less boring and none of this stuff is constant or static, new versions of software programming interfaces come out ever other day it's a real PITA sometimes

I was recently asked to write an application that

1) interfaced to any scanner in the world
2) made the scanner scan individual pages and save to jpeg
3) OCR'ed (Optical Character Recognition) the barcodes embedded in the delivery notes that were being scanned.
4) compressed the results so that we didn't eat vast amounts of disk space on the server
5) integrated with my document management system so we could retrieve the delivery notes as proof of delivery for inclusion with the invoices (as attachments) at the point in time that I generate the Invoice emails on each batch run.

One might imagine that all this should be easy nowadays, however in spite of there being standard scanning or image capture interfaces i.e TWAIN, WIA, ISIS, finding a standard library that would allow the appropriate level of control was extremely difficult, indeed after much experimentation with TWAIN and WIA code (reasonably priced) it became clear that it was not do-able reliably, TWAIN and WIA are flaky very flaky.

ISIS however is very good but all the interface code libraries available cost thousands of pounds and also require runtime end user licences which was not commercially viable for us.

The primary tool for this kind of research is Google 20, 40, 80, web pages open at a time? Easy and I still won't have concrete answers.

20 pages of MSDN class library references trying to find a half decent example to implement a crappily documented programming interface, I do that every day more than one time a day.

It is extremely frustrating as most of my time now is spent trying to understand code that is supposed to make my life easier but is so poorly documented that it actually makes it harder :(

That's why some of us need hundreds of tabs open at the same time, the answers are all over the place



Jim

[les_taxi]

Fair point I was just speaking as an average user not a programmer

[joebloggs]

Les, I am confronted on a daily basis with the need to do vast amount of research in order to develop software, I am constantly asked to write code for new devices or to make an application look less boring and none of this stuff is constant or static, new versions of software programming interfaces come out ever other day it's a real PITA sometimes

I was recently asked to write an application that

1) interfaced to any scanner in the world
2) made the scanner scan individual pages and save to jpeg
3) OCR'ed (Optical Character Recognition) the barcodes embedded in the delivery notes that were being scanned.
4) compressed the results so that we didn't eat vast amounts of disk space on the server
5) integrated with my document management system so we could retrieve the delivery notes as proof of delivery for inclusion with the invoices (as attachments) at the point in time that I generate the Invoice emails on each batch run.

it sounds exciting
jim why didn't you go into game development

[KeithD]

...or just someone else's code.... everything already been done code wise .... it's how you put it together tha gives a different user experience.

A little off topic, but I was helping with work on an NHS computer system for Admin in the mid-80's (CPM & machine code ) ..... if you've ever wondered why government IT goes sooooo far over budget it's because the programmers finish the system in the allotted time ..... then one manager says, can you add this, another says, change the look of that, another says, don't like that take it off, even though a week before you'd added it for another manager.... and round and round you go with no one in the NHS actaully in charge to say STOP.... ENOUGH.

[joebloggs]

in the mid-80's (CPM & machine code ) ...

your showing your age scouser Keith

you cant compare cpm with vista
cpm you didn't even have proper directories, if i remember correctly you had a few user areas and all the files were mixed up

[JimOttley]

it sounds exciting
jim why didn't you go into game development

Wish I had the skill Joe, it's a niche real time area of programming where you need to understand the GPU in detail and you probably also have to understand proprietary Graphics libraries intimately as well.

Once upon a time it was possible if you were a generalist but now you have to seriously specialise if you want to get into games and a huge part of the real development is done by artists now not programmers.

Real time state machines at the bottom of the stack, I can do that stuff but the high end graphics are hard

You asked the question in past tense and I did not really answer that, my career in IT has been pretty random, I really drifted from one money making opportunity to another, if I had been focused then maybe I could have got into the interesting stuff but I wasn't, the thing I really missed out on was a chance to get into CRM development in the late 90's I had some friends that made a fortune in that field.

[JimOttley]

...or just someone else's code.... everything already been done code wise .... it's how you put it together tha gives a different user experience.

A little off topic, but I was helping with work on an NHS computer system for Admin in the mid-80's (CPM & machine code ) ..... if you've ever wondered why government IT goes sooooo far over budget it's because the programmers finish the system in the allotted time ..... then one manager says, can you add this, another says, change the look of that, another says, don't like that take it off, even though a week before you'd added it for another manager.... and round and round you go with no one in the NHS actaully in charge to say STOP.... ENOUGH.

Yeah it's mostly Lego these days that's why one spends such a huge amount of time researching on the web, a lot of the bricks don't fit properly

You are so right regards government IT, I was one of the lead developers on a system to manage the Scottish budget back in the early 90's, I worked for a small Glasgow Consultancy and we wrote a great system for the Scottish Office and I supported it right up till 2001 I think.

However we specialised in government IT and we had our fair share of nightmares, it was always due to lack of control of the specs, I was involved in a debt system for Barnsley council (early 90's again) where we had change requests coming in to change the change request from two weeks previous, some of the girls working on the council side ended up so stressed they left their jobs or went on long term sick, I left eventually and started my own business after I told my boss he was doomed He wasn't he sold the company and the products as vapourware within 2 years and made a lot of money

The problem is they don't have strong management in the government sector that understands the detail of IT projects and the impact of incorrect specs or radically changing the spec mid project.

[JimOttley]

...or just someone else's code.... everything already been done code wise .... it's how you put it together tha gives a different user experience.

I should add that I am a control developer that is what I really enjoy I have loads but I never commercialised them properly.

I do use other peoples Lego bricks but I do also build my own Lego bricks much more fun doing that but not when you are under time pressure constraints and deadlines you rarely have the time to roll your own :(

[les_taxi]

I remember learning basic programming on my vic 20 lol

It was too much when machine code appeared

[joebloggs]

I remember learning basic programming on my vic 20 lol

It was too much when machine code appeared

vic 20 those were the days
i made some money back in the early 80's, when did some 3.5k machine code games for the vic-20

[les_taxi]

I remember buying something like popular/personal computing weekly and typing in gosub or goto 18 then poke 32

*I would type for hours and save it to cassette tape,I also remember my 2 year old son knocking the mains lead out after i had typed for hours

Then voila my state of the arts colured blocks (spaceships) would take to the sky and i would blow up more erm blocks (spaceships)

This was cutting edge and drew gasps of wonderment from all who saw it lol,Those really were the days.bring back the bitmap brothers

[les_taxi]

vic 20 those were the days
i made some money back in the early 80's, when did some 3.5k machine code games for the vic-20

What games were those I may have played them?

[joebloggs]

What games were those I may have played them?

i'd blow my cover if i did that les
but you must have bought some mastertronic games les ?



do you remember any vic 20 ones ???
they sold them cheap by the 100,000s

http://www.guter.org/mastertronic_st...best%20sellers

one of the games i did is on this list

[JimOttley]

i'd blow my cover if i did that les
but you must have bought some mastertronic games les ?



do you remember any vic 20 ones ???
they sold them cheap by the 100,000s

http://www.guter.org/mastertronic_st...best%20sellers

one of the games i did is on this list

Those were the days but sadly I never had access to a machine in those days apart from helping my mate write a payroll system on his spectrum

[JimOttley]

i'd blow my cover if i did that les
but you must have bought some mastertronic games les ?



do you remember any vic 20 ones ???
they sold them cheap by the 100,000s

http://www.guter.org/mastertronic_st...best%20sellers

one of the games i did is on this list

I am slightly in awe Joe, 5K OS with 1.5K required by the OS and the rest in machine code I'm impressed.

Closest I got to that was writing a couple of hundred instruction spaghetti code programs for Hewlett-Packard RPN calculators.

[joebloggs]

I am slightly in awe Joe, 5K OS with 1.5K required by the OS and the rest in machine code I'm impressed.

Closest I got to that was writing a couple of hundred instruction spaghetti code programs for Hewlett-Packard RPN calculators.

yes 3.5k and that 3.5k included your user defined graphics, sound and all your code !

it was a challenge to try to use the minimum bytes possible and also i use to count how many clock cycles a routine took ! for example to scroll a screen, with 1mhz processor , the number of cycles a instruction took counted

i was very young in those days