[TEH INTERNETZ] Internet Explorer usage falls below 50%

[Resurrection]

Internet Explorer usage falls below 50% - Oct. 6, 2010

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- For more than a decade, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been the predominant tool the world uses to connect to the Web, but that's no longer true, according to a Web analytics firm.

StatCounter, which tracks Internet data, said that IE's share of the browser market fell to 49.9% in September. More people still use IE than any other single browser, but the combined market share of non-Microsoft browsers now outpaces IE.

Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) once commanded more than 90% of the browser market, rising to dominance by preloading IE on Windows computers. That sent Netscape, the browser king of the 1990s, tumbling into irrelevancy. It also prompted antitrust suits against Microsoft in both the United States and the European Union, the latter of which forced the company to offer Windows users a list of browsers to choose from when they set up the operating system.

That, along with the fact that other browsers have outpaced IE's innovations, has led Mozilla's Firefox, Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Chrome and Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) Safari browser to eat away at Microsoft's market share. Internet Explorer's use has been falling steadily over the past several years.

"This is certainly a milestone in the Internet browser wars," said Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter's CEO. "Just two years ago IE dominated the worldwide market with 67%."

Still, online data tracking is a tricky science, with various methods returning different results. Some trackers record browser information based on clicks to a network of client Web sites, which is the main method StatCounter uses. Others use toolbars, ISP data or even surveys to collect the information.

Though the trend is clear across the board, other data trackers show that Internet Explorer is still firmly on top of the browser world. For instance, Net Applications -- which is frequently cited by the browser makers themselves -- shows that IE's market share sits much more comfortably at 59.7%.

Microsoft did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Recognizing that its market share was falling fast, Microsoft recently made the decision to embrace many of the changes and innovations that its rivals produced. Internet Explorer 9, which is currently in public test mode, adds support for an emerging Web standard called HTML5, along with a handful of other advances that will help it keep pace with its fast-improving rivals.

Interesting news this... Around 98% people worldwide still use Windows...
People have warmed up and become more tech-savvy and are looking at options...

Good to know...

[slikrapid]

It also prompted antitrust suits against Microsoft in both the United States and the European Union, the latter of which forced the company to offer Windows users a list of browsers to choose from when they set up the operating system.

which shows just how deceptive these so called antitrust suits actually are - they make a suit over a rather irrelevant issue (a free web browser), yet forget to extend it to all additional non-essential OS elements (the non-uninstallable ones), not to mention the OS itself which not only maintains a monopoly but also as a result brings major profits to the company (unlike free browsers), destroying competition (or reducing their chances to progress) with various methods

the main issue with laws/regulations nowadays is that they are being designed by various shady think-tanks set up by or financed by the big industry (large business companies), which then lobby (which is nothing more than 'sophisticated' bribery) for these acts to get passed/accepted at the legislative/governmental/global level, thus maintaining or furthering their monopolist positions, which prevents smaller companies and market newcomers to reach any significant market share - even if they manage to make a breakthrough, they simply get bought by the bigger companies and integrated into their oversized structures

take a look at just about any market and you will notice how it is being controlled by a handful of major players who control not only the game itself, but also its very rules, as mentioned above

[SealLion]

What I'd like to expand upon is the very well known facts that it is the large corporations and companies, not just Microsoft that have monopolies withing thier respective corporate domain, but there are of course many, many other companies. Most of us know that companies like Walmart are super-big....having a monopoly not just on the number of department stores, but also in being so corporately sized to be able to manipulate prices. Even setting the price that they would like to place on items that individual and independant sellers of their own products would like to have sold in Walmart stores.

With companies like Microsoft, MS, like slik points out, pretty much have monopolies over the type of OS installations as a result of strong agreements with companies like Hewlett-Packard.
When there exist agreements such as this, the consumer doesn't really get to pick and choose. Yes, of course, the consumer does get to pick and choose after they partition their HD, but the point that I'd like to make is that of the initial option to choose the type of OS installation.

It may be true that there's a lot of companies that are choosing alternative OS installations such as Red Hat Linux and such, but that is only after a period of research on their part to determine for themselves what they'd like to work with.

As long as there isn't much opportunity for the consumer to choose, you'll always have monopolies.
This goes even for other companies such as Boeing, for example. Boeing is a very large company and being as big as a company as it is, it can squeeze out other competitioin from smaller companies. It may be sized up against other large companies from Europe, for example, but the point is that corporatism is pretty much the wave of the future.
Corporatism isn't a very good thing because it portends to a lot of bad things for consumers: Lack of choice, squeezing out smaller or mid-sized companies that may have alternate technologies, ideas, prices on products, alternate products that may actually test better than products that are presented as testing good when in fact, they may only test mediocre. This could be theorized with larger companies that have a stronger association with governmental organizations and affiliations with other organizations.

And when corporatism is in bed with government, you know that the results favor $$$$$$


Sorry, I may have gone of on a tangent for awhile there with respect to a couple of examples that I presented; however, the basic point is that with most large corporations having either strong affiliations or corporate-insider representation, the results are not necessarily favorable for consumers of the public in general.



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[Instab]

yes that's a problem.
however another problem is that people don't qüstion things as much as they should a.k.a. lazy which makes it easy for many companies to do things the way they do it

[desodorante]

Unfortunately what slikrapid and SealLion said is correct.
But in the software market this is more of a question of available resources, investment and innovation.
I work for a major software factory, I've heard coworkers working for top tech brands and they all complaint about the same: lack of documentation, lack of time, some mid-management jerk lobbying for some obsolete software, absent top management and so on.
We all have great ideas, cool things that could make the product different, but it all comes down to what someone that barely knows the product decides its best.
Most developers cycle through projects so none of them are familiar with the code, and given the lack of time they constantly improvise solutions.
I've seen features added to a program one week, that were overridden by a feature doing the opposite next week; I had to talk to Project Managers, Revenue analysts, Functional Analysts, Developers, CTOs, and even CFOs about how their "feature" for the next release will simply crash the system, or allow any user to perform actions of an admin...and I just do the testing....
So, Microsoft lacks innovation because it is one of those companies were management is far away from knowing the(ir) product(s), so they keep selling the same crap with a few tiny twists because they do not know what their customers really want, so they are not interested in investing hundreds of hours of development and investingating next gen apps.