IE Usage Share Falling ... But IE 8 Grows the Fastest of All

I know for a fact that I'd never, ever open up IE if it were not for my companies intranet.  I bet a lot of others would be the same way.

In the last two weeks I've switched from Firefox to Chrome and I don't think I'll be going back.  I don't like the way Adblock works on Chrome, and I have some issues with Lastpass that were not present on Firefox, but I trust they are being ironed out.

Paul, two questions:  What is your opinion on adblocking (this could be answered in the mailbag if you wish) and question two: In the Wininfo article you say IE will have features that it would be hard for other manufacturers to emulate.  Why would it be hard for them to emulate them, and will they have a very big effect on the surfing experience?

I'd like to hear your commentary on AdBlocking as well, Paul.  

Quite frankly, I switched to Firefox several years ago as a result of frustration with IE6 (and then 7).  IE8 is rather nice, to be honest, but I keep using Firefox because of the wonderful AdBlock Plus.  Otherwise, I'm starting to find myself getting frustrated with Firefox -- high memory usage, buggy, chunky scrolling (at times), hanging on page loads, etc. -- but the AdBlock keeps me coming back.

Thoughts?  Do any of the "other browsers" have decent AdBlocking???

I've tried to switch away from IE 8, but I always go back.  There's some sort of comfort in using IE that the other browsers don't offer.

When I'm at work, our firewall blocks ads.  When I'm at home, I wish IE had a good ad blocker.

I happen to use IE a lot mainly because of exchange and other Microsoft web apps. Also my home server remote desktop only works on IE. I don't really see a bug difference with IE VS FireFox VS Chrome, but I will say that I use chrome also.

The main reason for chrome is the no clutter on the screen. Also it's nice to be able to sing on to my google voice and my gmail at the same time as they are two different google accounts. One thing I do miss from IE when I use chrome is favorites. In IE I could name a favorite email then any time I needed email I could just type email on the address bar.

Seriously IE8 grows automatically at the expense of older versions of IE...and you highlight that it grows the fastest?

IE8 will install automatically with Windows update on XP or Vista/2008, you have to un-check it.  It comes, in the US, as the default on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.

Chrome and Firefox are consumer choices.

I'd love IE9 to improve enough I don't feel the need to install Chrome.  I hate having to install the OS, and then download and install software to replace stuff that comes with the OS.  It feels like it's just one more thing for me to deal with.  Now, I can accept something like Windows Live Essentials.  I mean, I wish it came with the OS, but it doesn't.  But it's MS, and it's going to be integrated with everything else.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate choice.  Before Vista, I loved my linux, and I was an early adopter for Firefox (0.1 Phoenix baby!).  But at the end of the day, I just want a computer that works well by default without the need for additional stuff.  Part of the reason I avoid Macs.

With so much discussion involving the rendering engine, I hope they aren't ignoring the UI.  Chrome's UI is a big part of what I like about it.  It's FAST.  The UI is wicked fast.  It's simple, slick, and get's out of the way.

Maybe with Windows 7 being so successful, they'll take this opportunity to refresh the UI.

"Thus, Chrome's change was about 10 times greater than IE's, from a percentage basis. It's a bigger deal."

So if you are now measuring on a percentage basis, why this?

"In April, the individual browser with the highest growth rate was, in fact, the latest version of IE, Internet Explorer 8. (IE 8 growth was 1.08 percent, compared to .6 percent for Chrome.) And of course, IE 8 continues to be the most-used browser version overall as well. So I guess it's not all bad news."

Chrome's change was 10% as you pointed out, but IE  8's 1.08 percent growth to 27.66 of the market is only a 4% increase.

I really could not care less which browser is higher, but it is very interesting watching you spin the numbers.  Changing the measurements to fit the story you want to tell. Adding the qualifiers when it seems to suit your point, ignoring them when it does not.

You would have a decent argument about the 1% loss of IE "holding steady" if that was a one time event, but it is not.  It is yet another data point in an obvious trend, and in this case, a new low.  That is certainly not "holding steady".  Are ipod sales "holding steady"?  They dropped by about 1% from Q2 2009 to Q2 2010. I think the pattern shows they are falling.

Would you give the "sort-of" qualifier to another company if their numbers were not exact.  Does this mean that Firefox "sort-of" hit the 25% mark?

BTW Chrome 5 beta just dropped and it FINALLY has Kerberose support!!!!!!

Question to the group as a whole:  What browser innovations are you most waiting to see?

Alright...

Obviously this is like trying to get someone to change their religion....

"Again, Adobe should be allowed to develop Flash and Flash-based products as they see fit. If developers want to use them, and if users want to use them, they should be able to."

You are trying to turn an issue with many shades of gray into a black and white one.  It's just not that easy Paul.  

Part of the reason that so many anti-malware, anti-phishing, anti-virus, web-filtering and firewall technologies exist is that the web and the browsers and the OS are all open.  One of the reasons so many PC optimization tools exist (and are needed) is because of the openness of the OS and the potential for App 'A' to conflict with the OS  or with App 'B'.

Apple is trying to stake out a new model.  It should be allowed to live or die based on what the people Apple is pitching the model to (customers) have to say.  Not based on whats said by third parties who want to ride the backs of Apples hard-earned success to financial success of their own.

"Obviously this is like trying to get someone to change their religion...."

In the sense that you shouldn't bother?

But I digress. Don't want to turn this into a religion debate on a TECH blog of all places.

yoshipod has it right.

"I really could not care less which browser is higher, but it is very interesting watching you spin the numbers.  Changing the measurements to fit the story you want to tell. Adding the qualifiers when it seems to suit your point, ignoring them when it does not."

Yep. Many times you stated that Apple's increase in OS marketshare is because "it's easy to grow when you're small". Apple, in your sudden conversion to percentage-based growth has DOUBLED it's marketshare since you declared "the mac market is ending".

Use absolute numbers or use percentages, but changing the metric to suit your biases is a sham. In any event, these monthly variations rarely tell the tale. The real story in browsers is the long, slow, still-continuing slide of IE.

But seriously, who really cares these days? Use whatever you like. The things should be standards compliant; after that it is a matter of preference.

As for the Adobe/Flash dustup, you object to Apple controlling its technologies and products, and yet you also object to Microsoft opening up and you've encouraged them to be as closed as possible:

" And honestly, why would Microsoft even license Exchange to Apple? Are they crazy? Between this and all the other ActiveSync licensing, they've effectively ceded the smart phone market to their competitors. What's next? A license to run Windows applications on the Mac?"

Apple is actually doing exactly what you advocate Microsoft should do. Make up your mind.

To answer Ocean's Question:

With the cloud becoming a reality, even though I am more of a local machine user, I want my browser to blend seamlessly with my Operating system.

Like say I am in Internet Explorer, but with a simple click of the button I am at my computer, clicking on documents, then I decide I need to check something on the web quickly, I just type the web address into the address bar, and bam I am there, no opening 2 things, just seamless integration. And with online-documents this integration would make it even easier, it would almost seem like you would not have left your local computer. I really wished they would start to do that with the coming of the cloud and all. Seeing as no OS maker was ever this innovative and forward thinking, but maybe with Google Chrome OS and its integration with Chrome OS, or maybe with Steve Jobs iAd and his magical vision we will have such a thing. I mean as we all know Microsoft could never do this kind of thing, they are not innovative enough. So all we have left is Google, Mozilla, and Apple.

I bet that if Google was able to abstract away well enough the hardware accelerated features, they could, over time, create platform agnostic APIs that developers could use to take advantage of hardware accelerated features on different platforms.

Ultimately, they would need to write the code for each platform, that is true...but that is the point of the library to begin with.

The developers (maybe writing plugins or whatever) wouldn't need to worry about the target platform if the library writers do a good enough job with the abstraction.

As an IT guy I am I saw the latests news of the new Chrome beta that is '35% faster than the previous version' along with ludicrous videos of how they measure speed compared with the speed of a bullet, etc. So I downloaded it and started my favorite pages, side by side with IE8, expecting to be wowed. But no, pages loaded as fast in both browser, even IE8 finished faster in some of them. So what do I care if Chrome is so fast in sunspider test if that doesn't represent average user browsing? But I checked Chrome further, giving it a try, and still, no support for multiple tab thumbnail in Windows 7, which I use A LOT in IE8, Chrome still forces you to have that extra toolbar if you want access to your favorites, which I also use a lot, then page scaling, printing.. not yet there, still forces itself into a resident program to 'check for updates' no matter what you do to prevent it, Google Docs spreadsheets are still slower in Chrome than IE8 when you have lots of data!, so I went back using IE8, again. I have tested IE9 and I've never been so impressed with a new browser before. Beautiful fonts, plays video and apps like a champion. I hope they give it a great GUI. My approach to web browsers is practical, if it is fast and easy to use for what I do, then I keep it. Numbo jumbo benchmarks do not impress me.

I have serious doubts about Chrome and any Google products. I installed Chrome a couple of months ago to try it out and really haven't used it since. Then last week while working in Photoshop on my system, a strange thing happened...I got a popup in my system tray from Google Chrome telling me a new version was available! To me this was an indication that Google has some application running in the background of my system that I've been unaware of. Considering Google's penchant for data collection, I've removed Chrome from my system entirely until I have the time to check this out a little more.

At the moment I'm happy with IE8 and Firefox and will continue to use those as my browsers.

@ckeledjian I agree.  When on Windows I use IE8 most of the time.  It just works, it has fewer web site/rendering issues.

Speed wise we are spliting hairs at this point.  Its only when you go to a site that really needs speed, like say google maps and you zoom in with a mouse wheel, then you can start to see a difference between the latest chrome and IE.....but its not like IE is slow, chrome is a tad faster.

All of these benchmarks, java testing, acid tests etc, dont mean anything if the page renders wrong for the average user.

On the Mac Safari is the best, but even IE8 has fewer problems with web pages.  FF and Chrome are behind their Windows versions on the Mac and not even worth using for the most part.

@Paul:

"And even if they were, the way they'd have to go about getting at platform-based hardware acceleration functionality would be completely different (maybe not even possible) on every platform. So that's a lot of platform-specific coding, making each version of Safari, or Chrome, or Firefox, essentially a different product. The point being that hardware acceleration is not, and cannot be, a "WebKit" feature (in the case of Safari/Chrome). Those companies will have to implement that themselves, and differently on each platform."

Actually, that's not entirely true, if they used the same API set on each platform - an impossibility right now, much to the chagrin of Adobe (re: Flash).  panache gets it right:

"The developers (maybe writing plugins or whatever) wouldn't need to worry about the target platform if the library writers do a good enough job with the abstraction."

That's the point of making managed API's cross-platform.  The app developer shouldn't have to worry about how the hardware acceleration is done on the target platform.  A well-written API set should do hardware abstraction for the app developer.  The developer would just make calls for hardware acceleration, and the API should translate the calls to a more native instruction set, based on the platform it's running.

Now, Webkit isn't running on any kind of high-level managed code surface that has features for hardware acceleration, but if they used a cross-platform API set that did have that feature, and the hardware abstraction was done correctly, they could write once for hardware acceleration and run on any platform that the API exists.  All they need is the proper libraries that support all of those features.  Currently there isn't anything close to .Net for hardware acceleration features, but it also isn't as widespread as Adobe's plans for Flash, and Flash only has hardware acceleration for 2D objects (it actually supports DirectDraw in limited fashion on Windows).  Each respective target platform would have to make calls to the hardware in different ways, but that would be the job of the managed API's on each platform, not the app itself.  So hardware accelerated surfaces would likely use DirectX (DirectDraw, Direct2D, or Direct3D depending on the type of surface) on Windows, and whatever 2D acceleration is offered in alternate platforms, such as Core Graphics in OS X.

Does OpenGL do any good 2D acceleration?  If so, that'd probably be the best option to cover *nix OS's.

So in conclusion, if Webkit (or any other rendering engine, for that matter) was coded in a higher-level, cross-platform API that does full abstraction of hardware acceleration features on every platform, you could still call it "a Webkit feature", so long as Webkit developers chose to utilize those API features in their code.

"IE Usage Share Falling ... But IE 8 Grows the Fastest of All"

.... apart from Firefox 3.6.

??

@shinnyNugget you are correct on all points.  I dont think Apple cares about market share numbers and they will never get above 10%.

They dont care about business (customers) hardly at all.  In fact with them making more money on iPhone/iTunes last quarter over computer sales, I am not sure if their future will be ever be computer focused going forward, especially with the iPad.  A year from now their iPhone/iPod/iPad/iTunes sales could be double what their computer sales are.

You can easily run a all Microsoft Computer with MS apps and use a iPhone/iPod/iPad/iTunes with ease.