No more Microsoft Internet Explorer for the 2010 soccer world cup
The only web browsers gaining more market share by 2010 is everything except Internet Explorer, with Mozilla Firefox leading the pack. If you are planning to be at the soccer world cup in 2010, planning to deliver your web content to a 2010 audience, then these trends are very important. They influence what technology decisions you need to make today to deliver to your 2010 audience.
So lets project current browser usage trends over the last year up until the start of the world cup in South Africa, June 2010, to see how that future audience will browse the Internet.
This is what I found (my data source data from Net Applications):
- Internet Explorer - still the largest market share holder but now commands only 61% of the market (it drops to below 60% in the following quarter). A far cry from those days of 95%.
- Mozilla Firefox - commands over 25% of the browser market. A full quarter of your potential audience.
- Alternate browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari) - 1 in 3 people will use these browsers.
How does this influence your technology decisions:
- Must work on all browsers - If you don't you get to lose 1/3 of your audience. Relatively easy if you ensure that you follow W3C standards and use AJAX abstraction libraries.
- Forget anything that only works on one browser - Really this means forget anything that only works on Internet Explorer. If you decide to target only Internet Explorer and succesfully draw 6 million customers remember that it could have been 10 million. Your business and marketing people will kill you, and rightly so. So no Microsoft Silverlight for you.
- Forget about new technologies. I'd say if you are doing video go with flash, its proven. If you do want to innovate use native video (It will be in Firefox 3.1 and is part of HTML5, other browsers will follow soon). There is really enough space for you to create an innovative experience with AJAX and existing technologies that work now.
Caveats, there are always caveats. I've based this data on the current average monthly changes in market share. Many things can happen to change these both up and down. Events such as:
- Microsoft might start innovating (or marketing) in this space - this will be neutral or slow the drop, its unlikely to result in clawing back of market share. People who use Firefox, Chrome or Opera make a concious decision to use the product. They would thus need to undecide, which is seems highly unlikely.
- Many more people move to cellphone usage - our figures are based on desktop browser products. But certainly we don't expect any positive shift for Internet Explorer, since the browser engine that dominates on cellphones is Opera's (and maybe Safari with all the iPhone users).
- Google Chrome gets used by more the 1% of the market - the current data is so low that I wasn't able to project this in any useful way.
- We'll see new versions of browsers over this time - The market share figues may stabalise or the trends shift slightly. This will leave us in 70/30 split between Internet Explorer and the alternatives. I don't think that changes your decisions much, its still means you could have had 10 million users when you landed 7 million.
See you at the world cup!
- dwayne's blog
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Innovation changes everything
A very well wriiten post with some useful information and updates regarding internet browsers..With all the new features browsers such as Mozilla,Opera and Google crome are fast replacing the old microsoft internet explorer..Keep up the good work buddy....
Lots more options
There are so many new browsers out there that are so much more feature rich than internet explorer that despite Microsoft's enormous lead, eventually they will lose much of their user base to these other browsers. Mozilla especially is doing some great work with Flock and Google's Chrome is great too!
"Rendering Engines" rather than "Browsers"
Another way of looking at this is that there are really about 3-4 "major" HTML rendering engines. "Internet Explorer" is "Trident (MSHTML)". Konqueror/Safari/Google Chrome are "Webkit" (KHTML). Mozilla uses "Gecko". (Opera has their own which is apparently referred to as "Presto").
Gecko and Webkit are both used in numerous other applications and specialty browsers as well. Trolltech/Nokia's "QT" toolkit apparently even bundles it, and there appears to be a GTK/Webkit project as well, so expect to have quite a few web-based specialty applications using it in the near future alongside general-purpose browsers.
As a rule, it seems like if you stick to proper, documented standards, things tend to work just fine in everything but MSHTML, and even MSHTML has been getting better about standards-compliance. Avoiding proprietary or platform-specific techniques is probably at least 90% of making sure one's site is usable by everyone.
Stick to standards
Great comment. Yes sticking to standards and avoiding platform-specific techniques is a very good approach.
Wikipedia has a nice page of Acid3 test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3 which highlights the rendering engines mentioned.
I'll disagree with the statement that Trident (IE's engine) is becomming more standards compliant. The data for Acid3 compliance is pretty bad compared to the other browsers 21/100 compared to the next lowest 81/100 for KHTML. Its a test I know and conformance at 100% doesn't mean everything. But while all other engines have made substantial inroads, often starting at a much better point of conformance, Tident has only increased its pass rate by 7 tests. Not a very good indicator of becomming more standards compliant in my view.
I love soccer, and love Firefox, but your data are wrong
Net Applications has IE's market share at 71%. Just click through to the site and you can see it. I like your thesis but believe you're starting from the wrong data set.
Nothing wrong with the data
71% in October 2008 (its dropped almost 1,5% for Novermber 2008). The 61% is the projected market share at the start of the 2010 soccer world cup. So nothing wrong with my data I'm afraid.
continued fall in 2009
January 2009, research firm NetApplications reported that Microsoft's share of the web browser market had dropped to 69.77%. Today the number is down to 67.55%. Google Chrome use has apparently picked up a bit, although the browser still has just over 1% of the market. And Firefox continues to pick up new users every month. The browser now represents over 21% of the market. But one of the most interesting factors is the rise of Apple's Safari web browser, which is now used by more than 8% of computer users.