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The Decline of IE and Firefox

blog.diffen.com

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#11
post #9

The stats are dramatically different for an enterprise focused website. As a counterexample, we show for our site: IE (all versions) is 52% of visits in the last month. IE 8.0 is 25% of IE traffic For the same month in 2012, IE traffic was 62% of all visits, so we are showing drops as well, but not to the extent we can ignore the needs of our IE customers. In short, know your customer. I don't like IE, but we like ou…

Wow, that is high.

I work in the edtech space myself, and supposedly the IE 8 stats are around ~10% for us, which is high enough to not ignore (unfortunately).

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#12
Those graphs are misleading. The first one visually indicates that Chrome currently has something like 100x the share of Firefox -- while the numbers indicate it's more like 3x.

You should at least have the base of the graphs at 0%. Probably even better to have to top line of the graphs at 100%. That'd give a truer visual representation of the data.

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#13

One question I have in mind: Will Safari be able to keep up, or will Apple become complacent because they're satisfied with being the best option for OS X? (Which they can achieve by being insiders on that OS, and not by being more awesome.)

Apple will need to be anything but complacent after Google forked Webkit to become Blink, now used by Chrome and Opera.

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#14
post #7
post #5

if i get this correctly these stats are from one site (diffen.com) - why is this relevant for anything?

I would give it at least a little bit of credibility just based on the fact that it's a consumer-oriented site with a wider audience than just us technical people. But I agree it's just one data point among many. Which brings up an interesting question, since we're on a site for startup founders: what kind of traffic patterns do you guys see on your websites?

My guess would be that among tech users, Firefox has gained over the past year, given concerns about privacy and Google's relentless slurping of browsing behavior from anywhere they can get it. That's the reason I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago; I now only use Chrome for Google apps.

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#15
Grande, you seem to be banned. Here's the comment

Are this unique visits or aggregate hits? beating Windows? How about showing us the real GA stats for Chrome OS? I help run a very popular health site and ChromeOS comes in below Windows Phone.

>Windoze

Okay, my bad for reading this 'article'

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#16
post #9

The stats are dramatically different for an enterprise focused website. As a counterexample, we show for our site: IE (all versions) is 52% of visits in the last month. IE 8.0 is 25% of IE traffic For the same month in 2012, IE traffic was 62% of all visits, so we are showing drops as well, but not to the extent we can ignore the needs of our IE customers. In short, know your customer. I don't like IE, but we like ou…

Yep, in the medical world (US hospitals, etc...) you're still looking at a significant portion of IE8 users, and even some IE7.

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#17

One question I have in mind: Will Safari be able to keep up, or will Apple become complacent because they're satisfied with being the best option for OS X? (Which they can achieve by being insiders on that OS, and not by being more awesome.)

Apple already has become complacent. They are by far the slowest browser to adopt new web features (including IE). For example IndexedDB has been around for like 4 years now and there are no signs of Safari implementing it. WebRTC is another where they are behind the other browsers.

Very rarely is Safari the first to adopt anything, because frankly they almost never are the ones working on drafts. I firmly believe Apple sees the web as "that thing we have to have but don't want to devote too many resources to."

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#18

One question I have in mind: Will Safari be able to keep up, or will Apple become complacent because they're satisfied with being the best option for OS X? (Which they can achieve by being insiders on that OS, and not by being more awesome.)

I only skimmed at the charts in the article, but I'd assume the underlying reason highlighted by OP is the only one that makes sense, i.e. that old Windows boxes get replaced by tablets (usually, but not necessarily, iPads), on top of smartphone sales; just less frequently for geeky users (who are more likely to be using FF or Chrome than IE). If so, "best" option for OSX seems somewhat moot: what really counts is be…

I have Gmail and Chrome installed on an iPad. HTTP links in Gmail open in Chrome if that browser is installed. Just FYI.

Re: The Decline of IE and Firefox

#19
post #12

Those graphs are misleading. The first one visually indicates that Chrome currently has something like 100x the share of Firefox -- while the numbers indicate it's more like 3x. You should at least have the base of the graphs at 0%. Probably even better to have to top line of the graphs at 100%. That'd give a truer visual representation of the data.

Whenever I see one of these graphs that is not zero-based, I'm forced to expend the unnecessary mental effort to decide whether the author is intentionally deceptive or merely stupid.

Usually, to save the expenditure of this increasingly rare resource, I stop reading.

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