Browser market share - 2007
After warning about the misuse of statistics, I’m likely to find myself hoist by my own petard now, but here goes…
It’s over a year since Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was released so I thought it was time to revisit the issue of browser market share, especially after the dramatic take-up of IE7 in the first few months.
However, first things first. Before getting to the detail of versions it’s worth looking at the overall market share for the browsers themselves. Over on Net Application’s Market Share site they’ve got this graph for November 2006 - 2007. You’ll see that whilst there’s some variation over the period, in general there’s not that much movement - Internet Explorer under 80%, Firefox hovering around the 15% mark, Safari reaching 5% and the rest less than 2%. The statistics collected by TheCounter for November 2007 show a roughly equivalent situation.
There’s a gradual shift from Internet Explorer (IE) towards Firefox and Safari that appears to be continuing from their earliest figures in December 2005, but only a few percent a year. Interestingly if you switch over to the operating system trends then you’ll see that there is an increase in the use of Macs of about 1.5%. That covers a fair proportion of the change, especially as Microsoft stopped developing IE for the Mac.
When it comes to the specific versions of the browsers the most significant development is the slow-down in the take-up of IE7, especially when compared to the use of the latest version of Firefox. The increases in the first few months (9% from November to December 2006 and 7% from December 2006 to January 2007) is of the same scale as the total increase from January 2007 to November 2007 - 11%.
Microsoft made the upgrade part of its automated Windows Update system, but it hasn’t been classed as critical. Presumably we’re now left with the users who either don’t use this facility or who ignore the optional upgrades - the majority are using Windows XP which supports IE7, so it’s not a matter of incompatiblity.
There is also the factor of the corporate IT policy, where the reasons for upgrading need stronger justification and have greater repercussions (e.g. support, training, etc.). For example, the US Department of Transportation is reported to have placed a moratorium on Microsoft upgrades.
So after sifting through all these figures, what’s the real significance?
For those of us developing web sites it’s the decline of IE6 into obscurity that we’re looking for. It’s only with version 7 that Microsoft have fallen in line with the standards that other browsers have supported for a number of years, and there seems to have been an interesting number of bugs to deal with as well. So having to deal with IE6, and until recently the different problems with the earlier versions, has added to the workload of developing and testing web sites but without increasing the features available.
There’s also the issue of whether what influences real users in their choice of browser. At a recent Bristol Skillswap there were a number of lively/provocative discussions about this subject. Looking through these statistics though, I can’t see that the majority of users make any conscious decision. Even in the refuge of the alternative community, the Mac, we find that most people stick with the first browser that is installed with their system - in this case Safari (even though it hasn’t been able to access online WYSIWYG editors & until the last month or so it hasn’t been possible to restyle buttons in forms).
That could mean that the balance could shift when/if mobiles and other devices start to be used to access the web in meaningful numbers, as Opera is far more dominant in that market.
