IE down below 90% marketshare

Mick reckons Microsoft don't care, but I reckon they should. MSNBC/Forbes reporting today that two reports have come out showing IE has slipped below 90% marketshare. It's just the beginning, unless they do something about it. Some of us worked our asses off to get them to 90%! I've even got some schwag to prove it.

Comments

Oh, they care, I can assure you...

[MattyT]

Yeah, Mick's on smack; they care.

Why else would they reignite the IE team now? I mean we've been asking for many features (dear God, how long have been wanting transparent png support!?) for years, I refuse to believe that it's only just now that they could free up resources.

Incidentally, I see nothing wrong with this - a business _should_ respond to competition. But, sorry Mick!, to believe that they've just decided to address IE issues, just now, not at all because of solid competition, is IMHO naive.

[Richard Giles]

MattyT - They've had the IE team working on it since at least last October. Have a listen to Scoble in The Gadget Show News podcast from a couple of weeks ago.

Having said that, Microsoft will be worried. I'd guarantee that market share is well below 90%. I've been keeping an eye on a few of my server logs, and Firefox pops up very often. The average over the last 6 months at Gadget Lounge is 10% itself, that's the average over 6 months.

My guess is the media and analysts are a couple of months behind.

Here's an interesting one to watch. Tim Bray updates his Browser Market share graph every week. Admittedly, he's a bit of a unix geek (now working for Sun), but discusses XML and related technology, which covers all operating systems.

[MattyT]

They've actually had people working on the IE code for even longer than that - XP SP2 had many security-related IE fixes. My poing was that _development_ has only ramped up recently - and even October _is_ recent.

Take a look at the Tim Bray graph. October was after his first recorded "cross-over" point (in August) and a looong time after Firefox began making inroads in IE's market share...

If MS were really listening to customers requests about improving IE (png support, standards compliance, tabs etc), then they would have worked on the product years ago.