I was just about to post a little something about the Mozilla FireBird/IE browser battle, when I noticed this: Microsoft to Quit Web Browsers for Mac.
All I can say is “wow”. First Microsoft decides not to provide anymore upgrades to IE without a whole OS upgrade, and now this. Sup with that? Seems to me they’re saying two things — Apple’s market share isn’t worth the effort, and the Windows world is locked in to IE, so they’re not pressed to improve it. Pretty bold. From what I see in my site trackers is that 34% of my visitors are still on Windows 2000, 38% are on XP, and 19% are on older versions of Windows. I know my logs aren’t a scientific sample, but clearly many people are not jumping on the latest OS. If that many people haven’t upgraded to XP yet, does Microsoft really expect them to keep using a dilapidated browser while much better ones are readily available? I have a feeling that they may regret these IE decisions. It’s so easy to switch your default browser, that it seems like Microsoft would do everything possible to keep people locked in to IE.
(For some other views on this see The Disturbing Trend in Browsers and The Reason Monopolies Are a Bad Idea)
So what I was going to post was that I’m going to start keeping a record of the browser share for my site. When I first wrote about Firebird on June 2nd, 90.5% of my visitors were using IE 5 and 6. For my own amusement, I’ll post the browser share at the bottom of one of my weekend posts each week.
For this week: IE 6.x – 54%, IE 5.x – 21%, Netscape 5.x (Mozilla) – 23%
I’ll also track Gizmodo’s stats, for a look at a much broader sampling: IE 6.x – 58%, IE 5.x – 12%, Netscape 5.x – 29%
Comments on this entry are closed.