Internet Explorers Market Share has fallen to below 60% for the first time since the 90′s, since IE4 actually and everybody is wondering where is the market share going?
Is it going to Firefox, Opera, Safari or the trail blazing Chrome? Why is it slipping now? Is there suddenly an upsurge in the numbers of people peeved enough at the worlds most dominant browser that previous slow trickle of people jumping ship has switched to a torrent like rats deserting a sinking, burning ship?
The rats aren’t abandoning ship, they’re just learning new tricks and have a seriously short attention span.
Mobile is on the rise.
Sean P. Aune linked to browser market share statistics on TechnoBuffalo today which show that Safari has 4.72% of the market. What the stats don’t tell us is what percentage of that is from iPhone OS.
Of course, it’s indisputable that people are abandoning IE, as the always have for browsers such as Chrome but that’s not all of it. Chrome is not just stealing share from IE, I happen to know a large number of people who have converted from Firefox to Chrome.
It’s a fact, the more mobile browsers are used the larger a percentage of the market share they’ll acquire and it’s not from Firefox, Safari or Chrome that they’ll eat market share. It’s from Internet Explorer.
IE is a piss poor performer on mobile devices. Everybody I know with a Win mobile smartphone has swapped to Opera mini because of it’s performance, so Microsoft won’t make up any ground there. Android and iPhone (iPod Touch / iPad) have their own default browser and I doubt anybody would change to IE (even if they could).
The people who are leading the charge in mobile use are the people who, for the most part,are tech savvy. They are the people who already abandoned IE on other platforms but now are eroding IEs market share even further by accounting for additional browser usage in both the mobile and desktop environments.
Between the mobile users using multiple browsers, at home and now on the move as well, the countless hordes preaching conversion from IE, and the real activists who actively install other browsers on the machines of friends and family, the only thing that will keep Microsoft in it’s dominant position is it being the de facto browser on so many corporate machines and those of the less tech savvy.
There are two ways that Microsoft can start to regain market share which, in tandem, may have the desired effect.
Make IE killer on mobile devices. Buy Opera if they have to and rebrand it, but do something. Opera is already on the iPhone, where is IE? Then make IE sync with the desktop environment and everywhere else you run a browser. Make it seamless to go from IE on the iPhone, laptop, PC or Win Mobile phone.
By making it the best browser (mobile and desktop) it can be and syncing between all of a users internet enabled devices you create a lock in and familiarity that people won’t be inclined to move away from and will stay with if the browser is good.
Now, I do see the flaw in my logic, it’s all well and good to say build a killer browser and create an environment that users will not want to move from, but that’s not so easy to do when people already actively avoid IE and wouldn’t use it if you told them it would save their dying granny.
In order to get people to want to use it, Microsoft needs to dominate the news cycle and IE needs to appear fresh.
Microsoft need to shift the pace with IE development. It can’t be this slow monolithic drag that exists at the moment with infrequent betas and releases. There are times I’d swear I’ve seen continental drift move quicker.
It needs to be snappy. There needs to be an announcement of a new developer preview every week. Every new feature worked in should be a reason to hog the news cycle.
Google Chrome has been burning up the browser charts and not just because of how good it is. They’ve been rapidly adding new features and announcing every one of them as they get it into the beta. There is constant buzz about beta release after beta release (there was some today). It doesn’t matter if the news is as minor as a tiny speed increase in benchmarking, it’s being talked about.
IE needs to be in the spotlight (on all platforms) and not because of another security problem. IE needs to be seen to be vibrant and development fast paced.
As I said above, the rats have seriously short attentions span and are constantly been drawn towards the shiny pendants of Google and Mozilla’s news cycle as it constantly flickers in the sunlight.
Related posts:
