February 18th, 2008Where Have All The IE Users Gone?
According to the stats for this site, 72.4% of all visitors to j2fi.net in 2007 used some version of Internet Explorer. The majority had used IE6, but this has changed over the last few months as more people have upgraded. At the same time, FireFox was used by 24% of my readers and the remaining browsers fought for the remaining percentages.
However, in the first six weeks of 2008, the numbers have been quite different. FireFox is beating IE by such a huge margin that I’m wondering what caused this mass exodus of internet users.
Looking at the Source
After examining the main sources of traffic to this site, I learned something semi-interesting. StumbleUpon users are 98% made up of FireFox users. Regardless of whether these people are on Windows, OSX or Ubuntu, only 2% of these net-savvy visitors want to use something else.
Readers who come from Google are typically split 40/40 between IE and FF, with other browsers making up the remaining 20%. Those from Technorati are predominantly IE6, while those from Yahoo tend to use IE7 and older versions of FireFox.
While it comes as no surprise that readers from social networking and social media sites are made up predominantly of FireFox fans, what does surprise me is the speed at which IE was overtaken. However, it seems that this is just a small piece of the internet pie, which is still predominantly IE.
According to Market Share, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues to hold three quarters of the internet while FireFox is in a distant second with almost 17%. Since this goes against the puny sampling I have with my stats package, as well as those of fellow bloggers, so I looked for the reasoning behind the discrepancy. Using the Market Share Worldview (which is not free), we can see that most countries are split in a similar fashion … with IE taking upwards of three-quarters the market. One country where this is drastically different is Japan, where 90% of users are content with IE6 and 7.
Well, What The Deuce?
It seems we can blame high IE numbers on those who just don’t upgrade or otherwise enhance their computers. These people are perfectly content to use their systems with the very same configuration they had when buying it, or after installing whatever software they might have done when subscribing to the internet. And who can blame them? If something works, why replace it?
The broswer people use to surf isn’t something that I think about very often, but after seeing the drastically different numbers on my stats page, as well as Nick’s post about IE6 users, I decided to add a bit to the discussion. I prefer Opera, myself, but so long as something works for us, there’s really no need to change.
That said, I’m interested to know how Market Share goes about getting their numbers. The numbers do seem quite skewed towards Microsoft’s products.
Have you noticed the same type of change on your sites? Does FireFox actually have a larger market share than the marketing reports show? I’m curious to know your take on the situation.
Maybe people finally realized how much trash IE is, and how much better and safer and more customizable Mozilla Firefox is
If people actually realized this, maybe there’s hope after all!
It really depends on who your reader base is. I have educational sites that are visited by 85%+ IE users and 50% are on IE6 (more fool me for not optimizing my sites for them!). Automatic updates are supposedly underway, so maybe by the end of the year, IE6 will be right down their with Opera and Safari!
I do think webmasters could make more of an effort to alert their users to the IE upgrade, but it seems they’d rather push Firefox in the hope of earning a few pennies from Google.
Hey Yuni, if you’re talking about IE6 then I’m in complete agreement with you, but let’s not paint IE7 with the same brush. I used it solidly for over a year and reluctantly switched to Firefox after IE7 suffered a series of freezes in December last year.
IE7 has a few things going for it that Firefox doesn’t (yet), e.g. full page zoom (not just text), overlapping toolbars, better printing and tabbing features (by default). The best thing about IE7 in my opinion is its speed and integration with Windows (at least Vista, anyway).
Firefox on the other hand is, as you say, extremely customizable and very stable (which is why I’m currently using it). The number of extensions is fantastic.
I don’t want to get into another “which is better” debate since this post is about IE6. So, to follow up from my previous comment, here’s a quote from the IE7 downloads page:
Let’s hope they sort out IE7’s reliability problems quickly!
FireFox certainly has a lot going for it, and I agree that it’d be nice to see all the IE6 people update to something a little less troublesome, but I still think that Opera is the best thing out there
That said, I wish I could get head office to update their machines to something other than IE6.
IE6 seems to be a browser that lets you surf the internet, and vise versa
I never did like IE, even back when Firefox didn’t exist yet. And I never will. I guess it all boils down to preference as well.