Internet Explorer usage drops below 50%

I was just checking out the latest W3Schools browser stats, and realised that we've reached a bit of an historic moment. The combined usage of IE7 and IE6 has, for the first time, dropped below 50% (48.6% for September):

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Now I know that W3Schools' audience is undoubtedly Firefox-biased, but this does show just how far Internet Explorer has declined over the years. Back in January 2002, IE commanded a whopping 86.8% market share. So it's almost halved in the last six years.

Personally as a CSS/JavaScript coder I won't be shedding any tears over this; frankly I'd be delighted if IE died a quick death.

Having said that, maybe IE8 is light-years ahead of IE7 in terms of CSS and JavaScript compatibility? I don't know because I've not dared install it onto my already-flaky Windows XP setup.

Anyone have any experience of IE8? Please tell me it's better...

Matt


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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

I'm too scared to install it - when's it out?

Simon

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It's at Beta 2 as I write: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx

How would you go about running it with IE7 and IE6 for testing? This looks promising: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

However I already have some hideous hacked version of IE6 running alongside IE7 on my XP VM, and it only just works as it is, so I'm scared to plonk IETester on top of it all without reinstalling XP first!

Matt

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

I've seen this, but i've again been scared to run it on my nice new netbook!

Let us know if you pluck up the courage!

si xx

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Which brings me to the next question. Given IE's market share (dwindling though it may be), why don't MS provide standalone versions of the browsers?

I know it integrates with the OS, blah blah blah, but I suspect it wouldn't be that much of a technical issue for them. They could tuck them out the way somewhere, just for developers, and we'd all be much happier.

Of course, that way we wouldn't have to buy a new Windows license for testing each browser, but they couldn't be that cynical.. could they?

Simon

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Well that would be wonderful, obviously! I seem to remember they issued a free time-limited VM image of XP with IE6 at one point - ah yes, here we go: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-and-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx

Not ideal, but a step in the right direction I suppose...!

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

And then nothing for two years. Feeble.

Simon

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ELATED : )
http://www.PageKits.com
Professional Website Templates