Toolkit

Story: IE suffers minor popularity setback

Posted by: David Wright (Wednesday 14 July 2004, 1:32 PM)

Last figure I saw for IE was that it had slipped from 85% market share in January to around 80% at the moment...

But given that many users use spoofing techniques to fool websites into believing that the browser is IE, how can any figures be accurate?

Also, as MS don't own 95% of the Desktop OS market, that means even if 100% of Windows machines had IE, MS still wouldn't have 95% of the browser market (OK, we can probably add in a few Apple users who haven't switched to Safari as well)...

How are these figures gathered?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2004/06/23/163393.aspx
reports that IE has (in June) 81.4% of the market, although IE6 only accounts for 72.8% of the IE market, which is worrying. Opera has around 2.3% and Mozilla 11.4%, with Netscape bringing up the rear with another couple of percent.

I am not saying the w3schools is any more accurate than WebSideStory, but please at least do some basic research before cuting and pasting press releases onto your site. It took around 30 seconds to find the w3schools figures in Google.

You are not doing your reputation any good by printing these type of stories without checking your facts. This is not the standard of reporting I have enjoyed over the years, but unfortunately is becoming all too common over the last couple of months :-(

Yes, IE does seem to be splipping in popularity, no matter whose figures you use, but the figures vary too widely to be used without comment.