With today’s release of Internet Explorer 8, everyone who use Microsoft’s browser will be getting some much-needed improvements: color-coded related tabs, “Accelerator” add-ons, search and site suggestions, toolbar favorites, WebSlice bookmarking, and “inPrivate” stealth surfing (read our earlier coverage). It may not be as fast as its competitors, according to early reports, but anything is better than IE7.
But speed is really everything. Without speed, all the other features fall by the wayside. You can’t enjoy a WebSlice (which is a slice of a Webpage that is constantly updated) if it takes forever to load. And if you look at Internet Explorer’s market share, it has steadily been eroded over the past few years by its faster rivals Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. We’ll have to wait for new independent speed tests to see how IE8 stacks up, but speed does not appear to be its strong point.
Microsoft is doing what it always does: focusing on its massive installed base of users and ignoring the rest. If you’ve already left IE for a speedier browser, IE8 is not going to bring you back, and Microsoft knows it. For instance, Internet Explorer long ago turned its back the Mac and IE8 will be no different. There will be no Mac version, even though Macs continue to gain market share against PCs.
IE may still hold 67 percent of the browser market, according to Net Apps, but that share is declining. Firefox claims 22 percent, Safari has 8 percent, and Chrome has captured 1 percent. And speed is not their only advantage. Many of the new features in IE8 are simply catch-up features. The rest are not enough to make most switchers switch back.
Does Microsoft even care about that other third of the market? It should, otherwise that third will soon grow into something much larger than it already is.
Honestly, the Net Apps numbers need to be called into question.
which stats do you like better?
That’s the problem. There aren’t great stats for worldwide browser usage. With great power comes great responsibility. Net Apps needs to better disclose where their numbers come from, and how they are collected imho.
StatCounter recently launched its new global stats tool which has a large worldwide reach. Our data is based on over 4 billion monthly pageviews, of which 3 billion is from non-US visitors.
You can view the worldwide stats here
http://gs.statc...y-200809-200903
and the US stats here
http://gs.statc...y-200809-200903
The StatCounter numbers show that IE’s share is even lower at 62.6%. Which supports my argument even more.
The netapplications number shows that there are 100 million iPhones in circulation, proving that page views results in statistics with a moe of greater than 100%
Its not speed, but it is anti-crash or anti-hang that is important. Currently websites are not sofisticated enough for JS/rendering speed.
Chrome is good at this “robustness” – but successfully diverts attention to “speed”, common google’s tactic is to divert attention..
Look at more mainstream websites. Lot’s of them publish their statistics.
E.g. I work for one who’s focused on students (high school throughout college). So we got students at school and at home using “us” and IE is at 80 something percent.
Of course it’s less than maybe three years ago but the switch isn’t coming so soon. We even have IE 5 and IE 6 — edu seems to be notoriously slow to update. Let alone all the macs at schools that still run IE. ;-(
Apple’s market share is under 5% in the states and even less in Europe (1-2%, I believe). There’s no real gaining anything towards the PC and certainly no revolution.
it’s simple really.. aggregate all the stats coming out, and be done with it. metastat.
two facts remain.
1) that IE, in one form or another is beating every other browser out there by a massive margin
2) its usage is falling
any other comments, or opinion is just chaff.
Especially when they show Apple numbers increasing at a time when Apple sales are tanking by critical amounts. While PC sales have not suffered the same impact…
I mean I expect to see some fluxuation in the numbers, but not the opposite of what the hard sales data shows.
Eh… from recent reports the opposite seems to be true, no offense.
Has it been growing over the last 5 years? Yes. Has it been growing over the last year? No. Has it been in decline for the last 6 months? Yes.
Wow, it seems depending on your context, we can both be true, so no need to apologize;)
GregA, no offence to you either, but while Mac SALES are in decline, those already-sold Macs are obviously still being sold. So it is a matter of declining growth in the past six months, not declining user base.
“still being sold” should be “still being used”, of course.
Its a shame IE has such a strong market share due to the fact that everyone just uses the browser that came with their computer. Their bloated browsers have never impressed me.
Apple sales tanking by critical amounts? What planet are you living on?
I agree. 1 in 13 visitors using safari? Doubtful.
I’m glad that IE8 decided to finally catch up; it makes my job easier. But I’ll never go back to it. IF they ever decided to care, it would be way too little, far too late.
erick..
i read/reread your article… enlighten me… just how is microsoft ignoring a 3rd of the market???????????
they’ve got a product that works.. is getting better…
and has fetures that a number of people find useful.. so what’s your real issue?
peace…
Well, their main concern seems to be to keep the two thirds they already have, which is fine. The other third (people on FF, Safari, Chrome, etc.) are not likely to switch if IE8 has speed issues, no matter what other bells and whistles it does have. Without addressing teh speed and performance issue, that other third is going to be hard to win back or win over. That’s just my opinion
A lot of Firefox users are actually Web Developers that can’t live without Firebug. IE8 has its own script debugger (which aims to be a Firebug for IE), so they are trying to make developers lives easier.
Microsoft has usually worked on the 80/20 rule…in other words, design and implement for the majority. It is impossible to please all of the people, all of the time.
Years ago I spoke with a lead PM on the MSN Messenger team who told me product quality was their primary objective. The reason was that their product was a distant third in usage in the US market (tho’ #1 in many other markets), and the goal was to retain current customers and churn IM users to their product. Churn in the opposite direction was unacceptable, because once you have lost a customer to the competition (and in turn, that person’s network who churned along), studies documented that less than 15% would ever churn back again.
I would propose two things:
a) the IE team knows they’re not going to win back everybody who has churned to Firefox or whatever. The browser has, shall we say, an illustrious history that has alienated many people.
b) there is no such thing as a Final release. What was released is called “Gold”, and as we know, it cannot be installed on Win7 beta, which is using a forked build. So it’s entirely likely we will see perf improvements in later releases of IE8 once we are closer to the Win7 release and check-ins are locked.
I remember one guy telling me back before AOL bought (and killed) Navigator: it’s not a battle, it’s a war. Wars cannot be won in a day.
“the IE team knows they’re not going to win back everybody who has churned to Firefox or whatever. The browser has, shall we say, an illustrious history that has alienated many people.”
I tend to forget that there’s good hackers at MSFT, at least they seem to be aware that IE6 stunted the growth of the web for years (I’m guessing a lot fo the IE8 team never worked on IE6). Still, it’s hard to forgive MSFT for that, I don’t think I’ll be easily persuaded to switch back.
Well, they won me back.
Those people are not likely to switch back to IE ever, IE sucks and always will be worse then other browsers, tech savvy people know this.
Hehe… I had the same Q but decided he probably meant people using “other browsers”. The headline could be more on point.
Just use the latest version of Firefox 3.0.X …along with the IE TAB (add-in). It’s genius! Because it fixes most any site that didn’t plan on alternate browsers.
The add-ins are so significant with Firefox that the entire browsing experience is far and away a better browsing experience. A brief list of ADD-INS:
IE tab
oldbar
Forecastfox
adblock Plus
flagfox
extended statusbar
fission
download statusbar
Anycolor
Reminderfox
PDF Download
The list goes on and on….what’s the allure for IE8? (Which still does not perform to the level of Firefox).
“But speed is really everything.” Do you have a source for this statement? Do you mean that all functions must be faster? By how much? Is it your thesis that the 33% of the market that usesFirefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera do so only because they are faster? Isn’t one the fastest? And if so shouldn’t it have 100% of the market?
OMG I fail to understand this “Speed” fetish of Erick.
If speed was that important, surely Safari or Chrome would have more users than FF3?
At the end of the day, 90% of speed is due to broadband/network/cpu/PC issues and only 10% to the browser running faster. It’s a bit of a geek talk and nothing more than that.
FF3 is better than IE7 but not better than IE8, which has some cool features that once adopted (Accelerator, Slices) will create stickiness and a network effect. They’ll also steal traffic from Google as they can simply use Accelerators instead of googling it.
It’s a shame that TC lets Erick write dumb-down articles without some overview…
BTW
I prefer Safari just because of their GUI. An extra millisecond of speed? Who cares?
Speed is important because it is the gating factor in bringing better applications to market. If all the browsers were as fast as Google chrome you would see a huge improvement in every website’s Usability and features. The other thing that it would do is kill off all the non “Open Web” plugins that developers need to use to make up for speed. Things like; Flash, Silverlight and Java.
So a millisecond may not seem like a lot as an individual but as a collective group of people browsing the web, it’s a lot.
Nobody here is talking about the speed of Java, Flash and such 3rd party plug-ins. That’s not under the browser vendor’s control.
We are talking about the speed of browser itself — but as somebody above mentioned it, the bottleneck is the speed of the network and the internet connection, not the browser. In theory, you could speed of the browser where it take infinitely small amount of time to render a page, but it stil has to wait for the page to load via the internet connection.
Erick is propogating nonsense.
Speed is everything and with JS basically owning the internet now the browser that gets the JS engine tweaked for speed is eventually going to choke out the others like Forrest Griffin in a UFC fight:
http://crave.cn...49301219,00.htm
IE and MS are redokulously retarded, they are fighting an uphill battle against INFORMATION itself. The internet is gaining seam not losing it, so MS is going to have to secretly hope stats and usability realities like one in the link above are silenced, yeah, good luck with that Redmond.
Huh? Since when do any users care about synthetic benchmarks?
Real-world benchmarks paint a very different picture. Plus, the margin of difference between Safari 4 (a BETA product) and the others, including IE 8, is quite small compared to the margin between all of them and IE 7 or Firefox 2.0. All the browsers have gotten faster at JS.
And yet, JS is just a small part of the browsing experience. Even on sites like Gmail / Hotmail and other AJAX-heavy services, JavaScript execution still amounts to a very small amount of processing time.
Just try comparing IE 8 and Firefox 3.0.7 at loading or working with GMail. There is no perceivable difference at all.
Your poor spelling notwithstanding, it’s clear that you’re just trying to trash on IE with nothing to back up your complaints.
I never comment on articles, but this is a first. Eric – give me a break – Speed isn’t everything. Most of the world drives a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord. People just want it to work decently.
I don’t love – OR hate – IE, but its there, and it works reasonably well. I can sit down at most any desktop and function with it without the need to download FF, Safari or Chrome.
Tried Chrome, nice beta, too much didn’t work in the first 5 mins. But with all the speed I found that out 2 msec quicker ;>). Get off your anti-establishment high horse.
That is the worst analogy I have ever heard. You might as well have said most people like to wear flip flops.
The Web isn’t necessarily but what an individual feels is necessary but what is possible from macro perspective and the speed of the browser limits what people can freely do with technology that is open to anybody. IE lagging behind in performance forces people into native technologies which removes the freedom of everyone to access to the functionality.
I for one want to be able to have easy access to applications and services that do big and better things.
Erick, stop writing about MS products because 1) you’re obviosuly bias with it and 2) you know nothing about it.
Speed is everything? Seriously?
IF Speed is everything then why is it that the remaining 70% of the world are still using IE? Also, IE is only last in javascript speed tests, loading a page is NOT ALL ABOUT Javascript. You’re an idiot.
Mac market share IS NOT GROWING. And the current economic (havn’t you noticed?) is not going to help that change.
That struck me too – Apple’s sales relative to the overall computer sales market dropped last year, not increased.
Um, wrong: http://arstechn...arket-share.ars
There’s a lot more to “speed” than just saying one browser is faster than another. One browser could be faster under ideal conditions but often take up hundreds of megabytes of RAM if left on for an extended period of time. I’m not sure how IE8 fares when it comes to memory over extended use, but overall I’d rather have a browser that is a little slower under ideal conditions but does not degrade as badly over time.
out of all the browsers IE8 is the one that takes the least amount of memory. Firefox still has memory management issue, Safari is a dinousour taking up memory and Chrome just about the same as Safari.
As long as IE6 drops dead, I won’t hang my self.
Now we have to support 3 of the most annoying browsers in the world thanks to SuperSoft.
PCs losing market share to macs? Sure macs sales have increased, and so have PC sales. Actually, macs have been at a pretty steady 3%. Microsoft is probably shaking in its boots right now.
Let’s face it, these so called “catch-up” features don’t even come standard in FX. They’re add-ons. So including them directly in the browser is a step forward compared to Mozilla.
It depends what stats you believe, but both Gartner and IDC show Mac shares growing in the last Q:
http://arstechn...arket-share.ars
Erick,
Have you ever considered that that could be due to the increase in iPhone developers (50k according to Apple) and the requirement to have a Mac? Where are the studies that show why there is an increase?
Jim
If you try these browsers side by side, the difference isn’t very significant, speed-wise. I think people choose their browsers for features (Firefox, ect…) or lack thereof (Chrome, ect…).
Exactly. No matter how many benchmarks Apple or Google put out about Safari and Chrome, millisecond differences mean absolutely jack **** when it comes to actually using the thing. And in that regard, IE8 is pretty damned fast for me.
security matters more than speed. by integrating the browser with the OS, microsoft ensured that security holes in the browser are security holes in the OS. that led to its decline.
chrome faces a big hurdle for a similar reason–privacy.
I could agree with that thought about security but in reality it doesn’t always work that way. It is true that by inheretance IE can allow to take over the OS but the new version of IE has many good security features that improve the browsing experience. I personally use all of the browsers depending on what i want to do. I depends the task i am working on but i see not much of a difference in speed between IE8, Safari and Chrome. Javascript websites can be relative depending on how optimize a code is to the browser. I think it’s bullshit that a 1 milisecond speed bump makes a browser faster when in reality is not something you would notice. I think i work more productively on IE8 than on chrome and Firefox. I think there is alot of bias going on against IE8 and credit is not being given in the innovation it brings.
I’m actually a fan of IE8.
Elaborate?
its what i use on my test Windows machine. seems to out perform Firefox by a big margin. like the new bookmarking stuff. that’s about it.
You don’t use Chrome on your Windows test machine?
use both of course.
Michael,
Shhhhhhhh!!!! Don’t let Erick hear that…
jim
LOL!
i am sure Michael got scorned for that… Honestly i wish Scornfield would get off his bias ship and actually review the browser by it’s true merits. IE8 might be the fastest with it’s JScript Engine but it’s the most productive so far. If you see the history of Scornfield articles you can see his bias a mile away. Please give credit where credit is due… FIrefox has the advantage of custimization, Chrome has the advantage of lightweight and IE8 has the advantage of productivity and speed combine for the average user.
Um,
1. I don’t understand why they’re ignoring a 1/3 of the market
2. What, no mention on standards compliance? Are they supporting box-model, CSS, XHTML, etc? Or… not
Standards compliance is basically dead, and getting deader. Actually, it was stillborn, and Adobe killed it in the womb with Flash. You can argue that basic point all you want, but when you compare websites using flash to do those sorts of things vs XHTML and CSS(the standards compliant way…) its really no contest.
Also the most likely contender to replace flash is Silverlight, not standards compliance, and that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at all…
Your first post was off-base, and this one doesn’t even make sense.
First, mac sales only went down this past quarter, perhaps due to a combination of the recession, coupled with most folks waiting on the complete line-up updates (which have now occurred).
Secondly…standards compliance is dead? Although I’m not a fan, IE8 is the only browser to fully support the CSS2.1 spec. ONLY. ONE. I actually believe the IE team are very committed to bringing their product up to spec (now onto CSS3, which should be set soon).
And what exactly are you talking about with Flash killing standards? Compare websites using flash, how?
Well my own theory for the cratering Mac sales is they now make ugly flat grey computers and nothing else.
Really??? Every computer (with the exception of the iPod and iPhone) in their product line is dull flat grey??? Are you kidding me?
Here look at their website.
http://www.apple.com
Apple has even convinced themselves that their dull flat grey new ipod is somehow attractive.
Here look at this video:
http://search.l...id=662792241556
Message seems to be dull flat grey computers are somehow ironic… I don’t know, just like that hammer it goes over my head.
Its like American Beauty all over again, everyone convinced that piece of trash blowing around was somehow beautiful. No, it wasn’t, it was a piece of trash!
Dude the emperor wearns no clothes.
But no, its not the financial crisis. PC sales were up. No one is waiting for Windows 7 to come out.
Greg,
Standards compliance is not dead. Its the only thing that allows us developers to actually build something once (or, with at least minimal varying differentiations).
As the web continues to become “the channel” that we are all building stuff for, browsers will need to continually progress towards a single render spec. This helps streamline content and app development on the web by shortening the cycles it takes to get to market. So standards are in everyone’s best interests (even MS.)
Flash and silverlight are just additional delivery mechanisms that float in the browser. Saying they kill standards is like saying cable TV killed television… they’re just another part of the web, they don’t comprise the whole.
Lolwhat?
Most of the modern browsers have decent standards support. Even IE is getting better (though they appear to be dragging their feet).
I read all the time about Firefox being so fast, and I actually recommend it to Mac users over Safari. However, Firefox is so slow to load on my PC that I can actually launch Firefox, and before the browser even loads, I can get tired of waiting, open IE (7 or 8), type in the web address and be viewing the page by the time Firefox is ready to accept my typing in the address bar. Is the browser app loading included in any of those speed tests?
Ditto. Complete Ditto.
Ditto. Firefox sucks on PC
?? are you a troll or something?
Completely agree!
At last… somebody says the biggest problem with FF out loud. From a consumer point of view, Firefox sucks because it “takes forever” to start up. And remember, most consumers don’t sit around with a web browser open all the time (or their PC even switched on for that matter). They want to quickly check a website, check their hotmail or whatever – so any delay in getting the browser up is going to be perceived very badly.
Just look at the push for speed in getting the OS loaded on computers.. many linux distros are chasing this (just read the stuff coming from Ubuntu for example), as have MS made vast improvements in this area. Most coders with any milege will remember the sudden God-send arrival of the Splash Screen – it effectively reduced perception of load/initialise times.
OS integration is undoubtably what gives IE (in whatever flavour) this edge – you just click the little “e” and, well, you’re ready to go.
IE is useful because it directs traffic to MS’s web properties. But if the web properties suck at making money, then it doesn’t matter if IE takes over the browser pie.
I’m using IE8 final release now on Vista x64, and it seems pretty speedy to me.
I see no difference w.r.t to IE7. But then again, whether is takes 0.2 or 0.1 to load a page is irrelevant.
FF is slowly losing its geeky “hipness” as it grows market share. expect attention seeking geeks to denounce anything MS and move to google chrome. until that becomes uncool.
my only speed issue with IE7 is opening a new tab, and thats because it waits for a response before opening a tab. otherwise i have no complains
Well, I am on Tiger and I still think Firefox is cool.
@etoile
If you are not going to mention/consider IE’s protected mode maybe you should leave the security comments to someone else.
BS article sorry to say that…
And I’m sorry to say you are correct….
i just wish there was the option where you can vote article on it’s merits, not on fanboy perception.
As usual with microsoft products its all show bells and whistles. They need to cut the fat and stremline it for what we actually need it do. Which is run fast.
Erick, I am not sure this article does justice to the various improvements over IE7 or the other big browsers for that matter. There’s a lot to be said about standards compliance, security, ease of navigation. You also have a bunch of genuine innovations — web slices, tab coloring, etc. I am the first to bash slow and cumbersome “me too” solutions from Microsoft, but it would seem that IE8 is a big step in the right direction in browser world.
If you don’t like IE8 — that’s cool, but can you elaborate a bit more? How much of a speed issue do we really have and how much does the average person care?
agree actually.
Well, that is the reason why not every Tech blogger is Michael Arrington
I second that.
@Ivo : excellent points. Specifically on issues of security and web slices.
This is not a review, this is an op-ed. Go read Walt Mossberg’s review. He likes all those features. He also says according to his speed tests IE8 is significantly slower than the other browsers. If that is true, then that could be a problem for MSFT.
Other than that, IE8 seems to be a vast improvement over IE7, and even pushes forward with some of the features you mention, Ivo. All good things. But does it help them stem the decline in IE market share significantly? I don’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see.
Erick you’re being FAR TOO PESSIMISTIC. You really should at least give MS more credit for better standards compliance and the new features. It’s an improvement compared to what former market leaders like General Motors did(which was totally ignore their customers and the competition, different industry but valid example).
I concede that Microsoft makes a better browser than General Motors.
you cant reason with an anti-MS fanboi, there’s just no point.
Erick = Fanboi
Mike, take him off reviewing any MS products in the future, we already know what his opinion will be.
Erick needs to grow up.
You can’t reason with an MS fanboy, there’s no point.
Eric you must live in your own little world and fail to accept any other product that is not a Mac and any other product you are bias towards.
Op-eds usually mention more than one or two superficial points. You’re breaking the IE8 news on TC (um, kind of a big deal?) and you post a copy-paste list of features and 3 paragraphs/11 sentences flaming MS on market share?
Come on. This is TC. IE8 release. You’re better than this
I assure you he aint better than what you hope he is. He has bias all over his face…
Eric…
Op-Ed is, to be pedantic about it, an Editorial piece, which is primarily an ‘opinion’.
In no way does this absolve the writer of the Op-Ed to justify his/ her opinion. While you are welcome to express your opinion, in a public space, you need to back that up with some logical reasoning. Nothing in your Op-Ed suggests that it is a logically reasoned expression of opinion. You simply make claims for which you give no justifications or reasons. Thus, for examplem you claim that ’speed’ is important. Yet, you fail to mention – as other have pointed out in their posts – that speed is dependent, in the first instance, on the internet connection of the user.
Of course, in a private conversation, this kind of talk can work, in a publicly available Op-Ed, however, I’m afraid it won’t. All it does is shows that you are sloppy in your writing, and more worryingly, in your thinking. None of the above suggests that you should like IE8, or that you cannot be critical of IE8, however, back it up with some resoned arguments. This you have failed to do.
I agree, Erick, and I’m surprised that so many Microsft fanboys have come out of the woodword today to flame. Firefox has come from nothing to gain ~25% of the market in a few years. IE is on the downswing, it’s previous reputation has damaged it’s prospects.
Remember, guys, that IE deserves it’s bad reputation: after it won the browser wars and destroyed Netscape, MS left the world with IE6 for 5 years. With a non-standards-compliant browser having 99% of the market share, developers were forced to abandon standards to get sites to display properly in IE – which meant that such sites would appear ‘broken’ in a standards-compliant browser.
I can’t say how intentional it was, but MS certainly dragged their feet with updates to IE, especially w.r.t standards compliance, and effectively stunted the growth of the internet for years. They knew the internet was the biggest competitor to the desktop… was IE part of a strategy to make the web suck? It certainly looks that way.
Even if IE has changed it’s tune now, you’ll understand why a lot of people are rather excited by the prosepct of MSFT losing some of it’s control over the internet.
It may just be me, but IE8 seems fairly responsive. Not as fast as Chrome probably but fast enough.
What interests me more it performs on web standards.
Can a distinction be made between Safari for Mac and Safari for iPhone? If so, I wonder if that’s why Safari is gaining.
As a mac user, i refuse to use IE8, even if there was one for osx!
+1
get that stick off your ass, this is a tech blog site and i think we should be happy for the innovation brought all accross the board.
It seems like this was simply a mindless article that was written by a guy who made up his mind about IE8 long before he ever tried it. IE8 is exponentially better than IE7, infinitely better than IE6, and some of its new features that Erik lazily and thoughtlessly glossed over are specific reasons why IE8 is better than Firefox and Safari in many cases.
I’ve been regularly using Firefox for years now, thus being part of the 1/3 – not to mention part of that 1/3 who’s an extremely niche technical user (like everyone on this site) who influences the usage habits of their parents and peers – and I’m heavily thinking of moving back to use IE8 full-time.
This is amusing. Has anyone that thinks IE8 (or any browser really) every used them? Not micro-benchmarking, but actual use? They are all really pretty fast. C’mon people, we have great, secure browsers, and lots of choice. Everything is great, and getting better. All of the browsers, to me, seem to work pretty much the same. Firefox is only fast if you don’t install add-ons, which of course limits its functionality, but it still can be fast. C’mon people…be reasonable, not fanboyish. We are in a good place browser-wise…and getting better all the time. IE8 is a great step forward, and I’ll be giving it a chance.
As for this article, rediculous. Ignoring a third of users? What an amazing rediculous statement. I think Apple is ignoring 90% of computer users with it’s Mac offering. I think I’ll write an article about it. Bleh.
I am sorry but I must agree with you.
my frustration is with the actvix apps that only run on IE. I cringe every time I have to open Explorer for work. if those proprietery webapps ran on chrome i could honestly shave 20 minutes off my work day.
It’s both amusing and sad to see MS try and try to get their browser to catch with the competition. I only use IE to test themes and with services like http://browsershots.org, I rarely even do that.
Speed isn’t everything, but it is essential.
“Microsoft is doing what it always does: focusing on its massive installed base of users and ignoring the rest. If you’ve already left IE for a speedier browser, IE8 is not going to bring you back, and Microsoft knows it.”
Couldn’t disagree more, and I didn’t see any basis for your claim. If they didn’t care about anyone other than existing IE users, why would they bother with the standards improvements that they’ve made?
As for switchers, I haven’t tried IE8 Final yet, but from using the Release Candidate, I know I’m more likely to use it than Firefox 3.x. I’ll personally probably continue using Chrome, though.
A big however concerns all those non-techies that I switched over to using other browsers so I wouldn’t have to play tech support buddy when they got hosed using IE6. They were never really switchers themselves, they only did it with my prodding. Now that I’m satisfied with IE8 security, I don’t care about getting my friends/family to use a non-IE browser. Most of them are like the 98% of the world that doesn’t care about browser wars.
I agree with you on this… i always added Firefox to the computer i service but only reason i did it was because sometimes IE get messed up and not work, it was also a reason give the user an option. But i know many people use Firefox due to me asking them to use it if IE didn’t work. I see the vast improvement of IE8 and trust me i won’t be loosing time installing Firefox.
I’m a mac user but I just tried out IE8 on a friends computer. I think it’s a significant improvement, I look forward to the improvements it has for web developers. It has pretty good speed, but I do think that eventually MS’s lack of focus on javascript speed will hurt it.
It doesn’t seem so bad now and perhaps by the time it would be an issue MS will address it. But as more and more complex applications are being written and relying more and more on javascript as opposed to flash or silverlight javascript speed will matter more and more.
When javascript gaming becomes a large market or when someone need to run large online spreadsheet operations, javascript speed will be crucial.
I don’t blame MS though, right now they make tons of from desktop software, it would only help them lose business or cannibalize themselves at best.
Wow a sane Mac User who gave a better review then the author of this article did. I am amazed by that alone, i congratulate you. I think that in the next version of IE, MS will up the game with a new JSCript Engine, i doubt they will ignore it.
Soon, it will be more than 1/3 because of recommendations, anyone who is using another web browser has made a choice and probably thinks it is the best. Anyone who is using IE probably hasn’t made a choice and doesn’t know there are other/better options, until someone tells them.
right now i use chrome, IE and Firefox and i honestly don’t see a better option out of the box than IE. Memory management is far better than the others, The accerators makes you more productive and Webslices are a great feature that allows you to get basic info quick and easy. The only reason i see Chrome up IE is on the fack of separating tab windows which could be very useful for productivity.
My biggest problem with IE and the reason I’ll never use it for a day-to-day browser is that tabs are slow to open. You can’t drag a link from one page to an existing tab (other than the current tab) to get around the issue either. Firefox allows this, Opera allows this, no idea why IE couldn’t.
I wonder how much of the market was lost due to Microsoft’s stupid Genuine Advantage choice? Surely those who didn’t know how to crack IE7 just switched browsers and didn’t lose sleep over it.
As far as the speed issue, it would certainly help if webdesigners actually cared about the CPU use of their page. I don’t think ANY webpage has the RIGHT to suck 30% or more of my CPU, but yet that happens on a regular basis. Some of the speed problem can be solved by better programming
Have you experienced slow tab creation in the release version of IE 8? I have not.
There are add-ons for IE that allow the drag-link-to-open-in-new-tab functionality. Or you can just middle-click or ctrl+click.
Microsoft can;t bring themselves back. IE7 killed them off. I know I am not going to IE8 for nothing.
I prefer IE7 to Firefox. Haven’t tried IE8 yet but will. Firefox kills my Windows machine whenever I open more than 3 tabs.
My Windows dies very often when I turn printer on but I am pretty sure – its Windows not my printer I should blame to because this printer works OK when I am on Mac (dual boot).
maybe it’s a driver issue, last i check Macs and Windows don’t use the save drivers. I know that drivers are one of the main reason for hardware to fail. I know you must have experience this using a MAc since there’s been countless times when Graphic drivers were making OS X crash.
Hey Erick,
Are you really just trolling for ratings by this piece? Wearing your anti-Microsoft patch a little too proudly today?
Remember this, the “alpha-geek” market is only so large. Most people just want “good enough” which is what IE8 seems to be.
Sorry MS hurt your feelings.
he is trolling, haven’t you notice this before?
Just as a point of interest. So far this month, my server stats show Browser hits as… Firefox 43.1%, IE 43.1%. All other Browsers are less than 10% each. Last month Firefox was about 4% more than IE.
Never heard of your site, and I won’t bother to follow your link, especially since you are trolling for people to do so. Go advertise elsewhere.
Schonfeld is the dumbest writer on TechCruch. Why are you trying to hard to be anti-Microsoft when all the other major tech blogs have given up on this kinda sensationalism.
Speed may be everything to you Eric, but not to hundreds of millions of people who use IE.
Btw, I use Chrome because of it’s better memory management system. I could care less if Chrome was beaten by all other browsers in a JavaScript memory test… I don’t really time Gmail every time I try to open an email. 1 second vs. 1.4 seconds is negligible.
agree
I agree and disagree! I for one loves speed as much as anyone else and many times cursed older IE readers for their lack of snappyness. BUT it is also equally important not to loose all your data!
My current version of Firefox 3.x something crashes almost daily, causing as much (if not more) grief as any slower web browser.
Id rather take a little lag, than a restart!
Speed aside, anyone know how IE8 does on the Acid 3 test? Any HTML5 features (e.g. offline storage) like we saw with Safari 4 Beta?
I’m running on a Mac so I’ve left all that IE* behind but I have an open question: when we say a step forward can anyone quantify (in figures or pretty pictures) the step forward IE8 has made on standards compliance?
Cheers
Acid3 does not measure any standards compliance that I am aware of, it is more of a wish list of the guy who wrote it. So if your browser supports Acid 3, it is no longer standards compliant.
Acid3 is a collection of fairly obscure CSS3 standards. How is that not a test for standards compliance?
Acid3 tests for things that are not in any standard any where, and the author admits he designed to to break IE.
It also tests for things like SVG, which are dead… or rather stillborn. I mean, you can claim that a technology that no one uses anymore is some sort of standard, and I guess the term for that is dead-right.
But given the tech blog’o’spheres tendencies of hysterics to all things Microsoft, you would think that there would be some outcry, or someone would even notice when the SVG memorial was officially errected earlier this year. Here it is since you missed it.
http://www.adob...om/svg/eol.html
But there was none. SVG’s dead was the proverbial tree in a forest that no one heard.
So in that case, its not really obscure anymore, as much as… its dead. And its not coming back no matter how much w3c fanboys cry and cry about “standards compliance”
Or I guess you can argue that Adobe is making the shrew business decision to only support browsers that support SVG… Er…. Um, do you really want to make that argument?
Because of that, the Acid3 test, is totally, permanently and irrevocably irrelevant. Its time for an Acid4 test that is designed to test for compliance with technologies that people actually use, and not designed because someone has an ax to grind with Microsoft. On that basis alone, the Acid3 test fails the RAND principal of the w3c. That the steering committee has let the Acid3 persist in its current state means the w3c has lost all relevance.
The majority of the Acid3 test is written in and largely tests the ECMAScript engine implementation of a browser.
If anyone is interested the ’specification’ of the Acid3 test can be found by doing a ‘view source’ on the acid3 test page…
http://acid3.acidtests.org/
If the CSS3 standards are obscure it is only because until IE supports them they could never be considered anything else. Otherwise you and I would probably be using them (and doing some fairly awesome stuff with them probably).
Rich,
You are mistaken, and to prove it I offer three questions.
Who wrote the Acid3 test?
What company is Ian Hickson working for?
What company is Opera currently invovled in a long lasting frivolous lawsuit?
And the bonus extra credit questions…
Which browser consistently is the first to pass the new iterations of the Acid tests?
How does that not violate the RAND principal of the w3c?
I will leave tech crunch forever, if you can answer the second extra credit question with an answer that doesn’t have me ROFLing while correctly answering all other questions.
LOL
Greg,
I don’t want to get in to a protracted discussion about the RAND principle of W3C with you here, only to say that I disagree with your points.
W3C works on contributions from its members and, rather than a conflict of interest, I couldn’t think of any company who would be better placed to write a browser-to-standards compliance test than a browser company. It is not an Opera compliance test but a standards compliance test …the rule of thumb being that if you understand the subject you will pass the test (so if Opera wrote it I guess they understand it and can pass it first).
Secondly, the whole browser industry is pulling towards the Acid 3 test so if it was a problem for anyone surely it would be a problem for the Mozilla’s, Apple’s and Google’s of the world. I found some stats on recent Acid 3 tests and, well, they’re not very convincing for IE8 are they?
http://www.maxi...rrow?page=0%2C3
With the lack of any other useful quantifiable data to benchmark browsers (other than on their speed), I consider the Acid 3 the benchmark for new browser releases….
Your comments have just been plain off like they have been elsewhere on this article but that’s it on the subject from me.
You can ROFL now if you like.
ROFLMAO!
It its nice to know, that with the notable exception of 90%+ of the market, the world breathlessly awates SVG and SMIL standards compliance!
GregA,
i think it is very interesting, that you mean SVG is not used.
Do you never used GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps, do you never seen graphics in wikipedia?
IE8 is about as good at Acid 3 as Erick Schonfeld is at writing blog posts. Out of 5 stars, it might scrape 1.
a 1 is too much credit for scornedfeld
Rich – do you mean features like DOM Storage? Yes.
http://msdn.mic...ibrary/cc197062(VS.85).aspx
You know what Brandon, you just made my day. Pleased to get some qualified information on the subject from the source.
That is a huge leap forward *for the Internet* and I congratulate the team on putting that in. Haven’t seen that blogged anywhere else…but the whole playing field may have changed with that addition.
Offline web apps anyone?
I’ve used IE8 for a few hours now and I can tell you it is noticeably faster than IE7
Is it better than the other offerings? I can’t answer that today, but give it a week or so and i’d be able to give an objective opinion.
I agree. IE8 is much snappier than the lethargic beast that is IE7. Enough to pull me away from Chrome/FF? Probably not.
I would say Microsoft ignores 100% of the market, since 100% of people values speed. Other issue is that 66% of the people have to use IE because it is imposed at work, or are lazy and do not swich.
really? please, i beg you please, STFU!
Tried IE8.
It’s slow.
Went back to FireFox.
I just wasted at least an hour installing and uninstalling IE8 into and off of my Lenovo X61, a 12″ notebook. IE7 allowed me to use two lines at the top for all of my menu & toolbars. IE8 apparently assumes everyone uses huge screens all of the time with room to spare, forcing me to use up one line of horizontal space for the menu, one for the address bar, one for my tools icons, and one for my links. That’s two more 1 cm strips of screen space on an already cramped 12 inch screen. Whatever the benefits of IE8’s new bells and whistles outweigh the cost of screen space. Thanks but no thanks.
If you’re concerned about screen real estate switch to Chrome or use a compact theme for Firefox and you even get a faster, more secure browser to boot.
It’s great to see the Microsoft and IE fans speaking out at Techcrunch. The silent majority is no longer silent. For a while, it seems like Techcrunch has become the hangout for Linux and Firefox geeks.
There is good and bad for Firefox, Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. Needless to say, the increased competition benefits everyone.
The only tough part is for the web developer with one more, almost compliant platform to support. At http://sw.tearn.com/ we’ve compiled 200 software platforms for the web developer. The challenge is daunting – IE8 adds one more dimension.
Pause the argument over IE versus Firefox. Certainly, don’t attack Erik. Lets goto work and build the next web.
“the increased competition benefits everyone.:
Definitely, this is the beauty of the competition we are getting from all sides, but some peoples bias are idiotic.
Now if anybody got into the IT industry they should always expect for standards and compliance to change and that’s part of the job. Unfortunately there’s been too many bias geeks rooting for their side. I personally like all the browsers out there, and as i mention before, i like firefox for it’s customization, chrome for it’s simplicity and speed and IE8 for it’s speed and productivity.
What drives me nuts is the speed of IE. I mean – don’t they use other browsers like Firefox and Chrome? Don’t they see that IE doesn’t compare with such browsers? I mean – I just don’t get it. Speed should be the most important thing for them. I don’t see how the richest company of them all – Microsoft – can’t come up with a FASTER browser when they have all the funds at their disposal. It’s really strange.
have you even used IE8 yet? sounds like you havent…
You know, I personally found that Internet Explorer 7 loads faster than FireFox…
I’m a FireFox user though, and theres two reasons:
I love Chatzilla, and I love Spell Check.
And, when I was using IE6, FireFox had functioning tabs that were kind of nice to have.
Why does IE often run slower than FireFox?
Lots of programs jack up IE with addons and activeX programs, users often forget to deselect these, and many of these “extensions” are not installed on Firefox. If you take the time to deselect these items on an installer, and go through IE every so often and disable things you dont use anymore, it will run fine.
I dont tend to like to recommend FireFox, since new users just dont get FireFox.
i just luv my FF
no IE 4 me
I use both FF and IE equally. I’ve used IE8 RC for a while and it’s fast and easy to use.
I’m really surprised to not see anyone mention something as simple as Themes. Personalization is a big deal. IE makes that hard.
The speed of one over another is fairly negligible. Firefox extensions are often fantastic, and that drives usage, however they slow it down and increase its memory usage as more get added.
But FF themes are terribly easy to locate and apply. For some reason I’ll never understand, Microsoft has made changing colors, in XP and IE, far too difficult and the location of scroll bars, menus, etc, tough for hobbyists to manipulate.
P.S. If you are a left handed Tablet PC user like me, Firefox remains the only option in mobile mode, and Safari and Chrome utterly unusable.
Is IE8 more conformant to web standards than 7?
From the features and notes, it doesn’t seem so. If a poll were taken of application web developers, I think many would make the same request:
1) “Can IE8 please support the hover pseudoclass on all (or at least block) display elements rather than just links?”
This one act, conforming to a common web standard, would open up vast new realms of simplicity and power in web application development and use.
There are a lot of little things that IE could do to improve the global web experience, but that one thing would be nice.
Another that could be nice:
2) “Can IE8 support background elements the way that standards conformant browsers do? Nested backgrounds break in IE. Why does this have to be so?”
The features in IE8 seem nice, but support for a few common web standards would help out everybody and make the web a better place for everyone.
I just downloaded IE8. Big improvement thus far, but let’s see how that holds once I have 27 pages open with many running active scripts.
I’ve also used FF, but frankly like the interface for IE better. Don’t ask me why, personal preference.
WRT Mac vs PC and trends, I can’t speak to sales trends, but I can say that Apple has made major inroads in perception, especially in the past year. The vast majority of my friends/family never owned a Mac and stubborly clung to their Windows PCs for years. Now, whenever a conversation with any of these people comes up regarding buying a new laptop, EVERY SINGLE TIME the person says, “you know, I’m thinking I might buy a Mac this time.” (FYI, I’m not a Mac user, so thats not why they bring it up). Three years ago, these same people would have laughed at the thought. People are sick of Windows, and Mr. Jobs has done a great job of making people feel like Mac is once again a legitimate choice.
At the same time, most of these same people are waiting to buy a new computer. Waiting to see where the stock market goes, waiting to see if their company is laying off, waiting to see just how much Obama and Ah-nold are going to hike our already outrageous taxes. The economy sucks. Computers, Macs and PCs alike, are expensive. For me personally, my PC is getting me by at the moment (just). Instead of buying a Mac on a whim, I’m actually saving up.
Lastly, can we can the personal insults aimed at TC writers? Seriously. If you can argue points civilly with data, great. Otherwise, no one cares what you think.
I think though IE not faster they have improved features when compared to Itnernet Explorer 7,they concentrated mainly on security features in IE8.