Ensight – Jeremy Wright

I was going to call this “State of the Browser”, but realised that would imply far more analysis than I’m drawing on.

Over the last several months, every major open source community known to man (in fact, nearly every major net community period) has been touting the death of IE. Of course, these death bells sounds more loudly whenever monthly stats are published, generally showing a very slow decline in IE’s market share in ‘favour’ of Mozilla, FireFox, Safari, etc.

I have been staying away from commenting on this for several reasons:

1. The slips, even guaged over a 1 year period are so infentessimally small they are practically statistical anomalies (1.5-2% over a 12-18 month period)
2. It doesn’t really matter, as long as IE has 80%+ market share, and there is no other browser with more than 10%, the net effect is the same: IE is by far the dominant browser
3. While losing market share may be significant, losing it and having that loss split by dozens of smaller players means IE is still the leader, and no single product or group is catching up

#1 is obvious, and is the biggest reason I haven’t commented. If the statistics don’t matter, the trend doesn’t matter (because it could easily be discounted). The problem is that there is a trend. Statistics or no, FireFox, Mozilla and Safari will continue to gain market share because they have momentum IE has no momentum and will not have any momentum until a major new browser release (IE for XP SP2 might just qualify, though I’m pinning the numbers on Longhorn).

#2-3 are similar but very different. #2 states that as long as IE has a significant market share, the ability for other browsers to assert any dominance is negligible. #3 states that as long as the 3 newer browsers continue to simply split the market, the individual growth in any of them will be negligible, making the possibility of any browser actually gaining on IE practically nill.

So, those are the reasons I haven’t commented on this in the past. Why am I commenting on it now? Because another blogger has bothered to, and has posted his analysis of the trends.

Gav, on his LiveJournal blog (first time I’ve linked to an LJ blog…); talks through his thoughts on the matter.

Good thoughts. Covering various stats sites, various methodologies and, ultimately, culminating in a good conclusion:

These are my gut opinions, based on a lot more details than I’ve included above, so take ‘em or leave ‘em:

* IE’s total market share (94-95%) is stagnant, or even falling slightly; but then, there’s not really any room for it to rise.
* IE6 (70-75%) continues to eat IE5’s users (20%); and there are some signs that IE5 is starting a dive to oblivion
* Safari is stomping all over IE over in MacOS-land
* Mozilla (2-3%) and Opera (~1%) are gaining ground steadily, but slowly
* Mozilla’s growth is particularly strong amongst heavy ‘net users and web authors (10% and rising fast); where it may be reaching a critical mass.
* Anyone still worried about Netscape 6: give it up, all the users (and there were never many) upgraded to version 7, or Moz
* The version 4 browsers are thoroughly dead (hallelujah!)
* Predictions: watch out for the mozilla-based browsers, particularly Firefox.

Good, impartial analysis.