Microsoft squanders browser dominance in record time

[allheart55 Cindy E]

 

 

An estimated 33 million users deserted Microsoft's browsers last month, pushing the Redmond, Wash. company's browser strategy ever closer to the edge of irrelevancy, according to analytics data published today.

 

Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge combined to account for 36.7% of the global user share -- a stand-in for the number of desktop and notebook PC owners who ran those browsers -- in June, according to U.S.-based metrics vendor Net Applications. June's IE number was down 1.9 percentage points from May, the eighteenth straight month of losses.

 

In the last 12 months alone, IE -- a bucket into which Computerworld also pours Windows 10's Edge -- has lost 17.3 percentage points, representing a loss of almost a third of what the browser controlled a year ago.

 

As recently as November 2015, IE accounted for more than half of the global browser user share.

 

Chrome slipped past IE for the first time. Chrome's rate of increase has been astounding, doubling its user share in just over 12 months.

 

If Chrome continues on the blistering growth rate of the past year, it will reach the 50% mark this month.

 

Like IE, Mozilla's Firefox also lost user share in June, falling another nine-tenths of a percentage point to 8%. Unless Mozilla can arrest the flight, its desktop browser could drop under the 5% mark as early as October, threatening the organization's long-term survival, which relies on search revenue from the likes of Yahoo to pay the bills.

 

Other top browsers, Apple's Safari and Opera Software's Opera, remained flat and showed a small gain, respectively.

 

 

 

Microsoft told IE users in August 2014 that they must upgrade to a newer version by January 2016. But while Microsoft probably made this decision to reduce support costs -- supporting one version rather than six -- the move had a side-effect that the company could not have foreseen. (For if it had, it wouldn't have followed through.)

 

Faced with Microsoft's demand to upgrade to the newest edition of IE, people instead rethought their choice of browsers.

 

The clear winner: Chrome.

 

Source: computerworld