“If you thought Microsoft’s venerable Internet Explorer browser was the most used browser in the world you could be forgiven. If this were 1999,” Wil Gomez writes for Mac360. “But here we are moving rapidly into the 21st century and, well, things have changed. And what has changed is all about numbers.”
“Chrome is used more an any device platform than Internet Explorer,” Gomez writes. “Apple’s device count of Mac, iPhone, and iPad now exceeds more than 1 billion devices, and Safari is the most used browser on all of them, so that gives Apple a leg up on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.”
The data is derived from “a count of users and their browsers that visit US government websites, so it’s likely to be statistics that are skewed this way or that way, but that’s what statistics do, right?” Gomez writes. “There are some interesting sidebars to the statistics the government gathers about web browsers. Which website run by the government gets the most visitors? The US Postal Service. Then, the IRS (at least, at this time of year), followed by the National Weather Service, and the Social Security Administration.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Web browser data from NetApplications backs up the gov’t data.
I haven’t see anyone use IE in years.
I still have to have it installed for a handful of companies who have sites that I can’t afford to not use the few times of the year when I have to interact with the.
Oddly, I recently helped my mother open a new bank account and after endless tries got it to work with IE when it failed with safari, chrome, and firefox. It was especially strange as only weeks earlier I had opened one myself in Safari with no issues whatsoever. Obviously whatever change they made was only tested in IE.
It is difficult to believe that people would keep a copy of IE on their Macs to run with Parallels and Windows for a few sites. I wonder what would happen if we all were to grow a pair and stop using those sites, stop using Windows and stop using IE?
I sure haven’t looked back since IE was taken off the Mac. I won’t use it again for any reason.
I wouldn’t bank with anyone requiring IE. Ignore obvious red flags at your peril when it comes to banking.
I’m surprised that MDN didn’t point out how Chrome is a Webkit derivative (as is modern Opera and iCab), thereby making Apple’s influence that much greater on web browsing.
Based on this Wired article Google went off in a different direction back in 2013.. And Webkit itself is a fork of an earlier engine called KHTML. http://www.wired.com/2013/04/blink/
Even Microsoft has written off IE. They’ve replaced it with ‘Edge’ in Windows 10.
Would be interesting to see how many convert directly to Edge from IE.. It seems in many of the client companies my company’s HQ in Japan deals with continue to use IE as the primary browser. I was told the main reason was the prevalence of Windows and that the huge majority of sites are optimized for IE.
I can’t speak for the compatibility between the two browsers. I haven’t read about any problems. But it would make sense that there were. We’d need a real Windows expert to… HEY! Let’s call up Rob Enderle! 😉
Funny all the things Microsoft has given up due to their own ineptitude, poor taste or unappealing late solutions – phones, browser, music player, tablet, PC market share, etc.. Can a company with tremendous opportunity and the financial resources have BEEN any more inept?? (Well Palm and RIM to be sure.)
Okay, so we all know that Android and iOS devices dominate consumer web traffic today. No surprise.
I wonder, however, if the split between Safari on iOS and Safari on Mac stats are accurate. For example, one of the most common tricks to avoid Flash on websites is to use the Developer menu to make your Mac report itself as being an iOS gadget.
Moreover, users like myself use multiple browsers for different purposes: FireFox, Opera, Mercury, and so forth all have advantages over Safari for many needs.
What I fail to understand is why any user would install Chrome for personal use. You can’t care about personal security and then install that datamining, key-logging Google malware.
I could see students that using Chromebooks possibly having Chrome on their desktops to sync their work and browser settings properly.
I missed the moniker “Internet Exploder”! lol
We used to call it “Intermittent Exploder”.
I still have a few “old” clients that can’t see past IE. They think it’s “the internet”.
I own a few websites, so i always check this stats and its true, somedays safari has more users than even Chrome
Have you considered that the content of your websites might lean towards being of interest mostly to Safari users?
I was a web developer for a company a few years ago and for a couple years had to keep monthly track of overall Internet browser usage.
Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari stayed relatively level (I did notice Safari growing) and Internet Explorer ALWAYS declined. Before I left, the last I saw IE was close to 10% and still declining.
1. Love the automatic syncing bookmarks between iOS devices and the Safari on the Mac.
2. Ghostery is compatible with Safari on Mac
3 For the first time since the 1990’s I’m finally Flashless on a “computer”. Some pages/videos don’t appear because they require Flash, but recently I started using the developer trick and have set the agent to iPad. It works like a champ.
4. I haven’t done too much digging, but is there a way to specifically turn off HTML5 cookies in the iOS and/or Mac Safari browsers like there is in Firefox?
1. meh. auto sync, when it works, is still more bloat. YMMV
2. Ghostery (and the indispensible AdBlock) is also compatible with other browsers
3. sometimes the trick works, sometimes no. I prefer using FlashBlock and when absolutely necessary selectively allowing Flash content that I trust. Sadly, Flash has not yet been killed definitively.
4. Yes. Switch to FireFox for at least some of your browsing. It offers vastly more user controls and customization than Safari ever did.
FireFox is too much of a PITA now that my bookmarks are auto synced in Safari. Plus, if FireFox does have a seamless merge feature with Safari then the data probably resides on their servers, which I’m not comfortable with. When it comes to housing data I trust Apple more than FireFox.
Thanks for the tip on FlashBlock. On the PC’s I ran a Flash super cookie cleaner in Firefox, but it was too kludgy.
Firefox is long-in-the-tooth in various ways at the moment. Their extensions system has been proven to have major security flaws. They’re going to transition to Google Chrome’s extension protocol. I find Firefox to have been remarkably buggy for years. It has its uses! It has some uniquely useful extensions. But overall, I avoid it until required. This is a replay of the degradation of its parent browser, Netscape.