According to quiris and marcoos, this week, Internet Explorer usage was less than 80 percent of polish market (with Firefox 12%, Gecko 13,79% according to Gemius).
The last time, I saw IE<80% was exactly four years ago. In July 2001 when on www.sports.pl we measured 79.21% of market share for IE. Four long years.
Can you imagine, that when for the last time IE in Poland had less than 80%:
- There was no IE6.0. – IE6.0 was released 3 months later
- Netscape was in 6.1PR version, and Mozilla in its version 0.9.2
- There were such standards as CSS lvl 2, XHTML 1.0, DOM lvl2 – those standards were ready even in year 2000! And the web starts implementing them in mid 2005! And in mid 2005 around 80% of market browsers have big problems with support for those standards!!
- There was no Firefox nor Mozilla Suite for public usage.
- Alladyn already exists and was for sure the very first JSLib that supported Gecko (W3C DOM and -moz-opacity)!
- MozillaPL was created 5 months later, and
- my first bug in b.m.o was filed 5 months later. – I use it as a start tag of my work with Mozilla because I joined MozillaPL and started reading b.m.o. then.
- “Mozilla” was mentioned for the first time in Polish usenet almost year later (24.Nov.2002)
- “Firefox” was mentioned (by me) on 09.Feb.2004, “Phoenix” on 14.Mar.2003
- More than 150 000 bugs in b.m.o was resolved since then
- And overall, it was 4 busy years of work to move from IE3/Netscape3 world to this day
While looking for data to this article, I was searching many pl.* newsgroups and forums, and found so many of people who are here today. More than a half of people discussing on pl.comp.www the future of Netscape browser on November 2001 are working around MozillaPL today. Thanks to their great work, passion and help over those years, we’re near to the end of monopoly, propertary standards and “the hell of World Wide Web”.
The next big step will be 50%. Is this possible? Hey – just look what we did!
2 replies on “IE less than 80%!”
Don’t get used to this declining usage of MSIE. Firefox is being pitched to the public in a way that gives Firefox users on Microsoft Windows no reason to continue to use Firefox when the new MSIE comes out (part of the next Microsoft Windows system upgrade, I gather).
The pitch to use Firefox doesn’t include any talk about software freedom, so Microsoft has a golden opportunity to distribute a proprietary browser that can compete on all the technical merit Firefox has and thus win back whatever popularity MSIE has lost. Firefox’s technical merit is considerable, but there isn’t anything Firefox does on a technical level MSIE couldn’t do too (if not specifically, then generally, in the case of things like XUL; MSIE will have something comparable when considered from a sufficiently high level).
If Firefox advocates were clever, they would pitch Firefox to their friends and neighbors on a feature no proprietary browser can match: software freedom. Proprietors hate it when free software advocates frame the debate along lines proprietors are utterly incapable of competing on.
> but there isn’t anything Firefox does on a technical level MSIE couldn’t do too
Yes, there is. Microsoft will not do anything that could lowerize their incomes.
> no reason to continue to use Firefox when the new MSIE comes out
MSIE 7.0, FWIK will use the same engine (Trident) which means old security issues will stay and overall security level will probably quite similar because the browser still wll be mixed with OS. They will does not support much more w3c standards which can lead to ostracism. There are many reasons, and IE7 won’t solve most of them.
And we’re innovative. Still. Fx 1.1 and Fx 1.5 will be innovative while IE7 will just try to catch up Fx 1.0. I don’t think we’ll be out of reasons for switch then 😉