Browser Share News
Very interesting to read today that IE continues to have its market share eaten away by the competition. Naturally, the lion’s share of this is accounted for by Firefox, but Safari and even the “blip-on-the-radar” Opera gained in 2008.
ReadWriteWeb reports that Firefox has properly consolidated its 20% share and continues to push higher. The report suggests that while IE8 may help Microsoft’s cause with its high degree of standards adherence and baked-in Firebug alternative, all the Web Slices and Accelerators in the world won’t change the fact that you still can’t extend IE in the same way as Firefox or Chrome.
I spoke to Matt Heller (Internet Explorer Product Manager) at last year’s TechEd developer’s conference about extensibility in IE. While Microsoft have put in a great deal of effort into rebuilding the rendering engine from the ground up, the chances of seeing the level of extensibility in IE in the near future are next to zero. This is because IE is so closely integrated with the Windows kernel.
IE7′s platform for adoption was the enhanced security. With so many vulnerabilities being identified in IE6, all the effort and attention was given mainly to hardening the browser and making it more stable, secure and reliable. Now that that job is largely complete (although market dominance and slow glacial release cycles will work against it), attention is given to compliance. However, opening up the browser’s internal workings for extension by all and sundry in the development world also effectively means undoing all that security work since it would create a veratible smorgasbord of new security flaws and vulnerabilities, exposing the OS to all kinds of naughty behaviours.
Heller believes it would be version 10 of IE at best (or another 5 years, whichever arrives sooner) before it was able to compete with the sorts of flexibility that Firefox offers. Perhaps that is why, in true Microsoft style, it is trying to make the browser more focussed on the experience. Everything these days out of Redmond needs to be an experience. It’s not enough to just get the job done, the user has to experience it as well. By offering features such as Web Slices, Accelerators, InPrivate browsing and other such tools, Microsoft hopes that it will continue to provide something to the “Mum and Dad” users that differentiate IE from the alternatives and keep that trusty and familiar application comfy and safe for that large market.
Meanwhile, what will this mean to the development community? My serious hope here is that these statistics give new impetus to the argument of dropping all support of IE6. This will probably be greatly helped with the RTM of IE8, when it can be argued that the market share of IE6 is low enough to effectively force users to upgrade. For their own good (from a security point of view at least) and that of the development community at large.
