Yes, Internet Explorer is on the wane in Europe
Post ballot screen slippage
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Internet Explorer's European market share has decreased noticeably since Microsoft rolled out its browser ballot screen to EU Windows users, according to new data from net research firm Quantcast.
Redmond introduced its ballot screen on March 1, after settling an antitrust complaint with the European Commission, and in a blog post, Quantcast says that March 1 was the last day IE handled a majority of Europe's web traffic. IE's share may have dropped as much as 5 per cent in the three weeks since:
According to the firm's preliminary numbers, Mozilla's Firefox is the main beneficiary of Microsoft's slide. "Recent data suggests that Mozilla's Firefox has seen the largest boost from the choice screen, but we'll have to wait a little longer to see the full impact of the forced choice on Microsoft's share," Quantcast says:
Quantcast's post follows an oft-repeated story from Reuters that says Internet Explorer has lost market share in France, Italy, and Britain since the ballot screen went live, citing numbers from research outfit Statcounter. According to Reuters, Internet Explorer's share has dropped 2.5 per cent in France, one per cent in Britain and 1.3 per cent in Italy.
But Statcounter's overall European numbers indicate that IE's share has held steady over the past month:
As Betanews points out, Internet Explorer's share did take a dip over this past weekend, but it takes a dip every weekend, as users leave their work machines for their home machines.
In any event, Opera says it has seen its European downloads more than double since the ballot screen was rolled out, and Mozilla says it has seen "significant" European growth as well. ®
COMMENTS
I'm a PC
I imagine that IE8 will get a massive boost from the current IE8-centric TV ads.
Do Microsoft truly believe their customers are as brain-dead as the people portrayed in those ads?
Ouch!
How long have you been nursing that particular grudge then?
Personally, I've been using Firefox since version 1. I use Firefox under Windows 7 (which I changed well before this current switch screen palaver), Windows XP, various forms of Linux and have even used the beta of version 2 for RISC OS.
No, Firefox isn't perfect. Neither is IE. However Firefox is certainly not the heap of poo that you imply as, if you had used it a little more recently and in a bit more depth, you would probably know.
You cite ignorance for the move away from IE. Could you also not consider that the same ignorance is exactly what has kept so many users on IE (the browser that Microsoft ships with the OS) for all these years?
So why did I change? In the beginning it was because Firefox was infinitely more secure than the IE of the time, and that I had tried Opera and Firefox and preferred Firefox. These days, I can't always make the same claim about security but, now that I am forced at work to use IE and nothing else, I can compare the experiences and find that Firefox provides better functionality overall, in my opinion, than IE. (oh, and if there are any Safari fans out there, yes, I did give it a go when I was trialling Windows 7 Beta, but I wasn't impressed. Too big, bloated and slow. I did try Google Chrome on my old XP box but, when it crashed the system, leaving me with a total mess that I had to reconstruct, I gave up on that right away!)
I do agree, however, with your very last statement. It will certainly be interesting to see how things go from here, especially if countries in other regions outside the EU start pushing for a similar option to choose.
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