Both Microsoft and Mozilla will be disappointed to learn that so far, nothing much has changed. Internet Explorer is down yet again, dropping 0.81 points to 55.11 percent. Firefox experienced a small drop of 0.17 points, to 21.63 percent. Chrome was up 0.37 points to 11.94 percent, and Safari was up 0.54 points to 7.15 percent. The implication from this is that the new browsers, though both substantial upgrades over their predecessors, are doing little to attract users of other browsers; the people switching to them are merely upgraders.
Upgrade failures
Both browsers show another trait not found in Chrome—a hardcore minority of users sticking with ancient versions of the software, and a slow process of upgrading. Internet Explorer is the best-known victim of this, with fully one-third of Internet Explorer users sticking with version 6 or 7, and only 4.5 percent of Internet Explorer users using the latest and greatest version. Firefox's situation is not as pronounced—12 percent of users are on 3.5 or below—but still shows some of this same "stickiness"; only 25 percent of Firefox users are on version 4.Microsoft argues that users should have control over their browser as a matter of principle, and that corporations specifically require control over the upgrade process. The company makes it easy to opt out even from security updates, let alone feature upgrades. From a certain standpoint, this is obviously a fair point—it's the user's computer (or the corporation's computer), not Microsoft's, so the user should ultimately be in control.
But putting users in control has external costs. Worm epidemics, botnet trojans, and other malware incur costs for more than just the infected; spam, for example, costs virtually every user of e-mail both time and money. Almost all large-scale virus and worm infections are a result of users refusing to install patches as they are made available. People who walk around with untreated tuberculosis can be forcibly restrained until they are cured, because of the threat to public health that they cause, and many argue that people who use unpatched computers should be similarly penalized—a motive that would strongly encourage automatic patching, at the very least.
Automatic feature upgrades are a little harder to justify—people are allowed to be anachronistic, just not health hazards—but refusal to upgrade to modern browsers does result in similar costs to owners and operators of Web sites. Web developers around the world would rejoice if Microsoft would aggressively roll out upgrades to force Internet Explorer users onto version 9 where possible and version 8 otherwise, and such a move would allow a much wider range of much richer Web applications. It would also be far more effective than the company's current marketing campaigns to encourage people to upgrade.
The success of Google's Chrome—the only browser to show any consistent growth these days—also suggests that users are less bothered about "control" than perhaps Microsoft believes. As long as the updates are automatic, reliable, and most importantly, unobtrusive, automatic updating is proving popular. A happy medium might be to make automatic updating the default, but allow corporations to defer updating for a limited amount of time to accommodate testing. In this way, home users would be kept current, even if compatibility constraints prevented businesses from living on the cutting edge.
Ultimately, a failure to push out updates undermines the development work invested in the browser. Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 are both excellent browsers, but this excellence counts for nothing if users are sticking with old versions. This hurts Microsoft particularly; not only is the leap from 8 to 9 greater than Firefox's leap from 3.6 to 4, but perceptions of the browser are also strongly influenced by Internet Explorer 6 and 7. If the only versions people had to care about were 8 and 9 then the feelings of outright hatred that the browser has earned over the years might finally start to recede.
The full article can be found at http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/05/web-browser-market-share-upgrade-analysis.ars
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