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Who Cares About Chrome. Internet Explorer 6 Has 25% Market Share
FYI – There is a press event setup for 2pm Eastern today – we will live blog this along with CNET’s Webware. You can watch the press event here.
At my company, Kloudshare, a big part of what we are developing involves pushing boundaries of what browsers are expected to do. Generally speaking this is the case industry wide as the web browser is becoming more and more a real application delivery system.
Google understands this issue and has apparently been focused on some of the more glaring weaknesses of the current crop of browsers. As such, they have decided to launch a new browser called Chrome, to try to bring browsers into the 21st century.
This has the blogosphere all excited. Everyone is writing about the features of the new browser, and its strategic significance. The product sounds great, but I can only get but so excited.
Why?
Because as a developer, Chrome seems to me to be little more than pissing in the wind.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer controls around 75% of the browser market, and that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that Internet Explorer version 6 has 25% of the market.
IE 6 launched in August of 2001.When IE 6 Launched the attacks of 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We were in the middle of the 1.0 tech bubble. In fact, if I had had kids when IE 6 was introduced they would be in second grade this year.
And yet 25% of the market is still using it. I’m not sure, but I believe it still comes on XP installation disks. In any case the fact that Microsoft has nothing in place to induce a higher upgrade rate is damn near criminal.
And so I must contrast all of the breathless excitement over chrome with the fact that the browser with #2 market share is so bad in 2008 terms it is just barely capable of delivering modern experiences. And even to do that, *lots* of engineering goes into supporting this trailing edge of the browser market.
I’d love to see a study of how much time is wasted developing special case crap for IE 6. I suspect if you added it all up we could solve world hunger or something.
All I know is that for me, as a writer, Chrome is a fun story — as a developer, not so much. As a developer, Chrome is very much a story for the next decade and has nothing to do with my 2008 or even 2009 challenges. In fact it will be a cause for celebration if I care at all even in 2010.
The bottom line is Microsoft has been fighting the browser wars with spitballs and plastic knives and they are still beating Firefox handily. So Chrome, from a business perspective, for the forseeable future, is totally irrelevant.
This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.
Finally I found a different and practical point of view to chrome.
I dont have stats about how much time gets wasted to make web 2.0 apps compliant to IE 6 but I can share what we went through.
Kreeo is one of the platforms that is 100% Ajax (page never reloads). We spent 40-50% of our total development time till date, debugging and making it IE 6 compliant (we created our own ajax framework),
Today 90% of bugs we are facing are still IE6 specific. Our target segment is working professionals and most organizations haven’t upgraded to even IE7. We hope IE 6 install base becomes 0 ASAP and that’s why we promote FF 3 :)
our site is in the 35-60 year old market and ours is even slightly more than 25% still using IE6 (we even have some netscape users – go figure).
Ironically, another project I work in a table-less site (purely css driven) works better in IE6 than IE7.
This is a huge drain of resources on start-ups. I suppose it’s job security for some but I too look at this with my heart sighing thinking “not another browser we have to support….”
Phew! At least someone isn’t blindly praising Chrome (hint: Michael Arrington ) as if it’s the solution to the world’s problems. There is no way Chrome is going to beat any browser yet. If it can, it will beat only Opera or Safari. No way is this newbie going to hurt Internet Explorer or even Firefox. Plus, we haven’t seen Google Talk or Gmail hurting it’s competitors so far.
And also agree with this point:
“The bottom line is Microsoft has been fighting the browser wars with spitballs and plastic knives and they are still beating Firefox handily.”
Even with all the issues of IE, it still rules the market. So, I don’t see Chrome as a threat to IE at all. Or even the Windows OS, as some have been putting it as.
The 25% number is simple. Corporations.
IT departments are loathe to change browsers, worried it will break all the custom software they’ve built on top of IE6. Microsoft can’t do anything about this, so please stop blaming them.
There are still quite a few things (mostly JavaScript quirks) that work in IE6 and IE7, but don’t work in Safari, FireFox, Chrome.
Whether these things are W3C standards or Microsoft bastardizations of legitimate JavaScript, if you want to steal away the 75% market share, you have to make a browser that won’t break existing code.