IE 9 Gaining Share, but IE 10 Just Around the Corner
If you are putting off upgrading to Internet Explorer 9 you should know that Internet Explorer 10 is just around the corner. Or maybe consider going with another browser entirely. There seem to be a lot to choose from.
Microsoft knows this well, and is trying to respond. The company actually lost nearly 10 percent of its total browser market share this year (and we still have December to go). But Internet Explorer isn’t just giving way to Firefox, either.
According to PC World Google’s Chrome is up more than seven percent and could even overtake Firefox as the second place browser overall. What is interesting is that in the Microsoft camp IE9 is actually gaining share among Windows 7 users and could even overtake IE8 before IE10 arrives next year.
But what does this really mean? As I’ve noted over the past year, I actually upgraded to IE9 for all of 10 minutes, didn’t like the changes – which I saw as essentially nothing more than – and went back to IE8.
The truth is that I still find that IE8 handles many websites very well, and there are remains a lot of compatibility issues with IE9.
Multiple content management systems (CMS) such as blogging software like Word Press have had problems with IE9. While IE9 offers the compatibility view that, in theory, resolves many of the problems including how pages are laid out, many CMS users still deal with not so small headaches as a result.
This is just one problem that comes from trying to support multiple browser platforms – and this doesn’t even include the Apple iOS browsers or mobile!
Of course this is why companies such as Microsoft opt to stop supporting older browsers, forcing users to get with the program and upgrade. But since the days when Microsoft had nearly 90 percent browser control there have been many options for users, and hence many more platforms for developers to deal with.
And while IE9 does appear to be catching on, Microsoft seems to be thinking ahead. From what little has been released about IE10 it should resolve many of these compatibility issues. So count me as one of the many who will likely upgrade from IE8 to IE10 and likely skip IE9.
Additionally, many users of older Windows operating systems, including XP – which as I noted in August – won’t even be able to go to IE10 -- or, for that matter, IE9. The latter doesn’t technically require Windows 7, and it is available for Windows Vista, but it hasn’t been a smooth ride – and there is little reason to believe Windows Vista and IE 10 will be much better.
The truth in all this is change is inevitable. We can delay it, we can try to avoid it, but eventually it will catch up to us. So while I maintained in the spring that I don’t like change for change’s sake, it seems that at some point before the winter snows melt I’ll have to say goodbye to IE8.
I still don’t like the way that IE9 basically changes everything from IE8 – and as I’ve ranted before I don’t like the “it’s better” line, when the developers won’t admit there was a problem with what I had before.
But this is their business, to develop new and (hopefully) better products. The problem for those small developers that have to work with all these browsers is that they all work so vastly differently. I’m not exactly what you’d call a conformist by a long shot, but ever changing market has so little that uniformity that it makes it a little frustrating at times.
