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TheeXile

IE8 is the best browser in the world!

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Except in the EU, it will be illegal for Microsoft to distribute IE with Windows 7. Firefox also has larger market share than IE in that area of the world, and IE's overall share in all area has been steadily decreasing for years now.

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Enjay said:

For me, the biggest problem with flash is still loading time. A "normal" site can be loaded and clickable in a very short space of time.

Not particularly Flash's fault. Designers tend to cram too much shit into them just because it's Flash. They also almost never use dynamic resource loading or a more clever "onload frame" approach.

Normal sites with complex functionality; usually implemented via AJAX, take their sweet time too. The reason is very simple, you better not click on my shit until the Javascript events point to valid objects!

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I always wondered how could a "market share" be defined for something that is not being paid for upfront or even indirectly, like a web browser. Firefox is free, Opera is free, Safari is Free, hell, even IE was always free (even when it was a part of the OS, there were still downloadable versions and versions for Mac OS).

Yet, I keep reading "IE gained market share", "Firefox dominates the market", "a new competing browser has entered the browser market" etc.

All fine and well, except that nobody is actually being paid, at least not on a per-copy-sold basis. Sure, the programmers at Microsoft got paid for their work, Safari's and Netscape must have been paid by their companies too...but who employs Firefox's programmers? And most importantly, what user(s) have actually paid for their browser in the last decade?

"Usage share" would be more appropriate, unless I'm missing something.

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Maes said:

All fine and well, except that nobody is actually being paid

Wrong.

Browser share is measured by collecting the User Agent from the browser when it requests pages from a webserver. Parties who release browser share information collate their numbers from a variety of sources, with the idea logically to survey a diverse range of sites to provide an impartial view of the "browsersphere".

For example, a news site is likely to be visited by regular everyday people just doing their usual stuff on their personal computer, probably with their browser of choice. This may provide a more impartial idea than say a site for web standards, which is is likely to be visited by more people interested in that subject and often those people will use a non-IE browser. The W3 site above is a good example of this. Services such as Google Analytics exist to provide this info to webmasters, so they can better tailor their site to their main audience if they so desire.

Sure it's not exactly accurate, but when you're talking two decimal points of a percent over millions of installs, it's accurate enough. Trends are usually the best any mass application of statistics can hope to achieve, and they do circumstantially prove that something is happening, and it's happening more or less over time.

You can get more info out of a browser, such as someone's IP address which allows geolocation to extrapolate location, language, timezone, etc etc. You can see the referring URL, so you can tell if most of your visitors are coming in from Google, or another search engine, or via a link someone else has put to your page.

A browser is not just a software device for displaying webpages. Most commonly, it can be the primary window into a "default" search provider (and probably the only way Bing will get its' foot in the door with IE8), which can be very lucrative as the link at the top of my post shows. A browser can also be an application platform, allowing one party to gain and keep market share if their advantage is good enough. Ain't no ActiveX on Linux! You want that, you need to run Windows. "This site is attacking you, but luckily Microsoft protected you. Click here to find more ways Microsoft is protecting you." While you're there, buy Windows 7, buy the new Office, buy everything!

Whilst I'm sure the Mozilla project started out as a philanthropic effort to continue the Netscape code based on the belief that it was simply a better browser, the market for making programs that display webpages is definitely money-driven today.

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Super Jamie said that Maes said:

All fine and well, except that nobody is actually being paid

Maes actually said:

All fine and well, except that nobody is actually being paid, at least not on a per-copy-sold basis.


Super Jamie, please try not cutting essential parts of one's statements next time, especially if that would make them appear altered and out of context :-p

Of course I know there's some revenue associated at least with Mozilla (due to their partnership and sponsoring by Google), although I never quite understood how even Google made any money (ok, I can search for the answer and find out that it's mostly advertising, but that's still not a direct detail payment on a per-user basis).

Don't ask me how and who pays Microsoft for every user using IE however. I guess that they are operating at a loss, hoping to recuperate money with the same scheme as Google. Opera was (and is?) adware, and Safari...doh, beats me.

In any case, there's not a direct retail market in the usual sense for web browsers (if you exclude initiatives such as the Mozilla Store), only indirect potential profits. Users, per-se, never paid a dime for their browsers. And advertising revenue is also highly volatile and the "plug" could be pulled out at any instant, if deemed unprofitable.

Well..then again, I'm not the greatest business/market economist alive :-p

I guess this all falls into the more generic trick quesion "Who pays for the Internet?" ;-)

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Super Jamie said:

Except in the EU, it will be illegal for Microsoft to distribute IE with Windows 7. Firefox also has larger market share than IE in that area of the world, and IE's overall share in all area has been steadily decreasing for years now.

If new computers aren't being shipped with IE, what will they be shipped with?

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arrrgh said:

If new computers aren't being shipped with IE, what will they be shipped with?

Whatever the computer manufacturers put on them, I guess. Which could include IE.

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arrrgh said:

If new computers aren't being shipped with IE, what will they be shipped with?

I'm not sure, but they'll probably add installers for IE and some other browser on the desktop and make the user install it on his own, or maybe include a separate IE installer cd. Or if you buy a ready computer, then the manufacturer will put whatever they want in there.

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arrrgh said:

If new computers aren't being shipped with IE, what will they be shipped with?


Nothing. There's no actual de-jure requirement that a computer should be shipped with anything.

De facto, Microsoft has made it hard not to ship a computer with Windows preinstalled. They should in theory use a "dumbed down" version of Windows without IE, but that requirement was buzzed ever since the Win 98 and IE4 days, and it's not even technically possible.

What they really do is removing the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop (the actual code couldn't be removed in Win98, unless you seriously hacked everything up) as not to "coerce" people into using it straight from the box. De-facto, I've never seen those dumbed-down versions being used anywhere, also because most copies of windows are warez.

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arrrgh said:

If new computers aren't being shipped with IE, what will they be shipped with?

There is talk of manufacturers including their own browser selection (Welcome to your new PC! Please Choose Dell Internet Explorer or Dell Firefox), or it could be an exercise left for the user.

Previously, yes, Windows' explorer.exe has been able to integrate iexplore.exe into the shell, and easily go from Win32 file-browsing mode into Trident internet-browsing mode seamlessly (Konquerer in KDE does the same thing using QT4 and Webkit).

With Windows 7, I believe there has been talk of modularising certain components of the OS so you actually can truly remove Internet Explorer. This makes sense from a speed, stability and security perspective, and is a legal requirement if Microsoft wish to sell Windows 7 in the EU. Though honestly I haven't read much more about it from a technical point of view.

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The obligatory link to Toastytech's Internet Explorer is Evil! page.

"Removing" IE from windows has been the holy grail of desktop computing ever since version 4.x

It could be done even back then, but the process was convoluted, and MS never really gave in to the "requirement" of making it optional, citing OS integration reasons. They bypassed the "requirement" in every version of Windows to date, and will probably do so with Windows 7, too.

As I said, I never saw those almost-mythical "European IE-free" versions of Windows.

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Super Jamie said:

Probably because they're not out yet.


Of course Windows 7 news overshadow anything else ATM, but I was referring to similar hype and new about previous versions of Windows (including but not limited to Win Me, Win XP and Vista) that also "were to be released in Europe without IE" but were never actually done, or at least the measure wasn't enforced. We'll see.

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There's only ever been an EU ruling against Media Player being included in Windows. This was released as "Windows XP N" in 2005 (maybe 04), however nobody bought it because you could buy normal XP instead.

With "7 minus IE", it will be the only Windows 7 available in Europe.

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not sure if I should post this, right now we flaming IE, it's very dangerous to go against this growd - I installed Firefox.

Sure enaugh, even so I got Flash comming out of my ears on my comp, it (Firefox) reminded me to downloaded it on every site I visited with flash content. Every thing, from my sites, and others did not load. I stick with IE6 for now.

Firefox seems is a nicer browser, less cluttered p, but I have no patience interfacing a browser with my system, nor study help files to get it working. I know people hate Windows, but they cater to the non-pro, microwave generation, ignoramuses, which is the vast majority ... btw I am also one of them :D I don't know everything.

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The real failure about IE8 is that it gave me the Newdoom forum as a "suggested location" ;-)

@Super Jamie: I can't be assed to dig through outdated news and old magazines but the Windows minus IE gripe is a story that has been dragged along ever since Windows 98.

So far MS managed to get away with it and I doubt a single IE-less copy of Windows was ever shipped or even beta tested. It was requested with 98, with Me, with XP and Vista and none of them actually got done that way, and if it did, the chances of finding a "neutered" copy of any version of windows in actual use are pretty slim. Yeah, the media player is a different affair but even that was only a very partial "success" for anti-trust authorities. Given the long list of bugs and incompatibilities that already are generating over Win7-IE, I doubt that will gain much of a foothold.

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