An opinion piece ran by TGDaily founder Wolfgang Gruener has lambasted Microsoft for botching the launch of Internet Explorer 8. While the editorial is littered with statistics that appear to support Gruener’s claim, the piece misses the very disparate cultural approaches of the Internet Explorer and Firefox user bases.
Browser demographics are as much an art as they are a science. The science is in compiling and crunching the data, but the art is in selecting a portfolio of sites that do not predominantly prefer a single browser. The two major players in this demographics industry are Omniture and NetApplications, both of whom make a business out of tracking and reporting web-related metrics. Given their commanding presences in the industry, we can reliably assume that their web metrics do in fact represent a broad cross-section of users and their proficiency with the Internet.
Like many sites, Icrontic also records browser demographics with Google Analytics. We know as much about the browser trends and percentages for our site as NetApplications appears to for the broader Internet. However, there’s one important distinction between our data and that of NetApplications: We are a site written for and by geeks. We are not the “broad cross-section” of users that NetApplications tracks, so we are uniquely positioned to reveal some trends that TGDaily apparently overlooked. Let’s do some comparisons:
Contrasting the uptake and use of browsers amongst geeks makes for several important points:
- Geeks are vastly more likely to try alternative browsers. Firefox’s representation is 113% higher amongst tech enthusiasts than amongst the general public.
- Geeks don’t wait for Windows Update. Tech enthusiasts are 379% more likely to update their browser in advance of an automatic update.
- Geeks are continuing to download and use Internet Explorer 8 while your “average user” is returning to the comfort of their familiar browser.
So what does this data tell us? Not that the launch of Internet Explorer 8 was a failure as TGDaily concludes, but rather that the Firefox 3 launch benefited from an especially savvy user base that responds to updates much faster than the general populace.
In fact, Microsoft is a company that has been historically plagued by a user base that’s apathetic to updates. Omniture analyst Geoff Johnston once remarked that the transition from IE6 to IE7 was slowed by “consumer apathy, or laziness” which “is extremely difficult to overcome.” Consider also the 2006 MySpace banner virus that infected over one million users a full six months after Microsoft had patched the exploit used. Even a tectonic shift like the release of Windows Vista has been mired in user apathy that has never entirely been overcome.
Moving away from Firefox, we can compare the IE8 launch to that of Safari 3.1, which should have benefited from automatic installation via the Apple Software Update service bundled with every copy of iTunes. I don’t think the size of the Windows iTunes user base needs articulation. The NetApplications data shows that the uptake of the browser during its automatic installation period of 3/18/08 – 4/18/08 peaked at 00.23%; this is but a fraction of the standing IE8 uptake at time of publication, yet nobody has dared to call the Safari 3.1 launch a failure.
With Internet Explorer 8’s inclusion in the arrestingly popular Windows 7, and its impending release on the Windows Automatic Update service in April, I think anyone can see that IE8 is primed for explosive growth. The launch of Internet Explorer 8 is no more a failure than the launch of Safari, and certainly not a failure when you actually stop to consider the vast cultural differences between users of Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is unfortunate that Wolfgang Gruener missed these things in his exercise to prove that a body of data can be abused to prove any point.
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