Ben Parr of Mashable.com reports that, according to current trends, IE will be going the way of the Dodo in 2021. Or, at least, it won’t be the leading browser. This, in and of itself is great news – but do we really have to wait that long? Ugh.
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6 Comments
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The best point I got out of your comment, Danny, was that we can speed up this trend by education. Good point. Maybe I’ll do something about that in the near future.
Trendlines are not indicative of the future. By the same reasoning, because the last two days were 10°F colder than the previous days, it should be 0°F by the end of the week. Obviously not going to happen.
(For more fun, try using a trendline to predict the stock market.)
A trendline can only predict the future IF ALL OF THE INPUTS TO THE SYSTEM REMAIN UNCHANGED. That means that all web development stops, the W3C stops writing new specs, no new browser versions, and no new hardware platforms appear. We all know that none of those are true.
There are several interesting dynamics in the web browser world right now:
1. The Internet Explorer team seems to be making reasonable progress in features, standards compliance, and security. (The Protected Mode security model in IE still trumps anything Firefox has, and they went further/faster on the phishing features.)
2. Google Chrome came out of nowhere, and its 1.0 release is about 99% of what most people need. If their future releases can address most of the criticisms, they can easily eat up Firefox’s marketshare.
As for taking on IE, Chrome seems to have a brighter long-term future than Firefox, because Google can afford to pay PC retailers to pre-install it (which decides how most people pick a web browser). Chrome is also the only other browser to have a sandboxing system similar to IE.
3. The platforms and use-cases for web browsing are changing, thanks to the introduction of mobile devices.
Noted. And, I probably should have stated it even more clearer than “according to current trends” that this was merely speculation at best. I was more quipping about the fact that I thought 2012 was far too long to have IE taken over as the top browser.
Personally, I feel as though Microsoft has had the opportunity for many years to be a leader in many fields (besides Market Share) and it doesn’t seem as though they’ve stepped up to that plate. That is my opinion of course. This doesn’t withhold the possibility that they are actively trying to change that now or will in the future – but it sure seems as though they could have done a much better job at a lot of things.
I hope there are MORE browsers released between now and the downfall of IE’s market share being considerably lowered. Competition is always good for us consumers. As a developer, I wish every company would simply follow standards to the T and make it easy. As a browser I want them to fight it out and let the cream rise to the top.
I have no idea how the market will go. I’m just saying that using a trendline to predict anything is faulty.
Trends are exactly that, the direction things are going right now. You can extrapolate hypothesis based on trends, but those results should be taken with quite a bit of salt and consideration for the variables.
Observable trend result hypothesis’ are a good way for someone to gauge where they need to focus. You could create a trend hypothesis that, based on your current eating and exercise habits, you would gain weight, feel worse, and eventually have larger health problems. Knowing a potential possibility allows you to make decisions and choose how to you act now to influence your future.
The IE team working to make a better browser than they have right now is an example of this. No doubt in my mind, they look at these trends and say, what can we do to change these trends? What can we do to improve our browser so it changes the current trends?