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With New Year’s Eve fast approaching, we wanted to give an early look at what we expect the share numbers to look like as we close out 2011, as well as take a look back at some of the top moments for the IE team this year.
Last month we predicted that IE9 was on a path to be the number one modern browser on Windows 7 worldwide. As of November, IE9 usage share on Windows 7 worldwide was higher than all versions of Chrome and all versions of Firefox – second only to IE8. Based on where the December data currently stands, we’re pleased to say IE9 is still following that trajectory and will soon take the top spot from IE8 on Windows 7, with usage share expected to come in at nearly 25.6% this month.
Source: Net Applications, December 2011 (monthly data through December 28th).
And once again, we expect the numbers in the US to be particularly encouraging.
Source: Net Applications, December 2011 (monthly data through Dec 28th).
2011 Top 10 Moments, IE Style
Of course, while the growth of IE9 is great for developers and the hundreds of millions of customers that get to experience a better Web, percentage points really only tell part of the story. Looking back at 2011, it was an exciting year for the Internet Explorer team, our customers and partners. Let’s look at some of top moments:
1. The launch of IE9: Together with dozens of partners including AMD, Dell, HP, Hulu, Groupon, Huffington Post, eBay, Slacker, ESPN and Foursquare, we launched IE9 at SXSW. Within 24 hours of that announcement, IE9 was downloaded 2.35 million times. That’s over 27 downloads every second, or over 240 downloads every 9 seconds.
2. The release of IE10 Platform Preview 1 at MIX 11: Just four weeks after the launch of IE9 we released IE10 Platform Preview 1 at MIX 11. We are now up to IE10 Platform Preview 4. The IE10 platform releases have added even more support for HTML5 and by continuing to innovate in areas like hardware acceleration, IE’s performance capabilities continue to shine.
3. Reimagining the browser with Windows 8: Although we gave an early look at IE10 through the Platform Previews, the real story came to life at Build when we showcased how IE10 will work with Windows 8 on new touch devices. Windows 8 will include one HTML5 based browsing engine that powers two browsing experiences: a new, metro-style experience that is perfect for Windows 8 touch devices as well as the desktop experience.
4. Amazing Web Experiences coming to life with HTML5: We’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing developers to create a number of truly killer HTML5 experiences this year. Two of our favorites:
5. IE9 recognized as the top browser for malware protection, according to NSS: NSS Labs, the independent security research and testing organization, released two reports in August that showed Internet Explorer continues to offer the best protection against socially engineered malware. According to the global test conducted by NSS, “IE9 caught an exceptional 96% of the live threats with SmartScreen URL reputation, and an additional 3.2% with Application Reputation.” Given that socially engineered malware is one of the top online security threats, we’re pretty darn proud of this one.
6. Helping to protect consumer privacy – IE9 includes Tracking Protection: When we launched the IE9 Release Candidate in February it included a significant new feature, Tracking Protection, a new technology that gave people more control of their privacy online while they browse the Web. With IE’s tracking protection and support from numerous third party organizations including Abine, TRUSTe, EasyList and PrivacyChoice consumers can both express their intent not to be tracked online and with a single click subscribe to a trusted 3rd party tracking protection list to prevent the tracking from occurring.
7. Orchestrating the demise of IE6: Yes, along with the rest of the world, we’d really like to see people move off of IE6, so much so that we launched a site dedicated to that end in March. Thank you to the nearly 1000 sites and thousands of developers who have partnered with us to encourage people to move off IE6, and congratulations to those countries in our Champions circle, you will have even more regions joining you soon (hint, hint).
8. Announcing plans to bring auto upgrades to IE. The community response to this news has been overwhelmingly positive, with users around the world applauding the decision to enable auto updates for IE users. One of our favorite tweets was from @zeldman: MSIE auto-updates: a holiday gift to web developers everywhere. http://is.gd/Dx2650.
9. Having some fun along the way: This is actually more than just one moment, but worth a shout out regardless. Whether it was sending some baked goods to our friends at Mozilla, “beanie-ing up” in support of Web standards, helping to host the first annual W3C conference, providing a few tips on when to update your parents’ browser, wrapping presents for little ones or sponsoring the first New Game Conference, we tried to stop and have a little fun throughout the year.
10. IE9 poised to become the leading browser on Windows 7: Okay, maybe it’s a bit early to list this one since we still have a little ways to go, but we are quickly heading in the right direction, which definitely earns a spot on the top 10 list.
We’ll see what the final numbers have to say when they come out on January 1, 2012. We’ll provide an update then.
In the meantime, thank you to everyone for a wonderful 2011 and Happy New Year!
Roger Capriotti Director, Internet Explorer Marketing
When is Internet Explorer going to support a free and open format for HTML5 Audio, HTML5 Video, and HTML5 media capture APIs?
Currently supports mp3's for audio (which require developers to pay licensing fees for their apps/games www.mp3licensing.com/.../games.html ) versus supporting the open and free Ogg Vorbis format that other browsers support.
Likewise IE supports h.264 for video - a format that is DRM encumbered, not free for all uses, and most certainly not open.
To cap it off - according to the silence by Microsoft on the IE Blog the media capture API's are not currently slated to fix either of these issues.
When will Microsoft fix these bugs with IE so that IE can be fully HTML5 Compliant too?
@openweb
There is absolutely no reason to go with 'open', lower quality stuff, unless you're already using a Linux-based operating system, in which case, you won't be using IE.
I always use IE9 and just logged in to make a comment. I got really frusturated with the scroll. IE9 scroll is so retarded. Why should i force myself to use IE9? I am a fan of MS engineering team. I admire every product MS came up with. I don't expect anything good on IE10. Just make the the IE9 work. All other browsers and even applications can work so smooth on my computer, except IE9's scroll. I am not looking for fancy GPU acceleration or anything. Just remember, it wont take much time for a customer to hate a product. It wont be easy to get them back. Also stop doing your own standards. You are not the top anymore in browser. You give good tools for developers, but why make the webdevelopers life so hard by having your own web standards? If i can read a news website good in all the browsers except IE who's problem is it? I wont blame the web developer. He did his job good. Just copy this whole comment and send it to your IE team head (if it has one). You got the best engineers in the world. But why can't you all decide something simple? When i use IE in my lab (im the only one who uses it), people laugh at me when the scroll just jumps at its own phase. Seriously, why sould they laugh at me for using IE 9? its actually you guys who did the worst product. I got 5+ years experience in web develpment. IE makes the life difficult for both developers and end users.
Any comments?
@eboy:
Well, I don't know about the scroll but you have a point there: I also like to see several ancient bugs solved. But until now, I have sent multiple bug reports to the Internet Explorer team on Microsoft Connect but the IE team always tagged them as "won't fix". In multiple cases, they misunderstood the report and obviously did not follow the steps I highlighted in "How to Reproduce the Issue" section and paid no further attention to my comments.
So, even if they send your whole comment to the head of the IE team, I do not believe anything good will come out of it.
This is for "eboy". You asked for comments. I gather from your experience that you are full-grown, adult. It is really sad that someone with your level on intelligence stoops so low to use "retarded" when describing IE9. Not only does it make you seem terribly uneducated and immature, you also give the impression that you are just plain ignorant.
These statistics don't really mean anything. The fact that Windows 7 is the OS being used makes these figures useless.