This article was published on February 2, 2010

Internet Explorer 8 World’s Most Popular Browser – How Can We Help These Huddled Masses?


Internet Explorer 8 World’s Most Popular Browser – How Can We Help These Huddled Masses?

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Hot on the heels of the news that Windows 7 had crossed the 10% mark, the Internet Explorer team had something of their own to crow about.

Internet Explorer 8 is now the worlds single most popular internet browser, being the program of choice for some 25.6% of all internet users. Of course, as any web developer will tell you, if any of those users came at the expense of IE 6, then good on Microsoft.

Internet Explorer 8 is built by Microsoft who has pushed the browser like rickety a cart up a steep hill, with gusto. Even past their huge advertising budgets, you have to give Microsoft credit for so quickly taking their new browser to the number one spot, even in the face of a new enemy (Chrome), and an entrenched competitor (Firefox).

They almost made it look easy.

Internet Explorer is a rather unpopular brand in the technology world, with many complaining that it breaks code that other browsers have no problem rendering, and is slow enough to hurt the user’s internet experience. It consistently fails standards tests, and seems to always lag behind in features, its larger development budget failing to help.

The Microsoft had a number of horns to blow in their blog post, saying that “as of today, Internet Explorer 8 has done over 350 million malware blocksInternet Explorer 7 and 8 have blocked a total of over 125 million phishing sites… We launched just less than a year ago, so it’s both humbling and thrilling to see so many people choose our product so quickly.”

All I can ask is how can we help these people move from Internet Explorer, and to a modern browser? Between Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and even Maxthon, there is a fit for everyone. No one should have to use Internet Explorer without knowing what else is an option.



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