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Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge browsers may be near the bottom of their unprecedented crash in user share, measurements published Sunday show.
Analytics vendor Net Applications reported that the user share of IE and Edge -- an estimate of the proportion of the world's personal computer owners who ran those browsers -- dropped by seven-tenths of a percentage point in December, falling to a combined 26.2%.
That seven-tenths of a point decline was notable because it was less than half that of the browsers' average monthly reductions over the last 12, six and three months, which were 1.9, 1.8 and 1.5 points, respectively. The slowly-shrinking averages over the three different spans supported the idea that IE and Edge may be reaching rock bottom.
Microsoft's browser collapse has been unparalleled. In 2016, IE and Edge -- Net Applications pours their user share into the same "bucket" -- shed 20.1 points, representing 43% of its December 2015 share. No other browser has bled that much user share that quickly, with the possible exception of Netscape Navigator in the 1990s.
I know we love to hate Microsoft in general and IE in particular, but is Edge that bad?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1) by charon on Thursday January 05 2017, @07:39PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @08:34PM
It is actually bad. Almost everything about it is bad. It UI feels like beta software, in that some parts of the UI are responsive and others are not. It hides settings in different areas, so you have to remember which way of accessing them gives you which settings. It barfs on some pages and some pages barf on it. It has extensions, but you have to manually change the manifest to make most of them work. The built in Flash player is irritating to control. Some settings magically reset themselves to defaults or, on one occasion I had, to a third option. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday January 06 2017, @12:29AM
The only redeeming features in Edge I can think of is that the rendering engine actually appears to work for just about everything, and on a phone Edge is a lot more pleasant to use than IE. Of course, the Edge UI is completely different on the phone vs desktop (or at least was last time I used it, which was a bunch of months ago). Everything else about Edge really is bad in my experience & opinion. I reach for IE rather than Edge when I'm on a Win10 desktop.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday January 06 2017, @11:30PM
My impression of Edge was that it was very beta software when I tried using it on the beta versions of Windows 10. It was very unstable, had lots of problems on websites that tried anything fancy, and the UI was clunky and unpolished. But hey, it was a beta and surely they wouldn't actually release it like that? Turns out they did. It would be a major improvement if they simply ripped the guts out and went to embedding IE, but at that point you might as well just IE because the UI is so much better.