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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: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:05PM
I never use IE. But then last week I tried to use it for something and I found out that it's kind of idiotic, in a way I had not foreseen.
I had a computer with nothing on it but a fresh install of win 7. I wanted to copy a 50GB file to it. So I connected another computer with a short ethernet crossover cable and set static IPs on both. Past experience has taught that getting a network share to work initially requires some dicking around with user accounts or registry settings. In order to bypass all of that, I just hosted the file via http and then typed the URL into IE and it started downloading. I thought that after 20 minutes it would be done with no headaches.
Here is where IE programmers managed to surprise me. Apparently IE didn't save the file where I told it to, instead it downloaded it to a temporary file in some secret directory. After 20 minutes of downloading, it then wasted another 30 minutes copying 50GB from there to the proper location. I guess I was lucky I had an extra 50GB of disk space, otherwise I assume it would have failed altogether and been a giant waste of time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @11:43PM
FWIW, you don't need crossover cables any more. Not in the last decade or so. The NICs figure it out between themselves.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday January 06 2017, @11:39PM
That's something that came with gigabit. So yes most things made in the past 10 years or so, but there is a surprising amount of 100MB still out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @01:02AM
Random thought?
Given your "virgin" install, it might have been faster to copy your 50GB file to a USB 2/3 portable drive, then copy off that drive?