IE8 Users Revert to IE7
When a new browser launches, it’s natural for there to be a huge surge in users. Basically everyone downloads it to try it out and then they go back to what they were using before. These are the people who never planned on switching from Firefox to Chrome or IE to Firefox and were just curious to see what it was like on the other side.
That said, it’s rare, at least for browsers, to see users reverting back to an older version just after the updated verison launches. According to InformationWeek, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 seems to be losing market share, even though the browser has been on the market for less than a week.
Backing up the report, IW posted some numbers from Net Applications: as of 8:00 am Monday, IE8 held 1.86 percent of the browser market, down from a high of 2.59 percent on Sunday.
While comfort is always a factor (just this morning we were talking about downgrading from Windows ME to Win98 back in the day) InformationWeek also points to the the fact that Explorer 8 uses default support for some new web publishing standards that aren't supported by a number of major publishers. As a result, someusers have complained that they cannot view certain sites.
Some IE8 adopters reported that even pages built with Microsoft's own Web publishing software, Microsoft Publisher, failed to render properly in the new browser. Yikes.
Check out the full report on InformationWeek here.
Did you any of you guys upgrade/switch to IE8 or did you stick with Internet Explorer 7 or your current browser? If you did stick with what you had before let us know why!
For those with issues just use compatability mode...
Its clean UI and speed are the main reasons I was attracted to it.
Which makes me wonder how much the IE8 surge was due to the Windows 7 beta, and the large fallback are people putting on their favorite browser shortly thereafter.
I even liked it, internet explorer 8 proved me very fast and good, for the few days I used it.
downgrading?? well, as long as they have a compatibility option, no need to.
As a web developer I also love the fact that IE8 is very standards compliant in its rendering. The days of having to use hacks to get things to display correctly in IE should be gone now. And that makes me very happy.
Depending on how the statistics were gathered what looks like people reverting is likely just an illusion created by people turning on compatibilty mode. A lot of them probably just set it on by default rather than bother doing it site by site.
Frankly though, this site has given me problems with IE regardless of the version since the latest revision about a year or so ago--IE6, IE7, IE8--they all seemed to crash after clicking the "next" buttons in the longer articles more than four or five pages into it. This is regardless of what PC I use--home built, Dell, HP--also happened on 2000, XP, or Vista. Being the only site that has given me so many issues on IE, it kind of pissed me off a bit. Still, I haven't had the problem with the final release of IE8.
As far as gmail goes, it's kind of a mixed thing. Most of the time, it works just fine, but on occassion, the navigation menus for the email screws up. I have no idea why it would work most of the time and not all of the time.
Other than gmail and a certain fan-based Star Wars web site, I have not had any issues with the final release of IE8.
Some sites, especially financial, require IE. In other words lazy or MS bribed IT departments.