Number crunching gives bad news for Internet Explorer 8

We’ve heard plenty of words about Internet Explorer 8, but now some numbers are starting to appear. And while it may not be true that numbers don’t lie, they are certainly making some unwelcome insinuations.

Net Applications, a web services firm which regularly produces browser and operating system usage statistics based on its customers’ behavior, estimated that 5 million people downloaded Internet Explorer 8 on the day of its release. By yesterday it appears that figure had reached at least 12 million.

The phrase ‘at least’ is key there as the firm’s figures suggest there’s a distinct pattern of people downloading the browser and then abandoning it. On the day before release, 1.34 percent of internet users were running Internet Explorer 8 (at that stage, the beta edition). That rose to a peak of 2.59 percent on Sunday, but was down to just 1.86 percent this morning.

Normally a change in such figures of a percentage point or so over a couple of days wouldn’t raise much attention as it could be a statistical quirk. However, a drop from 2.59 percent to 1.86 percent is far more significant than, say, from 92.59 percent to 91.86 percent. And as today’s figures don’t cover office hours in the US, the difference between workday and weekend use doesn’t apply. (Microsoft products often see a dip in usage on weekends and holidays as people are more likely to experiment with rival products on home machines than at work.)

The other possible concern for Microsoft is that virtually all of the IE8 increased share is thanks to people upgrading from version 7; there’s no clear evidence that users of other browsers are switching to the ‘new and improved’ Internet Explorer.

At this stage, of course, IE8 is only being tried by people who are interested enough to download and install the software, which means they are probably more likely to be critical. Once the browser is pushed to users through the Automatic Update system, it would have to be pretty poor for the average user to go to the effort of reverting back to a previous edition.

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