(Trends): What’s Your Favorite Alternate Browser?

One of the things about the exo.repository that we most like to demonstrate is how it allows us to extract market trending data points that nobody else has. Whether it’s the rate at which internal IE organizations are shedding IE 6.0 (hint: it’s a stampede), or how a new version of Windows is driving base RAM configurations through the roof, we love it when we come out with something truly unique.

Such is the case with one of our newer charting products, “% Users Running IE + Other.” By combing the process records of our 24,000+ registered exo.performance.network users, we can determine not only which browser they use most often (still, sadly, Internet Explorer), but also which 3rd party web browsers they use in addition to Microsoft’s ubiquitous IE.

This is especially useful when trying to reconcile the often conflicting reports of decreasing IE market share on the public web with those of IT organizations “clinging” to Microsoft’s browser out of a need to support legacy in-house web applications. But when you factor in real-world telemetry data from the exo.repository, the picture becomes much clearer.

Figure 1 – What’s Your Favorite Alternate Web Browser?

Yes, it’s true that IT organizations continue to rely on IE extensively within their enterprises, a fact born about by the over 80% of systems we monitor which show IE in use for several hours each day. However, this seemingly disproportionate number begins to make sense when you consider that these same IE users are also regularly running at least one 3rd party web browser – most typically, Firefox or Google Chrome. In fact, upwards of 31% the systems sampled which run IE also run Firefox, while better than 18% of sampled systems run Google Chrome (in addition to Internet Explorer).

Clearly, there’s more going on with web browser market/usage share than has been reported by the mainstream IT press – and that’s because the media have traditionally relied on public-facing monitoring solutions, like NetApplications, to provide them with market share numbers. But the public web is only part of the picture. What we’re providing here, at the exo.performance.network, is a different perspective: A unique (aggregated/anonymized) look inside the thousands of Windows-based systems that contribute to our growing community of IT professionals and organizations.

And, of course, we do it all for free – our way of giving back to a Windows IT community that has provided us with the support and resources we needed to construct the exo.performance.network in the first place.

Note: The above statistics were generated from the over 14 billion process metrics records collected from the over 24,000 registered, active xpnet.com users. If you’d like more information about the exo.performance.network, including how to reproduce the above chart object (for free) on your own site or weblog, please visit our web site: www.xpnet.com.