News - Internet Explorer 8 becomes world's most popular browser

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Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox continue to gain, but Microsoft's IE8 now commands almost a quarter of the browser marker.

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Read more.

Good news!

Impressive. In before all the IE8 vs. FF wars :rockon:

Of course IE is going to be more popular than third party browsers - it comes preinstalled on nearly all computers and is included with Windows media, most people aren't going to bother changing. If Chrome or something came pre-installed on Windows instead then that would undoutably be the most popular browser...
Good to see people are actually using windows update though!

I moved from FF to Chrome, based on speed and memory bloat. FF is faster than IE, but just memory bloats out of proportion. I still have to use it for some addons, but Chrome is a lot faster even than FF.

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Originally Posted by borandi

I moved from FF to Chrome, based on speed and memory bloat. FF is faster than IE, but just memory bloats out of proportion. I still have to use it for some addons, but Chrome is a lot faster even than FF.

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I do love firefox but yes the memory bloat is excessive (Thinks back to the time it consume 1.4Gbytes of RAM and a similar amount of swap...).

Yeah, I third that FF is a bit of a memory hog but I like the add-ons and wasn't there something dodgy about the chrome EULA (about data collection or something) or has that been sorted now?

Im always interested to know what metrics some of these companies use...

any ideas?

But all in all, it's a good start....

hm i use FF with issues of it stalling on pages lol, is chrome worth it??? im not going back to IE no way lol

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Originally Posted by tiggerai

Im always interested to know what metrics some of these companies use...

any ideas?

But all in all, it's a good start....

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Browsers send information to a server identifying themselves (browser headers) so they probably just log the number of hits from each browser, allowing only 1 hit per IP address too I'd assume, on a popular website, say Google for example. Here's a line of this information from a Windows 7 PC using FF 3.6 for example:

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User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6

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Chrome is Slim and Fast and updates itself automatically, no switching back to IE if it stays that way.

I would recommend installing Chrome from either the beta channel or dev channel to keep ahead of the official released version.

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Originally Posted by watercooled

Yeah, I third that FF is a bit of a memory hog but I like the add-ons and wasn't there something dodgy about the chrome EULA (about data collection or something) or has that been sorted now?

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wtf man, I have used Firefox since pre-1.0 and I've NEVER had a problem with it. but I hear this complaint about using too much memory all the time --- seriously what kind of stone-age PC are you guys running? Do you only have 256 megs of RAM or something???

Vanilla Firefox is fine. Even with a few addons it's fine. Only when you start installing every shiny addon you see will it start getting sluggish, and that's to be expected.

Well for a start the amount of memory used isn't dependant on the PC it's running on. FYI my computer has 6GB of RAM and also check the specs of the others who mentioned the bloat, hardly stone age. I'm only using 2 add-ons and I didn't say it was sluggish. It uses several hundred MB RAM most of the time which is a lot for a browser and it doesn't release it back to the OS properly until you close it.

Both chrome and FF eat memory in spades for me - and i certainly wouldn't call either 'light' in any shape or form. Chrome starts faster and 'feels' that bit quicker overall out of the two though. I use three browsers regularly atm as I like to play around and compare - i'd still lean to Opera based on that. Chrome has some memory problems too - sometimes it seems to get deeply out of control on that front and I end up closing it to release (huge) chunks of memory. It's interesting too that it spawns so many processes - presumably to isolate tabs?

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Originally Posted by latrosicarius

but I hear this complaint about using too much memory all the time

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Yeah, wonder why? ;)

With the advent of chrome-extensions at last, I've now moved to chrome as it supports my 3 essentials:

AdBlack
Flashblock
Xmarks

On OS X you have to download beta V5.0.307 to use extensions :
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id.../google-chrome

I sat on Firefox 2.0 for a long time, then sat on 3.0 mainly because I wasn't sure if they required a reinstall. Turned out that I could just update from 3.0 to 3.6 directly from the browser, and I noticed a welcome improvement when it comes to memory usage (I think it came from 3.5).

Never used Chrome though, so can't compare to that. But if it wasn't for the plug-ins I've now taken for granted, IE8 is not bad at all.