Ask HN: Why is IE8 usage growing?

[franciscop]

It might not be much, and it might be slow, but the last 3 months the IE8 usage is growing at a slow rate[1]. While I expected to see it dead by now [2] from the last year's decline, this is not the case.

The second part of the question is, how do we stop this or should we just ignore it? Although this is a particularly more difficult one...

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+mobile+tablet-browser_version_partially_combined-ww-monthly-201501-201505

[2] http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/64361/19209

[jay-saint]

Has anyone considered a tax season effect on these results? I used to work for a computer manufacturer that also did re-seller / refurbishing of used computers. December was always when the seasonal tax preparation companies (Jackson Hewitt Liberty Tax), would pop up buying loads of cheap semi-reliable used systems. These tax preparers would then rent whatever cheap strip mall space was available, stick 20 PCs and a few used HP laser printers and connect them all to a decent terminal server.

The small company I worked for would sell a couple hundred of these tax prep systems a year just locally, multiply this out across the US and this could be a correlation. Many of these systems get reloaded, updated and then pulled back off the web to be resold after tax season. On company we sold them to would even let people use a part of their return to buy one of the systems.

[mseebach]

> and connect them all to a decent terminal server

Why would those systems be running IE8?

[JimA]

It's because Windows 2003 support ends on July 14th, 2015, and Microsoft is enforcing a browser upgrade to the latest available version (IE8) even for Custom Support Agreements that take effect after that date. So in order for any customer to continue to get 2003 OS support they have to upgrade to IE8.

On the server side, we will see some similar micro-effects as we get closer to January 1, 2016, where IE7 will go down and IE9 will go up due to 2008 having to upgrade, and IE9 will go down and IE11 will go up due to 2008 R2 having to upgrade.

[mahouse]

How many people actually browse from server editions of Windows? I remember that I skipped XP because I could not stand the Play-Doh interface, so I went from 2000 to 2003.

[buster]

You may not believe it but there are a lot of enterprises that are still running Windows XP and just now in the process to upgrade to Windows7. IE8 is the default browser in Windows 7.

Just a guess, but for example, i know for a fact that the german telecom is doing this XP->Win7 migration in the coming months...

[engi_nerd]

Yup, my rather large workplace (in the Fortune 100) switched from XP to Win 7 just about a year ago. We have IE8 but they will also let us use an ESR version of Firefox. Other business units than mine get to use Chrome, too.

[xmstr]

I work for an org that just upgraded from XP to Win7, however we went straight to ie11 as the default browser during the upgrade. However, optional use Firefox and Chrome is permitted for both XP and Win7.

[ryanmarsh]

My current client runs XP. My Java devs have to use it. Torture.

[mixonic]

IE8 is coming out of the Trough of Disillusionment and finally reaching the Plateau of Productivity. Obviously.

[Petefine]

When I follow [1], IE8's numbers are (from Jan) 2.56%, 2.61%, 2.13%, 2.19%, 2.26%. So they don't look to have grown at all.

If anything they've declined a little, although this may be within the margin for error for the sample.

[franciscop]

2.13%, 2.19%, 2.26% is what worries me. They dropped dramatically in the same period of last year. From March, they are slowly creeping up.

[noodle]

IE8 is growing because people are moving off of IE5/6/7. Soon they'll have to move off IE8 as well, but I imagine that IE8 is the logical stopover since apps that only ran in older IE versions don't require a lot of work to run in IE8. Getting them up to modern browser standards, though, will take time.

Example: many many years ago I worked on a project that used XML Data Islands as an early form of AJAX-like functionality. You could fairly easily modernize it up to IE8 without major changes. But to go beyond that would require heavy rewrites.

[darcyparker]

It's an interesting trend that I have seen among my company's user base. It could be real, but it could also be an increase in false positives.

A possible explanation for the false positives:

Many large companies are seeing more and more machines moving to IE11, but have websites/tools that require IE8. Ideally each web site should explicitly declare compatibility/standard modes they require in their HTML. But for older enterprise software, this is not an option, so companies take the 'easy' approach of enabling compatibility mode for all sites and/or all intranet sites. A better approach when you can't edit the html of the web app is to use the group policy editor and set compatibility mode on a URL by URL basis. But many companies take the easier route. This is my theory that may explain the false positives.

If they aren't doing so, tools that aggregate browser usage should be doing additional analysis on the user agent string to get a better sense of the 'true' IE version. Perhaps using methods like ie-truth [1]. When I see trends like increased IE8 usage, it doesn't make sense to me... so I have doubts that these tools are testing the browser type accurately.

[1] https://github.com/Gavin-Paolucci-Kleinow/ie-truth

[acdha]

Browser stats are noisy – if you look at a larger timescale, you'll see this is actually somewhat lower than December:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser_version_partially...

The first thing I'd do is check to see whether the apparent trend is supported by other data sources, particularly traffic to the sites you care about. It's worth poking around somewhere like http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/ or http://akamai.io to see if other they're seeing the same trend.

[peter303]

Much of the corporate utilities in my company seems to only work in IE. There is a whole ecoculture of business software that ignores any other browser. I have bring up a VM to complete some of required paperwork.

[kellros]

It must be IE gathering its numbers to face off against Spartan in the IEpocalypse.

Another theory is that corporates/governments are switching over from XP to Windows 7 (with Internet Explorer 8 as default) because XP was declared "dead" (end of life on April 8, 2014 - no more security updates) and the existing PCs aren't capable of running UEFI required for Windows 8...

Windows 7 and Windows 8 is going to get a free upgrade to Windows 10; it's not far fetched to believe some people are installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 on a clean machine to make use of the free upgrade.

[brudgers]

Windows 8 will run on anything that ran Vista and does not require UEFI. Placing a sticker proclaiming Windows 8 certification or something like that on a new computer requires UEFI.

[mattmanser]

Stats of one of my bigger clients show an almost 50% drop in IE8 in the last year (UK traffic only).

Don't believe everything you read. Also, who actually uses statcounter?

[josefresco]

I picked a client at random (typical small business in the US) and see a 54% drop in IE8 and a 32% drop in IE9 usage year over year.

IE11 represented the most traffic (for IE users) and it grew by 346%.

Sessions from IE users overall were down 15% for the same period.

Source: Google Analytics

[mchanson]

IE 8 gets, for the most part, to end of life next January. So it should go back into shrink mode as those IT departments get with the times.

[Roboprog]

Thanks for that info. Verified it on the MS support site and emailed the link to work.

I am working on a project to be delivered to CA Dept of Public Health around January. We were told to target IE 8 as our minimum browser (as well as FF/Chrome/Safari). Seems a waste, given this news. Time to push for IE 9 or better.

[KevanM]

You can see from this there is a general trend downwards in usage, but there are sudden, periodic, upswings in usage such as December last year.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop+mobile+tablet-browser_ver...

[meishern]

Its growing because of China and India large populations of primarily young people whoh every 6 months add tens of millions of internet users who become of age for middle class parents to buy them a computer, or in other cases scrape enough money to purchase the cheapest clone (the very machine which would have a pirated os and ie8).

[JohnTHaller]

According to NetMarketShare (which has much better stats than statcounter which excludes most corporate users, hardly any of which use Chrome), IE8 was down to around 15% share of desktop users back in November but spiked up to 19% December through Feb. It's now trending downward again at 17% in March and 16% in April.

[taf2]

It is most likely because you're including May and this month is incomplete. In June, it's possible when you run the numbers again it will show a different picture, similar to if you review the months past. That is what I've observed at least when using gs.statcounter. Hopefully this is the case.

[ck2]

Bots like the IE8 user agent.

[korvenadi]

Many organizations, still use IE8. IT Support in those organization either don't care to upgrade or their internal products just don't work on any new versions.

[fideloper]

No one's mentioned China yet? Perhaps they're finally updating from IE6 over there.

[arihant]

This is a pure guess - people downgrading back to Windows 7. Maybe new laptop buyers install Windows 7 because they don't like 8.1, IE8 is default on Windows 7.

Could be a lot of things, but it is a good chance that this has something to do with Windows 7.

[smcl]

It seems unlikely to me that enough people are tech savvy enough to downgrade a version of windows but can't (or don't want to?) switch from IE8 - which we can probably all agree is not a particularly nice browser

[joshvm]

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

Windows 7's share has increased by 2-3% in the last three months. I think it's probably upgraders since XP has decreased by ~ the same amount, and XP users are far more likely to be enterprise.

[chippy]

I'm thinking it's people upgrading from XP. They know they can no longer use it, so they upgrade to 7

[mcbridematt]

Guessing along similar lines - ex corporate Win7 machines hitting the secondary market?

[franciscop]

So before we had ie8 because it was the latest supported by Windows XP, now we get it because it's the one included in Windows 7. Oh, the irony.