Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT
Internet Explorer Gains Market Share, Privacy Criticism
Monday, August 02, 2010 by Bryan Anderson
There's been some jostling among browsers for market share and
over the last few months Internet Explorer has come up on top in
terms of growth. According to the latest statistics from Net
Applications via Mashable, Microsoft's IE has taken 1% of
the market share since May, growing from 59.75% to 60.74%. During
that same time, Firefox has seen its share drop almost 1.5%, from
24.32% in May to 22.91% in July.
Not only does this reverse a trend that saw IE lose 5% of the
market share over 7 months (Sept 2009 to March 2010) but it reveals
users are slowly coming back to Microsoft's browser of choice.
While the news of IE6 severely crippled the brand, IE 8 and the
news of IE 9 (superior hardware-accelerated speed, strong support
for open standards) have got IE fanboys and fangirls happy
again.
IE's growth may be a positive sticking point, but the community
is abuzz because of other news relating to the browser market share
leader. According to a CNET.com article, "efforts to build
Microsoft's IE 8 with more robust privacy settings were stifled by
the needs of online advertisers to track user activity." This
information originated from a Wall Street Journal story that talks about the
"internal heated debate" between privacy-centered tools or
advertiser-friendly implementation.
User privacy has always been at the center of Microsoft's
browser innovations. This merely proves how sophisticated the
industry of online advertising is and how difficult it is to
balance user-generated information while pleasing the advertising
companies.
With their recent acquisition of Web ad vendor Aquantive,
executives at Microsoft thought the tighter privacy intended by
developers would "hinder the tracking needed for online
advertising." In the end, IE8 now simply offers a setting called
InPrivate Filtering, where users can "tweak to manually turn off
blocking for specific Web sites." The problem (and annoyance) with
this solution is that it must be activated every time you launch
your browser.
Is there a middle ground when it comes to user privacy and
information for advertisers? IE 8's development manager stated that
"the web is fundamentally an information exchange" - who decides
what information should be sent along and what data exists solely
for the user?
Until next time -
Matthew Hymel
Switchfast Technologies
Chicago IT Support &
Consulting
Rochester
IT Support & Consulting
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