So … Microsoft would like you to believe that their latest re-draft of the Internet Explorer joke (which is getting very old indeed) now has a new, improved punchline … about the only thing that they can guarantee you, is that you’ll laugh twice as much as ever before. I mean come on – how can a company that has done so much for the personal computer (market?) get it so wrong so consistently? (more…)

Old news for a lot of you I am sure, but I was scratching around on the W3C website when I noticed this…

Now while this does not mean that Firefox is leading the pack if you take into account that IE6 & 7 come from the same stable and that those that use IE7 “upgraded” from IE6 or (god forbid) to Windows Vista, it does show that our favourite Mozilla browser keeps growing in popularity and is slowly but surely capturing more and more of the market. Also note that the percentage points lost by IE6 are not all accounted for by IE7.

Unfortunately Opera and Safari are riding a slow steady see-saw at the bottom of the log. Lack of performance by Mac’s browser could also well be due to the popularity of Firefox – remember that Firefox is not just available for machines that use the Windows OS, but OS X and Linux too.

For those that have not yet caught on to what the implications are of this … web designers/developers use these statistics when designing sites to guesstimate which browsers to optimise for. Sure, we can use CSS hacks, conditional comments and multiple style sheets to ensure that we capture the full audience out there and we test websites in as many of the aforementioned browsers as possible – at least the ones that care about accessibility and compliancy do. It also makes our jobs a little easier. Statistically, 70% of the traffic to this blog comes from Mozilla users … that says something about who uses which browser. I sometimes have tiny niggly issues/flaws when viewing a site in Opera for instance – and I mean really really tiny … with Opera constituting only 1.6% of the potential readership of that site, does it really matter that there’s a one pixel gap there that shows up a dark background behind and can the hours spent trying to fix it really be justified? However, if it’s there in IE6 but not in Firefox, I’ll surely fix it even if it takes me days to sort out.

For those that read this, are not developers or use the other browsers – to find out just what exactly makes this browser so damn popular … here … Get Firefox