Website design is greatly affected by the browser from which the end user views their sites through. Now this can certainly be frustrating for the website design industry, especially when users are not aware of what a browser is, and further more, when they are using the ‘Worst One’, no names mentioned. Each month the website design consortium, W3C, publish figures based on the detected browser usage from a sample across the Internet. We can clearly see from these trends, which browsers we can expect to rise or fall over the coming years.
Website Design Browser Statistics
Going by the statistics published by W3C in February 2010 we can get a clear indication of how widespread usage for each of the mainstream browsers compare. Since it’s release as FireFox in the early naughties, we’ve seen a month-by-month growth of popularity. In fact, the most remarkable of which is that the share is more than that of all of Microsoft’s browsers combined.
- Mozilla Firefox (46.5%)
- Internet Explorer 8 (14.7%)
- Google Chrome (11.6%)
- Internet Explorer 7 (11.0%)
- Internet Explorer 6 (9.6%)
- Safari (3.8%)
- Opera (2.1%)
The New Browser on the Block
The name’s Chrome. Google Chrome! Spotting this weakness, Chromes first victim in its inevitable rise to supremacy will be the ghastly Internet Explorer 6, which due to severe security loopholes and some clever marketing on Google’s part, has been banned by government figures in some of the EU’s leading economic forces. Google Chrome offers a more robust solution and aims to let the world know that there are other browsers than the one which comes as standard with your computer.
The beginning of the end for IE6!
Anyone involved in website design will tell you for sure, that the root of all evil is Internet Explorer 6. It’s the very reason that you have to continually design your websites, not to the consortium standards but around the pitfalls of this god-forsaken monster. It’s also the reason that we haven’t seen more widespread usage of transparent pngs, CSS3, html 5 and so on and so forth.
But hold on, the end is near? Now you can tell people to avoid IE6 like the plague, until you are blue in the face, but when it comes to your average user, people deem that little blue ‘e’ on the desktop as ‘The Internet’ itself. With this in mind, there is not only no drive to change, but no knowledge that other browsers even exist!
YouTube began the final assault on IE6 on March 13th with it’s discontinued support for the condemned browser, and it’s prompt to push users towards better alternatives.
It seems the risk of getting your identity stolen is not enough to discourage its use, but will the ability to watch videos online be? Me thinks so…
If Google chrome were friendly with the addons like firefox then it would already capture the bigger part of the market share.
Yeah, I certainly agree with you there. I feel it’s very much targeted toward an end-user at the minute and not a competitor for a developer browser. I think we can safely say that they’ll be on that case in the coming months and years, you can see this just by how fast they update and release new versions.
I didn’t like GC it seemed like there was a bit missing, however like Firefox when I first started using that I didn’t like it to much, IE 8 was an attempt to kick IE back to trend, and although many are firefox converts it has worked a bit! I use either Firfox for the plugins, IE 8 when I am working on websites, and my own little browser I wrote for general bloggin ect (it’s just so much quicker with no add-ins at all!)
Yeah, I think Google have tried to keep things ultra simple, which just shows, in my opinion, the market they are aiming for is fundamentally non technical users, for one example IE6 users.
What is your browser built on?