As another data point, I admin some fairly popular sites that cater to enterprise users and we have a huge percentage of IE6 users. Far more than the "average" site and certainly more than Firefox.
There is an important lesson for web devs in that 2nd pie chart.
Browser usage is enormously variable depending on demographics. When you weigh the cost/benefit tradeoffs of cross-browser compatibility for your site it is critical that you understand the actual browser usage for your site, not just the internet at large.
On a mass-appeal website that pulls in a wide cross-section of worldwide internet users IE may be the majority browser, dominating everything else by a 3:1 margin, with IE6 as popular as firefox. For such a site it probably pays off to make sure your site not only works but works well and looks good in IE, even IE6. However, if you have a more tech focused site then things are dramatically different, likely firefox will be the overwhelmingly dominant browser, with IE a distant 2nd, 3rd, or 4th and IE6 usage just a tiny slice. In that scenario the excessive costs of making IE (let alone IE6) compatibility a first tier design priority become completely unjustified and you should probably care about how well your site works in IE6 about as much as you care about it working in Opera (which is probably not much).
I agree but would add that, in my experience, getting your site to work in Opera is easy, so sites usually do work there. Getting a modern site to work in IE6 takes a lot of testing and hackery.
This is such bs. Firefox outstripped IE6 a LONG TIME AGO. To back up my argument, we get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, spread around the world. IE6 gets about 3% of our total traffic of about 20 million per month. Firefox(overall, mainly 3.5 and less than half of that 3.0) are at 33%. IE(overall) is about 48%.
... and what kind of site do you run? I think this means averaged over the web. If you're running anything remotely technical you have a very different userbase than, say, Yahoo!.
I guarantee for all of my clients that it will look exactly the same, or damn similar (minus font rendering) in IE6 all the way up to the newest versions of Chrome.
Once you sit there with IE6, IE8, FF, Safari, and Chrome for a while, you start to get niggles on what each browser will do.
For my current client, I've only had to do one IE6 specific hack (fieldset background colors/images).
That said, I'm not doing anything too fancy (but still use JQuery, Ajax, etc).
Unless we are explicitly leveraging new browser technology, from a design standpoint it could be construed as 'whiny-developer-syndrome' for people who refuse to design for IE. After the initial "WTF" curve with your base css laid out, it's actually not too difficult.
This is an unfair comparison. No single version of Firefox has greater marketshare than any single version of Internet Explorer. If you take all version of Firefox together, yes they do beat the oldest version of Internet Explorer still in wide usage, IE6, but that's comparing apples and oranges.
Web developers still have to target multiple versions of Firefox, and Firefox 2.x supports fewer things than Firefox 3.x. Likewise, developers still have to target IE6 (23.3% share), which supports even fewer web standards than pretty much every other version of every other major browser in wide usage.
Nevertheless, it's hard to understand how this comparison is valid or significant.
I agree. There is certainly far less hassle going between Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.5 than there is between IE6 and IE7 or IE8. That said, this is not really the substance of the article or the article's headline. The headline and the comparison don't really make much sense, unless you're basically trying to promote Firefox. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Firefox user and evangelist. But making flimsy comparisons isn't what got us here and it doesn't really help us think about the state of the web.
I was an amateur web developer back when I was hand-coding my proto-blog in Notepad back in '99. Ah, those were the days of Netscape 4 and IE 4 & 5. Pretty much gave it up when my blogging withered away in '04. So I bowed out before the Browser Reconquista began and have missed all the excitement of IE6 versus IE7&8 versus Gecko versus Webkit. I can't imagine how thrilling it is...
I just had a massive issue developing for Firefox. I spend the better part of yesterday fixing a handful of CSS bugs. It still doesn't work perfectly. I'm not very happy with Gecko at the moment.
I asked a friend on Windows to test it and he showed me it on IE, crippled and appallingly broken. My advice was for him to find another web browser. I'm willing to make Firefox work but draw the line at IE.
I develop initially for Webkit, in part because Coda offers a built-in Webkit preview that makes coding for it very fast and easy. Then I preview it in Opera and Firefox.
I wish every web browser would switch to WebKit. It pains me how bad certain rendering engines are.
>>the oldest version of Internet Explorer still in wide usage, IE6, but that's comparing apples and oranges.
Which is also the version with the most market share and the most problematic for web development, FF 2.x is only 1.14, I'm pretty sure most people focus only on the latest versions for FF/Safari.
All the graphs are hilariously bad for a site with tech-geek audience.
They only just stopped using a translucent 3D pie-chart. But it's still tilted, drop-shadowed, single colored and, most importantly of all, a friggin pie chart in which we need to eyeball differences between several items less than 5%.
Just give us a table of figures and a bar chart for love of tufte. If you want to be trendy make it sortable with javascript.
And it's the trends that actually count anyway! I truly dispair every month when they wheel this out.
I'm looking at that first chart and noticing Chrome creep up on Safari... Anyone know if this got a leg up when Chrome started being offered by the Java updater?
And my favorite Linux and Windows browser (Opera) continues its downward descent. It seems a bit unfair to me -- Opera always responds like a lean and mean browser with stability and a dearth of innovative features, but for some reason it never gets any traction. Is Free Software/Open Source that much of an attraction? Maybe it's just me but I have a huge respect for well thought out and well written proprietary software.
Of course, I guess I'm a little bit of a hypocrite since I use Safari on my Mac. At the same time though, no one can really compete with Mac Safari -- its running profile is tiny and integrates with Mac better than any other browser.
I assume you don't mean dearth here as that would mean a lack of innovative features.
Personally I found Opera to be too much of a walled garden, they never really had a cohesive extensions story. Sure you could configure it to a very great degree but you are still interfacing with it only at points and ways the developers were able to foresee. Still I used it for years it's a good piece of software.
I think my next browser will be one of the minimalist webkits uzbl or surf as soon as they can support a decent vi mode.
Opera's UI is still pretty clunky (it's improved, but not enough), they've never built the enthusiastic community of Mozilla or have the brand recognition and products of companies like Google or Apple, and its USPs have gradually eroded over time with increased competition.
that's for the visitors of w3schools, which are more technical people. my mom, who would use IE if it wasn't for me tricking her into using firefox, would never be a w3schools visitor.
from the bottom of the page:
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.
I agree - I really like Chrome (and Opera, for what it's worth) and I can generally cope with the normal ads on most sane web sites these days.
But some sites go over the top and a few minutes of looking at flashing, flickering, CPU-hogging dross like one British forum I regularly visit (two large Flash banners at the top of the page, one down the side and one large square Flash ad, often an auto-playing video, in the first post of each page) is enough to send me scuttling back to Firefox. If someone developed a Chromium add-on that did the same thing as Adblock, I wouldn't look back.
(I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly and value - provided they don't abuse my eyes with videos and those flashing "YOU'VE WON A CAR!" images.)
I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly
Ditto, but I had to use Vista yesterday and tried out IE8 (again) and was so suprised to find 2 popups on the dilbert website. I don't disable popup blocking for anyone. I thought IE8 had it enabled so it was a little strange ... first unwanted popups in years. Blah blah blah, ... as you were.
I've been using Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org) for a while - seems to do a good enough job for me (though I've noticed that transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS seems to get stuck sometimes).
Plus, it means on those rare occasions when I fire up IE, I also see fewer ads.
I've been making the transition myself, doing much the same thing--starting FF to use Firebug, but otherwise leaving it be. Sometimes I miss a few of the plugins, but otherwise, I appreciate the speed and smaller memory footprint.
Firefox passed IE6. It did not pass IE in general, which enjoys a huge advantage.
Or did I read something wrong? Because at first blush, the version number "6" didn't seem that important in the headline. I'm a little confused, though. Why is every version of FF compared to just one version of IE?
So the point is: whether its IE7 or FF, the fact that all of FF is greater than IE6 means that the goal of standards adoption has progressed?
Why wouldn't the main story just be that the rollout of IE7 is finally showing some signs of eliminating IE6 users? And if it's a web standards story, why the FF head?
47 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadI suppose it's a credence to a tech site that its readers are overwhelmingly tech-orientated compared to the widespread market.
Browser usage is enormously variable depending on demographics. When you weigh the cost/benefit tradeoffs of cross-browser compatibility for your site it is critical that you understand the actual browser usage for your site, not just the internet at large.
On a mass-appeal website that pulls in a wide cross-section of worldwide internet users IE may be the majority browser, dominating everything else by a 3:1 margin, with IE6 as popular as firefox. For such a site it probably pays off to make sure your site not only works but works well and looks good in IE, even IE6. However, if you have a more tech focused site then things are dramatically different, likely firefox will be the overwhelmingly dominant browser, with IE a distant 2nd, 3rd, or 4th and IE6 usage just a tiny slice. In that scenario the excessive costs of making IE (let alone IE6) compatibility a first tier design priority become completely unjustified and you should probably care about how well your site works in IE6 about as much as you care about it working in Opera (which is probably not much).
IE8: 28%; IE7: 27%; IE6: 19%; FF3.5: 16%; FF3: 7%; Others: 3%
Once you sit there with IE6, IE8, FF, Safari, and Chrome for a while, you start to get niggles on what each browser will do.
For my current client, I've only had to do one IE6 specific hack (fieldset background colors/images).
That said, I'm not doing anything too fancy (but still use JQuery, Ajax, etc).
Unless we are explicitly leveraging new browser technology, from a design standpoint it could be construed as 'whiny-developer-syndrome' for people who refuse to design for IE. After the initial "WTF" curve with your base css laid out, it's actually not too difficult.
Web developers still have to target multiple versions of Firefox, and Firefox 2.x supports fewer things than Firefox 3.x. Likewise, developers still have to target IE6 (23.3% share), which supports even fewer web standards than pretty much every other version of every other major browser in wide usage.
Nevertheless, it's hard to understand how this comparison is valid or significant.
I asked a friend on Windows to test it and he showed me it on IE, crippled and appallingly broken. My advice was for him to find another web browser. I'm willing to make Firefox work but draw the line at IE.
I wish every web browser would switch to WebKit. It pains me how bad certain rendering engines are.
Which is also the version with the most market share and the most problematic for web development, FF 2.x is only 1.14, I'm pretty sure most people focus only on the latest versions for FF/Safari.
They only just stopped using a translucent 3D pie-chart. But it's still tilted, drop-shadowed, single colored and, most importantly of all, a friggin pie chart in which we need to eyeball differences between several items less than 5%.
Just give us a table of figures and a bar chart for love of tufte. If you want to be trendy make it sortable with javascript.
And it's the trends that actually count anyway! I truly dispair every month when they wheel this out.
For graph 2, the lie factor for each bar graph is:
IE: .25 / .62 = .403
FF: .25 / .2383 = 1.04
Safari: .25 / .0417 = ~6
Chrome: .25 / .034 = 7.35
Of course, I guess I'm a little bit of a hypocrite since I use Safari on my Mac. At the same time though, no one can really compete with Mac Safari -- its running profile is tiny and integrates with Mac better than any other browser.
I assume you don't mean dearth here as that would mean a lack of innovative features.
Personally I found Opera to be too much of a walled garden, they never really had a cohesive extensions story. Sure you could configure it to a very great degree but you are still interfacing with it only at points and ways the developers were able to foresee. Still I used it for years it's a good piece of software.
I think my next browser will be one of the minimalist webkits uzbl or surf as soon as they can support a decent vi mode.
(And yes, I am using Opera 10 now)
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
from the bottom of the page: W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.
Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated.
Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE.
The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy.
I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.
But some sites go over the top and a few minutes of looking at flashing, flickering, CPU-hogging dross like one British forum I regularly visit (two large Flash banners at the top of the page, one down the side and one large square Flash ad, often an auto-playing video, in the first post of each page) is enough to send me scuttling back to Firefox. If someone developed a Chromium add-on that did the same thing as Adblock, I wouldn't look back.
(I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly and value - provided they don't abuse my eyes with videos and those flashing "YOU'VE WON A CAR!" images.)
Ditto, but I had to use Vista yesterday and tried out IE8 (again) and was so suprised to find 2 popups on the dilbert website. I don't disable popup blocking for anyone. I thought IE8 had it enabled so it was a little strange ... first unwanted popups in years. Blah blah blah, ... as you were.
Plus, it means on those rare occasions when I fire up IE, I also see fewer ads.
Firefox passed IE6. It did not pass IE in general, which enjoys a huge advantage.
Or did I read something wrong? Because at first blush, the version number "6" didn't seem that important in the headline. I'm a little confused, though. Why is every version of FF compared to just one version of IE?
So the point is: whether its IE7 or FF, the fact that all of FF is greater than IE6 means that the goal of standards adoption has progressed?
Why wouldn't the main story just be that the rollout of IE7 is finally showing some signs of eliminating IE6 users? And if it's a web standards story, why the FF head?