From the perspective of someone implementing web application software, Firefox is now the dominant browser. Mozilla does an excellent job of making Mac and Windows Firefox almost identical from a programmer’s perspective and every new browser from Microsoft is like a new platform. It would be interesting if Firefox versions were broken out in the stats, but the difference between Firefox 1, 2, and 3 from a compatibility perspective is nowhere as dramatic as the differences between IE 5.5, IE6 and IE7.
Even when you aggregate the versions, Firefox is fast approaching IE…
source w3schools.com
2 Comments
The flaw in your argument is that the data for your marketshare stats is based only on w3schools, which suffers from a selection bias because it is not reflective of the average Web user.
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Thanks for pointing that out, Tony. Digging into the stats more, I found two other sources that show Firefox at less than 20% and IE7 at over 35%:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2 and http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/October/browser.php In these other surveys Firefox is gaining ground over IE, but it’ll be a while before Firefox is the dominant browser. Sigh.