Linked by Adam S on Tue 26th Aug 2008 21:32 UTC, submitted by Moulinneuf
"Poor Microsoft. This week, the Redmond, Wash., giant is gearing up for the next big release of its Web browser, a leap from Internet Explorer 7 to IE 8. When open-source competitor Mozilla released its last update of Firefox in June, the Web went wild: People downloaded more than 8 million copies in 24 hours. Microsoft's release might not have such a frat party feel. Even as it gears up to release IE 8, the developers behind the Firefox Web browser are experimenting with a new technology that sharpens the threat their browser software poses to Microsoft's most valuable businesses. The new technology, dubbed TraceMonkey, promises to speed up Firefox's ability to deliver complex applications." While many have abandoned Microsoft's browser offerings, Microsoft will be introducing an innovative new type of selective privacy mode called InPrivate with IE8.
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Member since:
2007-07-13
Although the perception is that IE is "still the most used browser by far" this is a misleading perception as far as the creation of web pages go.
IE 6, IE 7 and IE 8 all behave differently. A web designer has to take those differences into account. This makes for a lot of work and testing. Anything else is 90's thinking that will piss your visitor's off (are you l)
Firefox, Opera and Safari all behave differently as well, but are still less problematic that IE. It is possible by sticking to a subset of W3C standards to write even relatively complex web pages that will work without modification on all three.
The day will not be far off when a web designer can write a page without any tests for the client browser, test it once for standards compliance, and be assured that it will work correctly on the majority of client browsers and only IE might have a problem ... "
Absolutely correct. The Internet Explorer family of browsers may have more market share than the rest, but individual versions are not particularly dominant relative to each-other and Firefox. This means that every web developer should be striving for W3C compliant pages. Targeting a specific browser version is folly these days as the top three (IE6, IE7, Firefox 2) have roughly the same level of adoption.
Here are some numbers to back this up. This is just a random site I googles, I'm sure many sites are similar give or take a few percentage points. Also note that the use varies across the world (Firefox is particularly strong in parts of Europe) http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Note around one-third of users are still using IE6. That may be because their company requires it, or they don't know (or care) how to upgrade. Most importantly, these may not be the savvy market-segment (the 'influencers') you would prefer to reach with your website. So that means you have to make sure your website works with both Firefox (for the smart folk) and the various IE versions.
To target IE-only is a foolish, and unnecessary, mistake people made in the past and are paying for now (since they have to pay to update their sites for other users).
Also, Flash nor Silverlight (or JavaFX or applets, etc) are nice for multi-media stuff that consumers like to watch without paying for it. Meanwhile the corporates (and governments) are continuing to the web as the zero client-side deployment is something they don't want to give up (which is why Silverlight will very likely be dead-in-the-water for most big organisations with vast numbers of marginally-proficient IT users).