Monday 9th March 2009
From a seemingly unassailable position as the de-facto standard web browser with a more than 90% share of the web browser market, Microsoft's Internet Explorer usage has plummeted over the past 2 years, with more and more users replacing Internet Explorer with Mozilla's Firefox web browser. Also, the increased uptake of Apple products means that Apple's Safari web browser also now accounts for a substantial share of web browser usage on the internet.
As if to add insult to injury, Google's released their own web browser, Chrome at the end of last year, although the browser has yet to make a significant dent in the market, holding just over 1% of the user share.
Recent web browser usage statistics from several sources suggest that Internet Explorer overall usage is now down to around 67% overall, with this further split between roughly 26% using Internet Explorer 6, 40% using Internet Explorer 7, and a tiny 1% of users trying out Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 beta.
Of the alternative browsers, Firefox's market share is the largest, with around 20% of users now using Firefox to browse the internet rather than IE. Apple's Safari users are now accounting for approximately 8% of web traffic, with the remainder shared between other browsers such as Opera, Google Chrome and the various Webkit / Gecko derivatives.
On more technical websites, the loss of IE market share is even more marked. Of the users of the w3schools.com, only 43% of users visited the site using Internet Explorer, with a majority of 45% of users using Firefox. Arstechnica.com report 51.06% of visitors using Firefox, and a paltry 21.8% using IE.
A diversification of the browser market has forced Microsoft to confront their poor support of standards compliant HTML and CSS in Internet Explorer 6 and 7. their forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 web browser is intended to have much better support for HTML and CSS than their previous efforts, although it still lags some significant way behind the Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox web browsers in standards compliance tests such as the ACID 2 and ACID 3 tests.
In addition, this diversification has helped to secure web users against the common “driveby” and “cross-site-scripting” exploits which dogged the various flavours of IE over the past 6 years. These attacks allowed crackers and virus writers to use well known exploits in IE to infect large numbers of unknowing IE users with viruses, trojans and worms. With a diversity of browsers now in use, it becomes much harder for virus writers to write exploit code which can infect large numbers of machines via the web browser.
If your website has not been properly coded using standards compliant HTML. CSS and javascript, and hasn't been tested with a wide range of different browsers, it may fail to work correctly in some web browsers. In fact, even if your site has been built to work in IE 6 and 7, there is a significant possibility that it won't work properly in Internet Explorer 8.
If you are unsure as to whether your website has been tested against a range of modern web browsers, you might want to consider testing it now.
A good way to do this yourself would be check your site in Mozilla Firefox and see how it shapes up. You can download the browser from the Mozilla Firefox website here. Once installed, just browse to your website from Firefox and take a look.
And if things don't quite work the way they should, get in touch with your web developer, or drop us a line:
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