In my main index.php file I dropped in an excellent page counter from Statcounter which I can highly recommend. Among other things it gives you a list of the browsers used by the last 100 visitors. This may be a skewed number since my readers tend to be savvy and 90-percent of them are smarter than me and the other 10-percent are kids. Still the indication is clear, at least to this audience. It’s moving away from Internet Explorer. After all THAT work and the Justice Dept and all, Microsoft cannot be happy with this sort of profile. Geez. Here is the screen shot:
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Bad news? This is brilliant news!
More people using standards compliant browsers the closer we become to a world where web designers aren’t limited to the capabilities of the dated IE6.
I have tried most of the others and see no advantage except to avoid MS (maybe enough reason). I do like tabs, but have always ended up back with IE.
PS. Glad to see this blog. I have followed Dvorak for years.
Have tried others, always go back to IE. Wish it had tabs.
Been using Mozilla and nothing but (different variations, of course) for 4 years – never been a fan of IE, so it’s nice to see it being dented by the better product (in my honest, educated opinion)
If nothing else, it’s motivating MS to improve their product, and showing people that there are fast, friendly, innovative products good enough in beta form to force Microsoft to play catch up again 🙂
From the Mac side.
I’m running Camino, and I believe it defaults to “pretending to be” the latest version of IE. I set it to identify itself honestly.
Since a lot of sites only “support” IE or Mozilla – most Mac browsers have settings which allow “spoofing” the browser-check features of web-sites, just to get access to those sites.
I wonder how many of your IE and Mozilla entries are from Mac-users running Safari or Camino?
Some Mac-users don’t like the idea of “spoofing” – since it masks the true number of Mac surfers out there. How do you get a web-page to support a Mac browser-type, when they have no record of getting visits from one?
Mike
I haven’t used that awful Internet Explorer browser since it infected all my PCs with Nimda. Once you’ve used Firefox with tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, ad blocking, superior standards compliance, and dozens of very useful extensions, I don’t know why anyone would keep clicking the blue e.
On my primary machine, my Mac, I usually use Safari. I’ve noticed that a lot of web statistic scripts, especially older ones, don’t recognize this browser and return IE, Netscape, or “unknown” instead.
Anyone tried the new Firefox?
Hurrah! An Opera user! I’m a fan of Opera- It can actually access the internet! Last time I tried to use IE, it kept on getting set to proxy through itself. That convinced me I needed to switch. Firefox is tempting though…… Its feature might win over my Opera devotion.
I was a IE fan for a long time. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure why people bothered using any other browser, when they had a good, relatively fast and de-facto standardised product. There were days when I was actually hoping that the world would become an Internet Explorer one, exclusively.
Then I discovered Firefox. It will take quite a lot for me to change to anything else, again. And I can see a lot of people are taking that same path. Firefox is a real fox!
…and I’ll make sure everybody I know starts using it.
Everyone was an IE fan once upon a time. What else was there? NS4 was doomed as more developers starting using CSS. Along comes Firefox with all these great extensions. I think its great. Even with 2 monitors, I can easily have 6 or more pages loaded testing web applications. With the WebDeveloper and HTML Tidy extensions, I can instantly validate the HTML thats served up by my server code. Total plus.
And I don’t know about you, but Firefox blocks iframes, flash etc like a champ. With Flashblock and Adblock extensions, life is clean and simple, the way it should be.