Recent statistics from W3Counter show that Firefox's marketshare has now reached 25%. The top five distinct browsers are:
- Internet Explorer 6.0 with 66%
- Firefox 1.5 with 21%
- Firefox 1.0 with 4%
- Internet Explorer 7.0 with 1%
- Safari 2.0 with 1%
The statistics are based on over one million distinct visits to more than one thousand different websites.
What I find amusing is that Netscape Navigator has completely fallen off the radar, with an insignificant marketshare, and yet corporate and government websites (always assuming they even acknowledge browers other than IE) continue to act as if Netscape was still important.
This also shows than any web designer who codes purely for IE is effectively treating one third of all users as unimportant. Maybe if IE held a 98% marketshare could that attitude be defended, but it certainly can't be now.
One last factor that should be considered... many web users set their browsers to identify itself as Internet Explorer. The main reason for doing this is to work around obnoxious websites that would work perfectly with multiple browsers, but explicitly check for non-IE browsers and kick them off the site. (Your browser is not recognised. Minimum system requirements are Internet Explorer... sort of nonsense.) So that figure of 25% for Firefox should be considered a minimum.
Link to the W3Counter report here.
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