What browser is the most used browser? Would it be IE or FF or some other browser? I'd like to know so I can view my website in that browser while developing. Thanks in advance.
IE 6 is currently the most used browser. However, IE 6 standards support is rather poor, and I would recommend testing your website in IE 6 and Mozilla Firefox. Also, it seems that Microsoft will be "pushing" IE 7 to all Windows users, so perhaps it will be better to use it instead.
The most highly regarded and reliable tabulation is Browser News .......... be sure to read the caveats .......... Gecko based usually includes Mozilla/Firefox/Safari. James
It has been a month or two since I last looked but the split was circa 30% each for IE6 IE7 and FF though it depends who your target market are as that is the global average of net users
1.IE6 2.IE7 3.Firefox 4.Safari 5.Opera 6.Konqueror/Netscape/Earlier version of IE - browser with less than 1% market share
Completely depends on your audience!!!!!! I build my sites for the Netherlands (maybe in the future we'll spread out to Belgium for some, but not for some time). Unlike the rest of Europe or the Americas, my country has a much higher reliance on Windows and IE6. In februari Microsoft is going to send IE7 via its automatic updates to those running XP. This will surely reduce my number of IE6 visits. Statistics vary but Central Bureau for Statistics says 90% are IE users, FF is 9% and everyone else is less that 1%. That said, a website for right-wing students (geenstijl.nl) and one for left-wing students (retecool.nl) both have much higher FF usage (up to 20%), as well as other browsers like Camino and Opera and the Mac-using population is much higher. Are you targeting students or hippies? This is completely different in computer type and usage than targeting the pensioned Old Ones. Want a world-wide audience? A US audience? Think many older browsers, dial-up in larger numbers, and various levels of scriping allowed. If you build sites for clients or just actually care, you need to test your sites in at least one screen reader and one screen magnifier. The percentage of people using those is LOW-- but they are restricted to a certain user agent, why lock them out? You need a website that just about everyone can see and use. Don't forget PDA's and mobile phones. The kids these days, looking up games or stuff on Wikipedia on their Nokias. T-Mobile is having a cow cause it realised it wasn't paying attention to the rise in mobile internetting and are now scurrying to make both their site and their products low-screen-size friendly (800x 600 and much lower, half that size often). You can get both JAWS and MAGic free (works in 40minute blocks when in demo version) from www.freedomscientific.com I got mine on a thumb drive so I can plug it into any Blows machine : ) I don't care if zero people visit my sites with Opera or Konqueror-- if they look totally shtty in those browsers, I've done something wrong. And it needs to be fixed. Konqueror has some issues with span-image-replacement, but as the site's still usable I let it go. I'm really reluctant to test and build for IE5.5 but I've noticed I actually have a decent population of users (or at least they claim to be using IE5.5 : ) I'm assuming they have Windows 98 or something and cannot upgrade and probably have trouble using FF (memory hog). If I were to follow my own advice, I'd build and check for IE5 as well. Don't lock people out of your site by building for only one or two browsers. The Internets should be, like, free, man.