When building web sites I usually test the MSIE browser and maybe Safari. Checking my stats on a regular basis FireFox seems to be rapidly growing in popularity. In January 4.13%, in February 4.95%, in March 5.42% and so far this month 6.35%. Compared to Safari 1.07%. Is FireFox going to be a serious contender for MSIE. With 6 in 100 users of my site using FireFox, and growing I recon we should all spend a bit of time checking our sites for compatibility. Has anyone else had similar stats? http://www.domainhub.co.uk/stats/2005/04/W/ganalysis.shtml Jason
Firefox is significant for me - sometimes as much as 25% of visitors. I always design for standards compliance (no problem in Firefox) and then kludge where necessary for IE. Roll on the day when we can forget the misgivings of IE. Mick
Too right, Get rid of IE once and for all. I make standards compliant (and usually transistional, as I have yet to fully update my sites!) websites for charities and my own personal use, and they work fine in FireFox I also use FireFox as my main browser - but I have to keep IE for Arnica's CMS - it isn't Mozilla compatible!
This is what this week was so far in the US. IE is top as always. We use Firefox Mozilla / IE / Opera - so we can see how things look in each. Now this is why htaccess and robots.txt is important! Safari is used by Apple people not even on the list. Microsoft Internet Explorer Netscape Mozilla findlinks/0.945 ( http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/findlinks/) Other Netscape Compatible OmniExplorer_Bot/3.06d ( http://www.omni-explorer.com) WorldIndexer Dumbot(version 0.1 beta - http://www.dumbfind.com/dumbot.html) POE-Component-Client-HTTP/0.470 (perl; N; POE; en; rv:0.470) NaverBot-1.0 (NHN Corp. / 82-2-3011-1989 / ) findlinks/0.946 ( http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/findlinks/) Wget/1.8.2 PHP/4.2.2 KummHttp/1.1 (compatible; KummClient; Linux rulez) MSFrontPage/4.0 LinkWalker appie 1.1 (www.walhello.com) libwww-perl/5.79 Opera/8.01 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) OmniExplorer_Bot/3.10 ( http://www.omni-explorer.com) WorldIndexer Java/1.4.1_04
mine is 73% internet explorer and 19% firefox, i normally design my sites in firefox, check them in internet explorer and then sometime i will validate the html/css aswell to check for any problems i might of missed.
My stats are IE 50% FF 40% I always write standards compliant (X)HTML and test it with both browsers. I usually have no problems with Firefox and occassionally some problems with IE which require some code or css tweaking. BTW. If you want see what your site looks like in other browser checkout http://browsershots.org/
I am at an average of 20% usage for Firefox and Mozilla browsers across my and my clients sites. I always test sites first with Firefox and deal with IE's quirks later.
Here's my stats out of the last 900 hits: 726 80.67% MSIE 6.0 65 7.22% Firefox 1.0.4 32 3.56% Opera 8.01 25 2.78% Safari 1.2 18 2.00% Opera 7.10 11 1.22% Firefox 1.0 10 1.11% MSIE 5.0 10 1.11% Firefox 1.0.6 1 0.11% Firefox 1.0.3 1 0.11% MSIE 5.01 1 0.11% MSIE 5.22
I have about 10% firefox. I usually test in Firefox, because it is the browser that best follows the standards. Later I check IE and Opera. It will indeed be interesting to see how IE7 handles stuff.
IMHO, Firefox will have a strong presence in the future. Thus. I always check on firefox first and IE later. However, if your visitors are grannies or people who just want to get info and cannot differentiate a browser from a modem, testing against IE is sufficient. I had one site where my audience are in this category and 98% used IE. In simple word, know your audience
Indeed... the younger and more educated tend to gravitate towards a technically superior browser (FF) and the old timers that have no clue usually end up using the junk (IE) because they don't know any better. Of course, this is stereotypical and overgeneralized, but you get the idea.
As many people have already said - try to design in Firefox. Gecko (the rendering engine) is probably the most standards compliant engine out there (although it's not perfect), so designing in Firefox will future-proof your websites. Once you have a completed site, check in IE for problems, and kludge and hack where necessary (although not too much otherwise M$ will never change their evil ways :-D )