Ten years ago, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were still fighting each to be the most popular web browser. Internet Explorer won the battle… easily, in fact. Support for Netscape finally ended in 2007, and since then Netscape has only been a byword. Shipping with (and being a fundamental part of) Windows has given IE a near monopoly over the web browser market. Is it the best web browser? Back when it was just IE and Netscape, I preferred IE. Now I would take any of the other browsers over IE. Ever since Firefox emerged in 2004, we’ve seen a change from what browsers were, to what they can be. We’ve seen innovations like tabbed browsing, speed dial, useful extensions, greater web standards support and faster JavaScript engines. It is also no surprise that these innovations are not coming from Internet Explorer; they are coming from all the newer browsers. Because of this, the market for these other browsers are growing.
Asa Dotzler, a member of the Mozilla team who has done extensive work with Firefox (including QA, testing and marketing), has created an interesting visualization on his blog showing both the growth of web users and the changes in market share of web browsers. Here it is:
There are a lot of interesting things that can be observed from this visualization. The thing that really caught my attention (and greatly pleased me) was that, according to this visualization, if you take the amount of growth in internet users since 2004, it is nearly equal to the amount of people using browsers other than IE. If this trend continues, then eventually IE will not have a monopoly on the browser market.
As of right now, these 5 browsers (in order) are the most popular:
Which one is the best? Well, that’s pretty much up to you. Try them all, and find the one that suits you best. But for the sake of the whole internet, please get rid of IE6 if you still have that. IE8 is available now, and there is no reason why IE6 should still exist and have such a big browser market share.
There are a lot of web applications designed to track stats like Clicky and Google Analytics, but not all of them share their browsers statistics openly. Below are a few websites that do contain decent stats related to browser market share. Remember that none of these sources can be considered “correct” because browser statistics will be heavily influenced by the type of people that visit the websites being monitored. For example, W3Schools is a website dedicated to helping people learn how to be better web developers. It makes sense then that their statistics show a much smaller percent of IE users compared to Firefox.
The “Browser Wars” have just begun.
Also, I’ve been enjoying another visualization that someone created recently. They have taken the most popular websites on the web and mapped them to a map of Tokyo’s transportation system. Click on the preview to see the whole image (it’s quite large).
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