Scribblings

Firefox appears from nowhere

I’ve just run an analysis of the logs for this site over the past 10 days. The results surprised me. If I omit the hits from myself and known search engines such as Google and Yahoo then nearly 11% have come from browsers other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Of that 11% around 9% have come from people using Firefox. The other 2% mainly consist of people using Safari, Konqueror and Opera. If I look back to the whole of October I find that about 95% of visits were from people using Internet Explorer while back as far as June the only browser to rise above 1% was Apple’s Safari.

I know all this is unrepresentative of the web as a whole but, to me, it certainly suggests the browser market is finally breaking out from being in the grip of Internet Explorer. Who knows, even more people might be tempted to produce sites which are not optimised for Explorer. And, horror of horrors, some may even be tempted to produce sites which, while they comply with the W3C standards, don’t even work with Explorer but instead fall over in a wobbly heap.

I’ll bet Microsoft is privately pretty worried about this. By the time the next major version of Windows is released (Longhorn, currently scheduled for some time in 2006) they may well find that they’ve lost the majority of the browser market altogether. Can’t be a bad thing.

Posted 3 December 2004, 00:54
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