Quacon Testing Services Inc.

Browser Wars

Since the early days of the internet the browser wars have been raging.  Although it looked like Microsoft had won the war back when IE 6 came out, it's slowly diminishing market share has left room for a couple other players.  In general unless you have an Apple dominated audience for your site IE is still going to be the most useful for your development teams to build for.  With solid coding practices, a few hacks here and there and patience you can have a site that looks perfect across a wide range of browsers.  Below are a few resources to give you a snapshot of the current marketshare of the different browsers. Things to keep in mind when viewing any of these resources are:

1. The stats you are looking at are not for your website, you should absolutely have some solution in place to monitor your own stats for development and testing purposes so you have accurate information on your audience (analytics.google.com is a great free resource that I have found no equal to).
2. Any website that has content dedicated to more technical users such as web developers and programmers will most likely have an uncommonly large percentage of the audience using FireFox or another non-Microsoft browser.
3. Any website that has content dedicated to visual arts (Photoshop tutorials, video editing, etc.) will most likely have an uncommonly large percentage of the audience using Apple hardware (no internet explorer support since IE 5)

Free Stats:
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2009/December/browser.php
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers