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Comment by bobsy | Hacker News Reader

Does it matter what is the most popular browser? For me the only thing that matters is <= IE8 loses market share. A modern browser is pretty much a modern browser today and for 99% of web browsing it doesn't matter which you use.

As a sign of changing times my Dad installed Chrome by himself! Blew my mind that he knew what Chrome is and actually managed to find and install it without help.

I still use Firefox. I am getting less keen on it. Tabs aren't sand boxed. I find their developer tools unintuitive and phpmyadmin keeps making the browser hang when I inspect a 200 column table...

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There's still a heck of a lot of new features we can't use because IE10 is lagging behind most other browsers. Examples:

http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-canvas

http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-filters

http://caniuse.com/#feat=border-image

http://caniuse.com/#feat=webgl

http://caniuse.com/#feat=audio-api

http://caniuse.com/#feat=fullscreen

http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-masks

http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-resize

There's also the question of whether history will repeat itself. Will IE10 stay still and in a couple of years time we'll be bemoaning the fact that we can't use CSS temporal olfactory backgrounds because IE users aren't upgrading?

Yes, because that is how customers make their project orders on which set of browsers are to be supported.

What the most popular browser is doesn't matter on its own. But I would still expand your <=IE8 to include all of IE because, while IE8 and lower are hopelessly outdated, IE9 is still a poor HTML5 browser and new and shiny IE10 is already behind both Chrome and Firefox.

Now IE is not batshit insane, the biggest problem is that is has a very slow release cycle. The second being that MS shuts out all its users on their older OS-s.

Chrome is very aggressively advertised and promoted in newspapers, magazines, on billboards and even on TV, not to mention on Google's Search and Youtube sites. I'm surprised its market share not higher, its actually falling. http://gs.statcounter.com/

In what world is 34.77% to 35.72% "falling"? I think you are looking at the IE line.

Also, IE is way more aggressively advertised and promoted than Chrome is. I've probably seen this ad over 100 times since March:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYRbYzgAvSA

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