Firefox finally passes IE6
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Web developers still have to target multiple versions of Firefox, and Firefox 2.x supports fewer things than Firefox 3.x. Likewise, developers still have to target IE6 (23.3% share), which supports even fewer web standards than pretty much every other version of every other major browser in wide usage.
Nevertheless, it's hard to understand how this comparison is valid or significant.
Which is also the version with the most market share and the most problematic for web development, FF 2.x is only 1.14, I'm pretty sure most people focus only on the latest versions for FF/Safari.
I asked a friend on Windows to test it and he showed me it on IE, crippled and appallingly broken. My advice was for him to find another web browser. I'm willing to make Firefox work but draw the line at IE.
I wish every web browser would switch to WebKit. It pains me how bad certain rendering engines are.
Of course, I guess I'm a little bit of a hypocrite since I use Safari on my Mac. At the same time though, no one can really compete with Mac Safari -- its running profile is tiny and integrates with Mac better than any other browser.
I assume you don't mean dearth here as that would mean a lack of innovative features.
Personally I found Opera to be too much of a walled garden, they never really had a cohesive extensions story. Sure you could configure it to a very great degree but you are still interfacing with it only at points and ways the developers were able to foresee. Still I used it for years it's a good piece of software.
I think my next browser will be one of the minimalist webkits uzbl or surf as soon as they can support a decent vi mode.
(And yes, I am using Opera 10 now)
They only just stopped using a translucent 3D pie-chart. But it's still tilted, drop-shadowed, single colored and, most importantly of all, a friggin pie chart in which we need to eyeball differences between several items less than 5%.
Just give us a table of figures and a bar chart for love of tufte. If you want to be trendy make it sortable with javascript.
And it's the trends that actually count anyway! I truly dispair every month when they wheel this out.
For graph 2, the lie factor for each bar graph is:
IE: .25 / .62 = .403
FF: .25 / .2383 = 1.04
Safari: .25 / .0417 = ~6
Chrome: .25 / .034 = 7.35
I suppose it's a credence to a tech site that its readers are overwhelmingly tech-orientated compared to the widespread market.
Browser usage is enormously variable depending on demographics. When you weigh the cost/benefit tradeoffs of cross-browser compatibility for your site it is critical that you understand the actual browser usage for your site, not just the internet at large.
On a mass-appeal website that pulls in a wide cross-section of worldwide internet users IE may be the majority browser, dominating everything else by a 3:1 margin, with IE6 as popular as firefox. For such a site it probably pays off to make sure your site not only works but works well and looks good in IE, even IE6. However, if you have a more tech focused site then things are dramatically different, likely firefox will be the overwhelmingly dominant browser, with IE a distant 2nd, 3rd, or 4th and IE6 usage just a tiny slice. In that scenario the excessive costs of making IE (let alone IE6) compatibility a first tier design priority become completely unjustified and you should probably care about how well your site works in IE6 about as much as you care about it working in Opera (which is probably not much).
from the bottom of the page: W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.
Firefox passed IE6. It did not pass IE in general, which enjoys a huge advantage.
Or did I read something wrong? Because at first blush, the version number "6" didn't seem that important in the headline. I'm a little confused, though. Why is every version of FF compared to just one version of IE?
So the point is: whether its IE7 or FF, the fact that all of FF is greater than IE6 means that the goal of standards adoption has progressed?
Why wouldn't the main story just be that the rollout of IE7 is finally showing some signs of eliminating IE6 users? And if it's a web standards story, why the FF head?
Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated.
Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE.
The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy.
I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.
But some sites go over the top and a few minutes of looking at flashing, flickering, CPU-hogging dross like one British forum I regularly visit (two large Flash banners at the top of the page, one down the side and one large square Flash ad, often an auto-playing video, in the first post of each page) is enough to send me scuttling back to Firefox. If someone developed a Chromium add-on that did the same thing as Adblock, I wouldn't look back.
(I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly and value - provided they don't abuse my eyes with videos and those flashing "YOU'VE WON A CAR!" images.)
Ditto, but I had to use Vista yesterday and tried out IE8 (again) and was so suprised to find 2 popups on the dilbert website. I don't disable popup blocking for anyone. I thought IE8 had it enabled so it was a little strange ... first unwanted popups in years. Blah blah blah, ... as you were.
Plus, it means on those rare occasions when I fire up IE, I also see fewer ads.
IE8: 28%; IE7: 27%; IE6: 19%; FF3.5: 16%; FF3: 7%; Others: 3%
Once you sit there with IE6, IE8, FF, Safari, and Chrome for a while, you start to get niggles on what each browser will do.
For my current client, I've only had to do one IE6 specific hack (fieldset background colors/images).
That said, I'm not doing anything too fancy (but still use JQuery, Ajax, etc).
Unless we are explicitly leveraging new browser technology, from a design standpoint it could be construed as 'whiny-developer-syndrome' for people who refuse to design for IE. After the initial "WTF" curve with your base css laid out, it's actually not too difficult.