March 20th, 2009
Firefox inches towards 50%, Safari holds steady
These are the kind of stats that should make the Mozilla folks very happy. According to W3Schools data, Firefox climbed to 46.4% in February, while the various versions of IE dropped by 1.2% to 43.6%. Granted, this is skewed towards developers, but most sources agree that IE is on a downward slope.
Market Share shows Moz up again in February by a slim .14% to 21.77%, while IE dropped again by .11% to 67.44%. I’m sure Microsoft is hoping to boost their stats with IE8, but the enthusiasm for another Explorer release seems to be lacking.
If it weren’t for Safari being strategic for the iPhone, I’d say that Apple ought to just kill Safari and embrace Firefox. (Well, with Fennec, they ought to anyway…) According to W3Schools, Safari is holding steady at 3%, despite being available for Windows in addition to Mac OS X. Market Share shows Safari at a more respectable 8.02%, but dropping from January.
The best news of all is for users who don’t do Windows: A shrinking market share for IE means that Web developers should be thinking about writing for Web standards, not for a specific browser.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations. Follow Zonker on Twitter.
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