Browser Battles

[Dave]

Yes indeed, the battle for Browser supremacy has rumbled on throughout this year and some interesting reading figures have definitely come to light throughout the year. If you want to have a look at the figures for 2009, I have gone to the trouble of finding them for you:

Wow! I literally had no idea that Internet Explorer still had a market share in the world of browsers and I had no idea it was almost triple that of Firefox. Of course, there is a lot of conclusions that you could reach with figures of these sorts but I think the most telling figure of all is that the share of Internet Explorer is dropping and quick. This year, it has dropped over 6% of it's market share and even more surprisingly, Mozilla has been matched all of the way by Google Chrome as both have taken a gain of over 2% of the IE losses. It really did surprise me that Internet Explorer still has such a majority. I mean, I know it comes with every PC that is sold but if you ask most people which browser they prefer, or are using, most of them will tell you that it is Firefox.

Now, this is not the end of the battle and if anything, it is getting more and more interesting by the day. Recently, Firefox introduced their persona's and I must say that I rather like them. Internet Explorer has been urging more and more of it's users to upgrade from IE6 to IE7 and hasn't really been doing a great job of this and of course Safari comes equipped with every Mac that is now sold.

So which browser do you use and which do you think to be the best?

 

[Ty Burna]

Personally I use Firefox, it's probably not the fastest of the browsers out there (Chrome, Opera, IE, etc.) but the functionality that it gives you through extensions and add ons is quite amazing. I have Chrome on my work machine, mostly just in case a customer has it (it's happened once so far) and I can see what they're looking at. I'm not entirely impressed with Chrome yet, but as a lightweight browser it will fit in well with netbooks and other low end computers. I haven't messed with Opera much, though I'm sure I'll get around to it sooner or later. I remember a number of years ago I was fed up with IE locking up all the time on me so I went looking for a new browser (this was before Firefox ever came into existence yet), and I found a program called Avant. It was a decent browser, not well known but did the trick.

But getting to this why IE still has a large market share, the biggest reason is because you have millions upon millions of computers out there. Many of the people with computers don't keep up with technology like a lot of us do around here so they continue to use IE. These are the same type of people that don't do their Windows Updates and still use IE6. And the amount of people that are like that are a lot more than you would expect. People are also afraid of trying non Microsoft products so they stay away from the likes of Mozilla and Google. Regardless, Firefox's market share is growing more and more, and eventually it will catch IE. This can also be expedited at least in Europe where Microsoft will have to include a browser selection screen. Users will be able to click on whatever browser they want and Windows will take the user to their website to download. Gone are the days of IE being the default browser on the computer. At least in Europe anyways, that hasn't changed in the US yet but it's a possibility of it happening.

 

[lordslix0129]

I find myself at odds with IE6/7/8 than any other browser out there, mainly because I'm constantly having to write customized xhtml/javascript/css codes just for that browser alone, and its always a huge pita. Firefox, Opera and Chrome are cross platform compatible with most web development languages. Microsoft has never followed any of W3C's (web standards authority) web standards, unlike Mozilla and Google. They make their own rules, and you literally have to write custom code from scratch and to make it work, and its still a bitch to make it work right. IE8 recently passed the acid test set by W3C, and its better than ever, yet it still is a pita

Firefox is a memory ****e, yet it's my favorite browser because of the support for it and the availability of almost every type of plugin any computer geek would need. Quite literally, they've made a plugin for almost everything you could possibly want out of a browser

Chrome is an awesome, light-weight browser that is far more secure than any other browser on the market, that I know of. It leaves a very small footprint on your system and it's very easy to use. I love how its completely different than Firefox too. It's not without its flaws though, where are all the plugins? It's still a very young browser that hasn't received much attention from the open source community, in terms of plugins and addons.

 

[The Doctor]

I use Google Chrome because I use a netbook, and Chrome frees up loads of space on the screen and is pretty fast. It's easy to move tabs around and make new windows, and it has Incognito mode which is...useful.

 

[Blade]

Firstly Dave, of course IE still has such a high share of the market. Just like smart marks only make up a small percetage of wrestling fans, educated internet users only make up a small percentage of internet users. IE comes free with most computers, so clueless internet users use IE, oblivious that they're using arguably the worst internet browser available.

Anyway, I generally use either Firefox or Opera. I use Firefox on the family PC, because it seems to be the best for use on virus-riddled computers. On my laptop, I use Opera because I've got a lot of pages bookmarked, between pages I enjoy and pages I use for study, so the start page on Opera is incredibly useful for that.