Her choice in men is a bit dodgy ;-)

I know what you mean...the fathers of her two daughters for starters! :Y

Definitely just for info only. It's not even something that's likely to go outside the team, just being written as a sort of learning experience.

The proportion of users who care about the things that you can configure in FF which you can't in Chrome is going to be so tiny as to be insignificant. And Chrome has plugins/addons/whatever, I don't know where you arrived at a belief otherwise.

Chrome is good in exactly the ways in which FF was good when it was good. It's lightweight and fast without lacking in customisability. Those were the reasons people jumped from IE to FF and they are the same reasons people (the vast majority of) will jump from FF to Chrome. Alongside the continued steady trickle of not-technically-minded people who realise they don't have to use IE.

I used Firefox when it was better. I'm hardly a typical IE user. I may not be as techy as you, but I make websites for a living and use the web a lot. And I jumped to Chrome when it became better than FF. Caer is more techy than me and he did the same. I think this group of users you're describing is largely imaginary.

On the odd occasion when I have to use FF now it feels... almost as bad as using IE.

But this browser-jumpiing/-savvy demographic is hardly representative of the majority though, is it?

 

That majority may be luddites, but they're the luddites that your web sites have to appeal to (unless you build intranets/extranets, or demographically controlled/restricted sites).

 

(What happens when Chrome becomes like FireFox?)

I think if someone uses not-IE they've already demonstrated their willingness to go elsewhere if something better comes along.

And when Chrome goes the way of FF something else will come along. Maybe even Opera 8-O

And FF's numbers are starting to fall. Up to this point it does seem that Chrome has been taking uses from IE (assuming it's as simple as the stats suggest and not something weird like IE->FF->Chrome). But yeah, the past few months have seen FF's numbers falling too.

I still use FF, cos I hate Chrome.

Then you are a worthless anachronism.

(hug)

I could be the new TAK.

:'D

I use Chrome too, but not for customisability (in fact it's the frustrating lack of being able to get my preferences which is likely to see me switch to Opera 11 or Firefox 4).


Depends why they're not using IE - did they actively choose, did they stumble upon the Browser Choice shortcut, did their techy friend/relative make the choice for them, etc?

I wouldn't be surprised if Firefox was falling - in the past it was really just IE vs not-IE (Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox).

Now there's a choice of non-IE browsers (with a huge simplification of...) one for people who just want a browser, and one for people who want their browser to work their way. (not necessarily a direct correlation to techyness)

Firefox may well lose most of the first (much larger) camp to Chrome, and only lose some of the smaller second camp (if you've got your browser working exactly how you want, you need inertia to move).

It'll still be one of the top three browsers though, and remain relevant - even if it does drop below 10% it's still have a very vocal group of people using it.


As for Opera... dunno what to make of them. There's a couple of Opera guys doing HTML5-related presentations at a conference I'm going to in a few weeks - might see if I can ask them "why have you only got 2%" and see what they say. :)

From what source?

Wikipedia is not showing statistically significant change:



(Well, I haven't actually calculated, because I don't remember how, but it seems pretty steady around 30% for the past year, and up from 27% at the end of 2008.)


Oooh, they've got a non-IE chart too:


From ~Nov 2009 there's a slight downward trend, but it'd have to accelerate a lot to go anywhere any time soon?

I said in the last coupla months and you show me year by year graphs? And wonder why you don't see a dip?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

What? You don't expect me to actually pay attention to what you're saying?

Not sure how reliable monthly charts are, but certainly I'm not going to pay attention to w3schools ones.


Even assuming it's a profile of web developers is wrong, because sensible web devs don't use the site.

There are no reliable stats. Because it's something which differs vastly from site to site and any site-neutral means of measuring tend towards self-selection.

I trust the w3schools one because it most closely reflects the analytics on the sites I work on (which tend to be big, non-technical stuff relating to TV/Popular music - very general audience).

Is it a fair reflection that there's more FF users than IE? I'm not disputing the numbers, I'm just surprised and didn't realise FF had overtaken IE.

Like I say, varies a lot per site but yeah, a lot of sites show FF at about 40%. And some show IE on 40%. Kinda weird but... yeah, these stats are fairly useless.

(By which I mean the stats are useless to use in absolute terms. But so long as the site measures the same thing each time, any trends are generally going to be indicative of the whole picture)

Yay, time for me to use my favourite picture!

 

And to be really boring and on topic - attached is an anonymised version of what I was trying to do, although it would then be extended/copy+pasted for multiple countries.

 

I like how it looks, but I'm sure that the coding is terribly inefficient and when actually extended for lots of countries would probably become unmanageable.

I think that's an oversimplification, but how substantial or not I cannot say. From personal experience, I moved away from IE when I moved to Mac since Microsoft dropped IE for that platform. I suspect the number of people who've dropped IE because it's Windows-only is relatively minor, but then there are others that have been scared off by security threats. While no browser is immune, IE's ties to the OS make it more of a liability, and once people have rid themselves of that, they may just be happy where they are.

All speculation, though. I have no stats to back this up.