Microsoft lost the second place to Firefox

Marcus Österberg — Mon, 23 May 2016 07:10:00 +0000

For the first time ever, Firefox is passing Microsoft’s web browser(s) measured globally. This is according to Statcounter’s data for April this year. Their data should be quite credible, despite the sometimes strange local variations in the choice of browsers, since they collect data from three million websites and has had fifteen billion page views.

All in all, Firefox accounted for 15.6% and Microsoft’s browsers had 15.5%. As you might figure out, there is a giant hiding in plain sight, namely Google Chrome, which has over 60%. The really small browsers like Apple’s Safari, Opera, and others, together account for 8.4 %.

Why are Firefox successful all of a sudden?

Now I’m speculating wildly, but I think there are Windows users, mostly on Windows 10, that have noticed that Microsoft is phasing out Internet Explorer in favor of Microsoft Edge. Perhaps they are making an active change. Suddenly they notice that the Internet may not be synonymous with Explorer.

To call it success is not entirely fair. It is, after all, so that Firefox has lost a smaller market share compared with Explorer & Edge, while Google Chrome continues to increase their.

How does this matter to my website?

Presumably, this is not something that determines how you work with your website. But it is absolutely worth trying to keep track of the market shares so to make representative measurements on one’s own website.

To some extent, a change in the distribution also may affect how web users behave. Let’s say that many of those who come to Firefox for the first time, is noticing ad blocking – well, then it can start to affect some websites.

Source: Statcounter

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Hooray! Internet Explorer died today…

Marcus Österberg — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 07:29:36 +0000

At last, Microsoft has finally caught up and stopped pretending that ancient versions of Internet Explorer is something worth keeping. Today they killed (FINALLY!1!) the support for all versions except the latest one, version 11.

I suspect that they would ideally spend all their focus in their new browser, Edge, but it might give too many angry corporate customers.

Some of us still remember Internet Explorer 6

We, old-timers in the web, is still upset over Internet Explorer 6, even though it is a couple of years since it disappeared from even the most slow organizations in the public sector in Sweden. Internet Explorer 6 was really good when it arrived, but was woefully poor during the last years of its life. The bottom line is that no browser version should live more than a year.

For us working with the web, it really is nothing new. We should not design anything to work in one or a few browsers that happens to be current right now. If we follow the design principle of progressive enhancement, ensuring a design’s usability in both new and old browser. As icing on the cake we are then not:

Dependant of Javascript.
Do not make it complicated for the search engines.
Set up barriers for those with disabilities.
Most likely, it has also resolved about half of the challenges of web performance without even focusing on it.

If you’re looking for a longer rant on the advantages of progressive enhancement? This is that concludes the chapter on web design in the book Web Strategy for Everyone.

My web developing friend Filip expresses his feelings for Internet Explorer 8-10 this way:

???
Very nice to once and for all throw out all the old fallbacks. Right now it actually feels like Safari is the elephant in the room, which will be harder to ignore …
– Filip Andersson

More on Internet Explorer <11’s death