Serendipity35

I was messing for a few days over the break with a website I designed because I realized that some crazy stuff was happening when you viewed it in Internet Explorer. I automatically default to Firefox myself and usually check sites there first, but you can't ignore the majority of Net users.

If you're in that majority of users, you use Internet Explorer as your browser. But according to preliminary data from Net Application, Mozilla's Firefox browser crossed the 20% market share for the first time last November and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 just went under 70%.

Google's new Chrome probably had around 1% by the end of the year. Apple's Safari made pretty significant gains during 2008, probably due to sales of Apple hardware.

But the big news in this is IE's decline during 2008. All the other major browsers nibbled away at IE's share with Firefox taking the biggest bite.

And the news for 2009 might have something to do with the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8 (the beta version of IE8 is out there already). It gets good reviews but most reviewers I have read still like the extensibility and speed of Firefox.

I wouldn't count out Google in this war. You know they are working on extension architecture for Chrome, so that developers can move their Firefox plugins to Chrome and give them some of that Firefox share.

Of course, there's that 0.22% of fringe people, like Tim, who check out Serendipity35 in oddball browsers. Sorry, but I don't design for you guys, but don't worry because Tim will probably continue to use browsers like the deprecated Netscape and scold me for for things that don't play nice with the code!

If you want to check out your site in MANY browsers easily (no installing software!), try http://browsershots.org