As a web developer, I like to know what browsers are likely to be hitting sites I design. There are many sources for this information on the net, but the numbers seem to vary greatly. Fortunately, I found a wikipedia page that has stats from several sources as well as the average among the listed services, helping to give a better view of what the approximate market share of the browsers is.
It’s no surprise that IE still owns a good percentage of the market, followed by FireFox. But what are the actual numbers? According to WikiPedia (see wiki here), they are:
| Source | Month | Internet Explorer |
Firefox | Safari | Chrome | Opera | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Net Applications | August 2009 | 66.97% | 22.98% | 4.07% | 2.84% | 2.04% | [1] |
| The Counter | July 2009 | 73.67% | 18.06% | 4.49% | 0.00% (N/A) | 0.86% | [2] |
| OneStat | March 2009 | 79.79% | 15.59% | 2.65% | 0.86% | 0.54% | [3] |
| Stat Counter | August 2009 | 58.69% | 31.28% | 3.25% | 3.38% | 2.67% | [4] |
| W3Counter | August 2009 | 52.36% | 31.86% | 4.35% | 3.23% | 1.19% | [5] |
| AT Internet | April 2009 | 63.60% | 28.40% | 3.40% | 1.70% | 2.20% | [6] |
| Median | August 2009 | 65.29% | 25.69% | 3.46% | 2.84% | 1.61% | — |
My personal browser feelings are FireFox all the way. It seems most forgiving for developers, is faster than IE and has far less vulnerabilities. All that aside, the number one reason FireFox has kept my attention all these years are the addons. I could not live without having the tools that make my browsing experience that much better. The developer tools that help with CSS are priceless. IE Tab makes the use of IE when absolutly needed easier by allowing me to stay within FireFox and still render the site in IE.