RE: Design Change Requests

Here's the top 5 from our ecommerce website...

MS Internet Explorer 92.9 % 
FireFox 4.6 % 
Safari 1.1 % 
Netscape 0.6 % 
Mozilla 0.2 % 

Of course, this is for mortals and not IS folks. I still think IBM
should drop their con job about open standards and just admit that
IE/Windows composes their belief system, at least in terms of developer
support.

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: RE: Design Change Requests
> From: "Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Tue, January 10, 2006 12:19 pm
> To: "'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> > From: Ingvaldson, Scott
> > 
> > According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp :
> > 
> > As of January 2006 IE 6 has 61.3% of the market and Firefox has 24.8%.
> > In my mind that makes it less than "obscure."  It should be as easy to
> > support two or three versions of the #2 browser as it is to support the
> > 31 flavors of IE and its associated patches.
> > 
> > But I digress.
> 
> The site you point to is pretty skewed.  Other sites show IE with close to a
> 90% market share, while others point to a slowing in the growth of the Gecko
> engine (Mozilla/Firefox/Firebird).  I'm hardly a Microsoft advocate, but
> still I realize that far more than 2/3 of people use IE.  Even the site you
> list clearly states:
> ----------
> 
> Why so high Firefox figures?
> 
> W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies.
> These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the
> average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it
> comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers. 
> 
> These facts indicate that the browser figures below are not 100% realistic.
> Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at
> least 80% of the users.
> 
> Anyway, our data, collected over a two year period, clearly shows the long
> and medium-term trends.
> ----------
> 
> The trend is that use of the Gecko engine is indeed rising, no doubt helped
> by the rampant security flaws in IE.  At the same time, your statement that
> "it should be as easy to support two or three versions of the #2 browser as
> it is to support the 31 flavors of IE" is a bit off the mark.  It seems you
> haven't run into some of the more frustrating inconsistencies between Gecko
> and IE, most of which don't raise their ugly faces until you start doing
> advanced DOM programming.  For example, events are bubbled completely
> differently in Gecko and IE.  Another particularly nasty bit is that the
> keycode in the keystroke event is read-only.  That really makes certain
> things difficult.
> 
> In any case, the inconsistencies between Gecko and IE are much greater than
> the inconsistencies between IE versions, and it's purely a business decision
> as to which to support.
> 
> Joe
> 
> 
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