RE: Design Change Requests

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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