Proprietary web-coding ends here?
About 40% of my visitors (and not including me) to my blog agree: FireFox is better to browse. At least, it is used in 40% of the times people read here.
This leaves 60% of the readers using Internet Explorer (IE), where about a quarter is using ‘ye olde’ IE6 and more than half the amount of the IE-users is browsing with IE7.
While IE7 is finished about a year ago, the development of IE8 is nearing completion. For all of you who do not web-dev: IE sucks and is not standards-compliant. This is the case for IE5 through IE7, of which the latter is not neccessarily the worst as one of its goals was to better adhere to the web standards as defined by W3C (which it currently does not 😉 ).
A recent blogpost on the IE8 developers-blog has raised a lot of scepticism among webpage developers and html-coders as Microsoft intended to make a standards-compliance mode an option.
As IE8 is capable to pass the infamous ACID2-test, the intention was to make this behaviour not the standard behaviour of the browser, while the standard-rendering engine of IE8 had to be backwards compatible with the errors and bugs of the previous versions of IE (of which IE6 has the worst reputation).
Luckily, the so called meta-switch has been abandoned, and the developers have decided the backwards-compatibility modus is to be op-in, and the standards-compliance modus is the standard rendering engine of IE8.
The tech-talk put aside: with the new version of Internet Explorer on its way it seems as though IE an Fx will be rendering webpages nearly the same.
This is good for coders, as the quirks of a specific browser do not have to be taken into account when developing a web-page, so there’s only the need to maintain 1 version of the page. yay!
Hallelujah!
About time anyway.
What makes me wonder is why the hell you let people with IE on your weblog at all.
To understand my reaction. Here some figures from my website in the month february of the unique visitors.
1. Internet Explorer 19.975 89,44%
2. Firefox 1.978 8,86%
3. Safari 279 1,25%
4. Opera 55 0,25%
5. Mozilla 29 0,13%
6. Netscape 10 0,04%
7. Playstation 3 4 0,02%
8. Camino 1 > 0,00%
9. HTC_P3300 Mozilla 1 > 0,00%
10. HTC_TyTN_II Mozilla 1 > 0,00%
Shocking, indeed. Hopefully will IE8 be soon be used a lot.
I doubt it Arjen, my guesses are that it’ll take a year or so before IE8 will take over the reign of IE6 or IE7. Do you have stats broken down over the IE-version? I’m on about a half on IE7 (56%), and about four tenths (41%) on IE6. Note: these numbers are calculated, with IE=100% (which is about 60% of all visitors).
Internet Explorer
1. 7.0 11.415 57,15%
2. 6.0 8.537 42,74%
3. 5.5 13 0,07%
4. 5.0 3 0,02%
5. 5.01 2 0,01%
6. 4.01 1 0,01%
7. 4.5 1 0,01%
8. 5.17 1 0,01%
9. 5.21 1 0,01%
10. 5.23 1 0,01%
Firefox
1. 2.0.0.12 1.340 67,75%
2. 2.0.0.11 466 23,56%
3. 1.0.7 38 1,92%
4. 2.0.0.4 21 1,06%
5. 2.0.0.1 18 0,91%
6. 2.0.0.9 16 0,81%
7. 1.0.3 13 0,66%
8. 1.5.0.4 10 0,51%
9. 1.0 8 0,40%
10. 2.0.0.3 8 0,40%