If your answer was “Internet Explorer” only, you may be antagonizing huge and growing parts of your market. I never understood the “one browser” web development philosophy, even back in IE’s hey-day.
Back then I used to hear some non-forward-thinking developers say they only tested in IE because it had some 75% or the market, the rest of the contenders divided up the other quarter of the pie, there was only so much time in the day, blah, blah, blah.
But thumbing one’s nose at 25% of web browser never made any sense – at least to me.
But the nose-thumber’s lot has grown worse with time. Over the past year, IE’s segment of the market (combined IE6 and IE7) has shrunk from 53.2% to 46.6%. IE 5 has all but disappeared.
In the same 12 months, Firefox’s share of the market has gone from 36.4% to 44.2%, Safari’s from 1.9% to 2.7% and Opera’s from 1.4% to 2.3%. So anyone now developing for IE and ignoring the others is building for less than half of the market.
But I still see websites and applications that misfire or completely fail in Firefox, Safari or Opera. For a personal website, it’s just dumb. For a commercial website, it’s suicidal.
If the current trends continue, it won’t be long before Firefox assumes the #1 position, a mean feat considering you need to go get it, download it and install it. But Firefox is gaining popularity for a lot of reasons – not least of which is that it’s extensible.
There are Firefox extensions that add all sorts of useful features to the basic browser. One of my favorites is the Foxmarks bookmark extension that allows me to keep all of my bookmarks automatically synchronized across four different Firefox installations on two OS X Macs, a PC running XP and a Linux laptop on Ubuntu.
I also installed extensions such as the Google toolbar, the Web Developer Toolbar, ColorZilla (tells me the value of any color on my screen) and a Del.icio.us bookmarking button.
Add to that the fact that Firefox is Open Source (free) and very crash-resistant. If you’d like to try out Firefox, here is the link to download it:
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