It wasn’t that long ago that a well-known Internet marketing expert stated that the browser wars were over and that [tag]Internet Explorer[/tag] (IE) would be the only [tag]browser[/tag] available in just a few years. At that time IE had well over 90% of the browser market. But IE has suffered the fate of too much success. Since that pronouncement, IE has made very few improvements, has lost it’s place as a [tag]Macintosh[/tag] browser to [tag]Safari[/tag] and [tag]Firefox[/tag] and has seen Firefox make significant inroads into it’s iron grip in the [tag]PC[/tag] world as well.

With the release of IE 7, things don’t look a whole lot better and I expect that Internet Explorer’s grip may loosen even among those users who just use whatever comes with their computer. Firefox is a significant upgrade, comes in both [tag]Windows[/tag] and Macintosh versions and is a far more satisfying browser to use than IE 6 or IE 7.

Every so often I use the server logs of several websites (my own and other’s) and gather up some numbers that may or may not hold up in a wider sampling, but provide some illumination on who is using what – at least on these websites. The website surveyed get about 15,000 combined unique visitors per month so the sampling is significant enough.

When I gathered up the Browser and Platform usage information in this article, there were a sizable number of “unknowns” and they were excluded from the percentages cited.

In the category of browser usage, IE still ranks #1 by a large, but shrinking margin of 79%. Firefox is second with 10%, Safari third with 8% and Konqueror last with 3%. Those percentages equal 100% as “unknowns” were not counted. The IE users are pretty much all PC users, while the Safari user are almost all Macintosh. Firefox is used on both platforms. [tag]Konquorer[/tag] is part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) and is most often associated with the [tag]Linux[/tag] platform. What I find interesting is that Safari/Macintosh accounts for 8% of our users (and some of those Firefox users are also on Macs. We have always had a larger percentage of Mac users than the market as a whole, but better than 8% tells me that more of our visitors are using Macs than last year.

W3 Schools website shows an even more pronounced shift away from IE toward Firefox. According to their browser survey, IE 5, 6 and 7 account for 59.9% of visitors to the sites they surveyed, a much larger sampling than mine, by the way. In their stats, Firefox is now at 29.9% with the Mozilla suite (Mozilla, Safari and Konqueror) at 2.5%, various [tag]Opera[/tag] versions totalling 1.5% and [tag]Netscape[/tag] at 0.2%, possibly because their download page in buried behind their portal page with a hard-to-locate link.

The Platforms numbers bear out some of these trends. Here, Windows users account for 86% of our visitors, down from 90% last year and Macintosh users come in at 11%, up from 6% last year. Other accounts for 3% and coincides with the Konqueror users in the browser graph.

What does this mean?

From my point of view, these numbers mean that we will be designing for a variety of platforms and browsers for a long time to come. I have always criticized web design and applications made only for one platform or browser and today universal usability is even more important.

Web applications that are only usable by one platform/browser combination are dinosaurs and those using risk the same fate as those reptiles of yesteryear. This is being recognized by business. Just a few months ago, my bank’s online banking system was only usable by Windows/IE users. Today, I can happily logon using Safari on a Mac and Firefox on both platforms. They have moved forward into the Internet of the future, Web 2.0. Have you?