Browser War for Market Share

Dedy Sofyan — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:10:51 +0000

The web-browser market has experienced a lot lately. Nearly a decade ago, the two dominant players of the time were Netscape Navigator (the reigning champ) and MS Internet Explorer (the contender). You might have witnessed the “Browser War” between Netscape and Internet Explorer (IE), which eventually won by IE.

Designer’s point of view
Personally, as a web designer, I have to constantly review these changes to cater to my target audience’s needs and visiting exper ience by designing websites that will “look and feel” similar when viewed using different browsers. Some call this “cross-browser / multi-browser compatibility”. You have to make sure that the site you designed will not break in that particular browser. One of the resource that you might want to go is the browser statistics, like: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

IE is losing grounds

From the statistics, you can see that Firefox is gaining market share consistently year by year. With the addition of Google Chrome in late 2008, the browser market share is once again a fiery battleground. IE has been losing its market share chunk-by-chunk to the competitors.

Why?

Perhaps, primarily because the competitors offer “innovative” additions to the browsing experience. Tabbed browsing made famous by Opera, even way back in the times of IE 5. Usable and customizable add-on / plug-ins for Firefox that extends the browser functionality to greater extends. Next comes “Google Chrome” with Google’s ambition to reinvent the web browsing experience.

Save the Developers

One additional reason why IE is losing its ground is perhaps most IE users are still stuck with IE 6. IE 6 has lots of limitations. A while ago, March 2008, a site called savethedevelopers.org offered a javascript popup for developers/designers to embed in their page, encouraging users to upgrade their outdated IE 6 to IE 7.

Somehow the site is now down and is redirected to Microsoft’s IE page instead. Interesting… Has Microsoft pulled some strings? For us, developers and designers, to maintain compatibility with IE 6 is a rather painful process. For example: IE 6 does not render transparent PNG “gracefully” so we have to include a PNG fix script. Certain IE-specific CSS hacks have to be applied to IE that normally are not required on other browsers.

Mobile Internet Browsing

Don’t forget that with recent advancements in mobile connectivity, more people are browsing the internet using their mobile gadgets. Opera Mobile is famous among Symbian-powered smartphones, including “smart-touchphones” with Opera Mobile for Symbian UIQ devices. iPhone users browse their favorite sites using the built-in Safari browser.

Now, us, designers and developers have more homework to do: to make sure that our design or code will not break on these gadgets, too.

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