Muses et essais

This article is a follow-up of the article Is Firefox losing ground?.

It seems that in the past eight days IE7 has grown to get approximatively the same market share as Firefox…

although this trend tends to have stagnated in the past week:

The coming weeks are going to be really interesting!

I am currently running a small experiment on the “spreading” of Firefox.

I am managing a public website (Who’s Who In France), mostly for fun and because I like the people behind this business, and we recently completely reworked the design so that it matches more closely to web standards; I am very close to the holy grail of XHTML validation, still have to figure out why when I am fixing the following validation errors, this valid page breaks…

Anyway, I have been looking at the logs in the past week and decided to draw a graph of the different shares of browsers access on the website, especially because I wanted to know how IE7 was doing.

The following graph is the result of my investigation of the statistics in the past 2 years (Internet Explorer in versions preceding IE7 have been omitted for improved legibility of the graph):

2 interesting facts that I can see on this graph:

• Internet Explorer 7 is gaining ground on previous versions; that was predictable as it is downloaded as part of Windows Update… myself included on the company laptop (for those who are interested, you can install previous versions of Internet Explorer for compatibility testing)
• In 2006, other browsers have taken the high ground on Firefox; not everyone is happy with Firefox and the market for alternative browsers is very wide.

This makes me think that this experiment is far from being finished. I believe IE7 will ultimately gain ground on the alternative browsers. Not that I would like to, but I tested it and couldn’t really find anything that I disliked (so far).

Follow-ups in the coming weeks…