It was many years ago that I learnt at NIIT that Microsoft trumped Netscape with their browser enhancements and their browser automation APIs. That was the first time I heard the word "Browser Wars". Wow. Didn't know the Internet witnessed a "war" over free application.

Years later, at the present day, I see what benefits "free" brings to a business. But I wanted to get a peek into how the browsers are doing in popularity, in terms of real numbers.

I visited W3Schools for the data. They are simply the best site to learn HTML, CSS, Javascript, et al (and they're free :). They maintain data about their visitors and collect Browser, Platform (OS) and Display monitor data. These guys declare that their data is from their own sites logs. And being in the top 1000 sites of the world (source: Alexa), I say their data is quite a good snapshot. I took their data, threw it into an Excel chart and here it is...


So Firefox seems to have overtaken IE! That means I have to factor Firefox into my Product Management plans. Chrome seems to have gained well from 3.9% at the start of 2009.


Next question, are these Firefox users from the Windows platform only? Or are they from the Mac and the Tux platforms? Although there isn't any data to correlate Browser to OS, I think the data below conclusively solves this question:



And finally, for the sake of curiosity, I took a look at the most popular resolutions of desktop monitors. You need to know this, if your website has to be tweaked... and it looks like 1024x768 is getting replaced by higher resolution displays! People require more desktop space...?


After reading all this, I thought it best to verify the data I collected. So I asked Uncle Google. He gave me a few links...

From those, I found version of browser popularity ratings from Net Applications' website (click here). As I write this, on October 18 2009 at 0134am IST, the stats indicate that IE holds 65.71% marketshare, while Firefox has 23.75%, Safari has 4.24% and Chrome has 3.17%. I've not seen how Net Applications calculates these figures, but I guess they have mentioned it somewhere there. At least it's not easily visible.

So which set of data do you use? Well, look at the set which best fits your target audience. If your audience consists of mostly techies, then you can look at the first set of data. If your audience consists of mostly the general public, then you can look at the second set. I'm sure they'll be more targeted research out there.