Browsers, browsers, browsers

I've written about this before, but with the rise of Chrome and IE8, it deserves another post.

In the course of discussing the difficulties of coding for IE6 (again!), I looked up browser market share statistics.

This table at W3Schools.com is a great resource because it shows a 9 year trend.

Bad news for those tearing their hair out coding for IE6: It took over 4 years for IE5 to move from a 14% share to zero.

Good news for the same folks: IE8 market share is growing much faster than IE7's did (0 to 5.2% within 5 months compared to 0 to 2.5% for IE7 in the same amount of time).

Based on my experience with IE8, it's a much better browser than IE7. I noticed IE7, but I don't notice IE8. My colleague August tells me that "its javascript performance is weak compared to other browsers, but they could easily improve that." Indeed, he'd much "rather be complaining about javascript *SPEED* than rendering bugs and CSS omissions."

Chrome is also growing quickly - not as quickly as IE8, but still a good showing. It's above 5% now, too.

Firefox continues its steady climb (at 47.7% now), Safari holds steady (3%), as does Opera (2%).

The big story, however, is that IE7 and IE6 market share are dropping at the same time that IE8 and Chrome have emerged.

August tells me that Thursday, 13 July 2010 is the last day of support for IE6. I predict it'll be pretty much gone substantially before that.