SEO and Internet Marketing
Browser Wars
 In the late 1990s Microsoft's Internet
Explorer replaced Netscape's Navigator (discontinued in 2008) as the dominant browser.
This was due to the bundling of IE with every copy of Windows. IE hit a peak of
96% of the market share.
Since then, new comers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera have
whittled away much of Internet Explorer's market share. Microsoft's dominance of
the Web Browser market still continues, but the competition is hotting up.
Market Share
The current market shares of the Browsers are as follows:
|
Browser
|
Market Share
|
|
Internet Explorer
|
62.69%
|
|
Firefox
|
24.61%
|
|
Chrome
|
4.63%
|
|
Safari
|
4.46%
|
|
Opera
|
2.40%
|
|
Opera Mini
|
0.53%
|
|
Netscape
|
0.32%
|
|
Mozilla
|
0.13%
|
|
Rest
|
0.23%
|
Web Standards
The early Browsers were unstable and had many bugs. There was a lack of Web Standards
as each manufacturer added proprietary features, and security holes were endemic.
Complex techniques (Quirks Mode) are needed to present these Web pages uniformly
in all the different versions of all the different Web Browsers.
Today, the compliance with HTML, XHTML and CSS Web Standards by all the major Browsers
has improved. Despite security issues, old Browsers like Internet Explorer 6 (with
about 12% of the market share) are still in use.
My advice, when creating a new Website, is to ignore the Quirks Modes needed for
IE6 and older Browsers. Google will no longer support IE6 due to cyberattacks, and
key functionality may not work properly.
See also the Management Overview of
Website Standards.
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