Explorer Fiddles as the Internet Burns.
This is an excerpt from “Three Internet Trends To Watch in 2006″. Visit The Business Ledger to read the whole article.
If your site was up and running in the late 1990s, you remember The Browser Wars. They’re back. Internet Explorer (IE), the hands-down victor back then, is today’s fat Roman emperor just starting to notice that the world is changing around him. Although Microsoft is releasing the next generation IE7 sometime this year, the technology elite has been going gaga over another entry which you need to know, Firefox.
Firefox, the modern descendent of Netscape Navigator, has become an excellent alternative to IE by focusing on speed and usability. My experience with it is that it renders identical pages noticeably faster and the ability to keep multiple pages open in the same window makes browsing easier. While Microsoft has been dropping support for non-Microsoft platforms, you can run Firefox on pretty much anything—PC, Mac or Linux. Firefox currently holds about 10 percent of the market—enough to notice.
Losing 10 percent of the market doesn’t qualify IE for T-Rex style extinction. It does emphasize the importance of building your site around Web standards. A site built around common markup commands can be viewed however your visitors want to view it—on their PC or on their Mac or on their Blackberry—and that’s good customer service. If you’ve built your site specifically for IE, you’re possibly alienating 10 percent of your visitors.