We noticed some rather interesting statistics on the 4th Nov (the day The Pixel’s Blog featured on Smashing Magazine’s homepage, in case you’d forgotten…).
66% of users on the day were using Mozilla Firefox compared to only 8% using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. To put this in context (just in case you’re wondering), IE usual commands a 65% market share of the web in total, and Firefox usually around 26%*.
So considering IE normally beats Firefox by 39% globally, Firefox defeating IE by a massive 58% based on visiters to our website (mostly coming from online web design publication Smashing Magazine) shows clearly the difference in preference between those in the web development community, and those that are not.
In fact, IE was beaten by both Safari with 12% and Chrome with 9%, making it the 4th preferred choice by web techies.
So why the difference between web-heads and Joe public? Despite IE 8’s obvious increase in speed since version 7, Firefox’s JavaScript performance, expandability and customisation options seem to win over the design and development crowd.
These features are less likely to concern the casual surfer; IE’s brand recognition and tie-ins with other big software packages make it an easy, pre-installed solution for most.
*Statistics sourced from Wikipedia’s Usage Share of Web Browsers
Don’t forget the propensity of web developers/designers to have Macs. That’s probably the biggest factor.