Please remember that IE6 is barely used in NorAm and Europe (0.59% NorAm from statcounter). It's mostly in China. If China is not your target market, please ignore IE6.
It would be really nice if Google published their browser usage stats based on their Google analytics data. If anyone could have accurate numbers it would be Google.
I actually do most of my debugging in IE now - and I've actually come to like the devkit they've got going. Ok, I am developing for internal intranets which of which my primary is IE, but they've actually come a long way. In terms of PC browsers (Mac is a different story) I'd probably put Chrome first, IE second and Firefox third.
I still prefer Chrome, but partly because it is my preferred browser on Mac too - I like consistency. I also think that their devkit is ever so slightly better... but in saying that I'm not unhappy with IE - it does what I tell it to do, it's fairly consistent and feels quite light (compared to Firefox which still feels heavy to me even after their improvements...). Admittedly there are some tricks you need to learn in the IE devkit (e.g. add an attribute of style to create new CSS definitions) but all in all I think they've done a pretty good job at cleaning up their act!
PS: I used to do ALL my development in Firefox with Firebug and the Webdev kit. I find now that Chrome/IE handles things very well: though Chrome still allows me to install the Webdev kit if I need it (e.g. rulers, security checks etc). I guess I switch browser camps often based on my needs :)
I have to use IE 9 some at work and lately I've not been opening Firefox unless I'm debugging a website. IE 9 is just pretty decent most of the time.
At home I switched back from Chrome to Firefox this spring. I think Firefox performs better on Ubuntu. On the Win 7 netbook I share with my wife we run only Chrome.
So uhm, I guess my story is that all three of those mainstream browsers are totally decent these days.
I forgot who talked about it (one of the leads from one of those three) and he said long gone are the days of seeing browsers massively outperform one another.
For the internet savvy, it's more a feature competition at this point mixed with user loyalty (Firefox, you'll always have my heart, even if Chrome is better)
I don't trust Net Application's data. They always seem to show either IE or iOS mobile share being much, much larger than what the numbers of those devices would suggest.
It also shows Chrome at double of what Net Apps says. I've been following Chrome's growth over the years, and the Statcounter number for Chrome seems a lot more likely than the Net Apps one.
Statcounter doesn't count users, it counts raw hits. Both numbers are relevant for different reasons. If you agree that Chrome users surf more this could easily account for most of the difference.
That is strange, because Net Apps also counts the iOS browser (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad) as something like 50-60% market share, when there are only 400 million iOS devices and 500 million Android devices. I doubt the majority of Android users have never used the browser.
(1) I've heard the old Android browser on some phones can report it's user agent as safari or some generic looking webkit that might get folded into safari numbers.
(2) site bias? Purely as an illustrative example imagine if Apple.com was one of the sites in Net Apps network while Android.com was in the Statcounter network.
(3) actually accurate. The wikimedia numbers are 10% mobile safari and 4.5% android.
every time these statistics come up, i will post the last 2 weeks from my own server. pretty much 100% US/CA audience. site category is home remodeling, DIY, contractors.
China, it's almost non existent anywhere else. Even the "enterprise" upgraded to IEX but they probably skip IE7 when they do that. For intranet stuff maybe still some IE6, but not much left i guess.
I find Aurora faster then Chrome and it displays fonts/pages better. I also think the memory use is much better then Chrome. Maybe its the Nvidia acceleration?
When the top 5 processes on my system are chrome, and all over 1.5gigs in size call bullshit all you want. But when I close chrome and 8 gigs of memory is freed, I call that bullshit.
I very rarely experience chrome crashes, but when it happens, it's always the entire browser. I'd be a lot more worried that crashes almost certainly imply security holes than how much it interrupts my browsing session.
It was chrome's marketing earlier now it's Microsoft's. I think they are both great browsers on their own. I find IE10 to be even better and so much faster though.
> I see tons of ads for IE. Never for FF. Microsoft's marketing is working.
Are you using FF while browsing? Because I'm pretty sure those MS ads are using User Agent targeting. I would not expect you see any IE ads while already using IE.
> FF is slower than Chrome (at least the desktop versions).
This is a misconception held by people that haven't used Firefox as of late. I actually frequently encounter crashes in Chrome, whereas I do not with Firefox.
Not it's actually still very slow. Theres a JS demo ever 3 days on HN that runs terribly in FF. Plenty of other 'pushing the envelope' demos do the same thing to FF. To their credit the FF team is usually here, or finds them, and bugs are quickly reported.
The funny thing is, most users don't care about how their browser performs in "'pushing the envelope' demos" - they care about how it performs when they're browsing the web.
No, that shows javscript benchmarks, not the more ambiguous notion of "browser speed".
Anyway, Chrome and Firefox are tied in Kraken, which is the benchmark Mozilla created to simulate real world loads. (And thus, presumably, the benchmark they care most about when optimizing.)
Firefox is horribly slow, and I don't even mean in comparison to Chrome. It's slow in its own right.
The constant updates? I'm getting used to it (although I can't really tell a difference one version to the next). It's the slowness and the crashing that gets to me.
I .. believe you, I guess. You obviously tried the current versions and they weren't for you. Still, I'm baffled.
I removed Chrome from my Android devices (what for?) and only have it on my desktop machines for tests. I start it once every fortnight.
Firefox, with its sync feature, keeps my browsing experience in order. I've to admit that I'm using the Beta 'channel' on both Windows and Android. The readability mode is amazing. My add-ons are really helpful.
Oh - and I didn't even mention that it's the fastest browser on an Android device for all I can tell (and so fast on my desktop that I couldn't give the crown to either IE, Chrome or FF - they all are plenty fast and good enough).
While I might sound a bit like a fan here (and I admit that I do like that browser quite a bit), I wonder what provoked your 'na na na na na!' Nelson style answer. The speed issue seems to be .. debatable / bad luck. Frequent updates are bad, but Chrome is good? Uhm.. Hard to take that serious.
Let's relax. I think that there's no need to argue about the value FF brought to the web. You might prefer 'newer' contestants and that's really fine! But bashing open-source projects that are alive, kicking and innovating, with some not-quite-that-creative broad 'ugh, slooow' criticism isn't .. nice or useful. In my world, at least.
This sounds like confirmation bias to me, rather than real world use of both browsers. I use Firefox as my primary at home, and Chrome at work (web developer) and I find very little difference in performance in real world use between browsers.
As for frequent updates, Firefox is a little more noticeable because you see it checking your extensions, but they don't update any more frequently than Chrome. If anything, they still update less frequently.
