Tag Archives: firefox

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Internet Explorer Falls Below 50% of Worldwide Market for First Time

statcounter-browser-stats

A new survey from StatCounter shows that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser has fallen below 50% of the worldwide market for the first time. The survey shows that Microsoft IE fell to 49.87% in September, followed by Firefox with 31.5%. Google’s Chrome continues to increase market share at an impressive rate and has more than tripled from 3.69% in September 2009 to 11.54% in September this year. The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive; in June it overtook Safari for the first time.

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million Web sites.

In the past, the industry has been focused on developing Web sites specifically for Internet Explorer. This survey shows that both insurance companies and agencies need to make sure their sites run well in multiple browsers, especially for consumer access.

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More than Half of Computer Users Now Run Firefox

InfoWorld recently reported that statistics from the exo.performance.network (a source of data on Microsoft Windows marketshare trends) indicate that over half of computer users (50.6%) are now using the Firefox browser. Despite this, Internet Explorer is still widely used, with 84% of users turning to it “regularly.”

These numbers indicate that a large number of people use more than one browser. This is hardly surprising, given the addition of newer browsers like Google Chrome and Safari for Windows, and the recent upgrade of Opera.

This means that Web designers and developers will continue to need to support multiple browsers. While modern browsers are generally more compatible than they have been in the past, developers will need to plan testing of their applications accordingly. View your own site with multiple browsers to make sure your visitors can experience your site without problems.

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Firefox 3.0 Released

The latest version of the Firefox Internet browser was recently released with over 8 million downloads achieved in one day. This release is significant due to Firefox’s continued increase in market share. According to Net Applications, Firefox had a 5.5% increase in browser share in the last year, paralleling a 6% drop in IE use and leaving Firefox poised to hit 20% of the browser market.

With 1 out of 5 browser hits being from Firefox, we are at the point where Web designers can no longer afford to build “IE only” sites. This change is important for Web developers in the insurance industry to recognize. In our own limited test, we have found Firefox to be significantly faster in displaying Web pages. At the same time, we find sites that don’t quite work right in Firefox.