By which of course I mean, it rules the ratings. Though it could also be said to rule, because it is a really good browser and was the first real alternative to Internet Explorer, back in the days when it was called Mozilla. I kind of miss the old logo and the spirit of rebelliousness that came with not running Internet Explorer back in those heady days. Though if we're going to talk old web browsers I could hark back to 1993 and getting NCSA Mosaic for the first time...but I digress.
So, these ratings. Here at I Do Imaging World HQ we (I) analyze the web logs on a regular schedule - given that I've done it twice,that is hard to disprove. And when I looked at the web browser statistics I see that some time around July, Firefox because the most popular web browser used to access this site. Of course, I credit my readers with being high achieving trend setters, so I don't know if this reflects the web use as a whole. Still, I think it's a significant point in Web history. Over the last two years, Internet Explorer has gone from almost 60% to just under 40% share, while Firefox has climbed from about 35% to just over 40%. Safari and Opera have seen modest gains, from about 5% to about 8% each, with Chrome, which of course didn't exist two years ago, now at about the same level.Any one of these is a perfectly good browser. In the last year I've been using Internet Explorer occasionally and have found that the latest release is actually really good. I've been using Firefox for so long that IE has caught up a lot. I use all five of these on the PC, on the Mac I use Safari, Firefox and Opera, and on Linux I run Firefox and Opera. I really like Opera, partly for their adherence to standards (though all browsers these days are pretty good about that), but also I like to stick up for the little guy. And, I can't shake the idea that any software from Scandinavia is just plain cool.
On the operating system side, things are a little less dramatic. Most people still run Windows, though in two years this share has fallen from almost 90% to just over 80%. The Mac has seen a steady rise, growing 50% in share from about 8% to about 12%. Linux trucks along on the desktops of about 7% or so of the desktops of my readers. For years and years I was among those hard-core souls, using a Solaris or Fedora machine as my primary workstation, but recently I've found little reason to use any machine other than my Mac Pro. I still use it as a Unix workstation at the command line, but as far as my web stats are concerned, hello, I'm a Mac.
