Firefox is now used by more than 21% of visitors.

The browser wars are heating up again. Users, constantly under attack from spyware, security holes and bloat are switching to Mozilla's firefox browser in droves. Firefox is a standards compliant browser that features tabbed browsing, and extremly fast page loading. Microsoft has also announced in recent months that it is abandoning development of additional version of IE on the Mac, since Apple has it's own Safari browser based on the Konqueror open source project. What does this mean to you? More testing. No longer can site owners rely on it looking fine on IE, it'll be fine for eveyone else. In a lot of ways webdesign is moving back to times when sites had to be checked on Netscape 3.x 4.x 6.x and IE 5.x 5.5x and 6.x. Hopefully this increased competition will lead Microsoft to enhance IE beyond it's latest popup blocking update with XP SP2.

Browser Statistics
FireFox

// UPDATE: I've been looking more at these statistics and I thought they sounded a little off. I suspect the site publishing the statistics is heavily skewed towards the developer/student community. Here are some stats from a broader range of sites.

Browsers

• 75% Internet Explorer 6
• 13% Internet Explorer 5
• 7% Mozilla (Netscape & Firefox)
• 2% Safari
• 1% Opera 7

Operating Systems

• 94% Windows
• 4% Mac
• 2% Other

Screen Resolutions

• 46% 1024 x 768
• 32% 800 x 600
• 9% 1280 x 1024
• 4% 1152 x 864
• 1% 1600 x 1200
• 5% Other