According to NetApplications, Firefox market share was over 20% for the month of November. Though they attribute the boost partly to greater-than-usual non-workday time (partly due to the Thanksgiving holiday, and partly just because of the way the month aligned with the work week), they still conclude: “Even considering these factors, Firefox’s share trend is pointing to above 20% share for December and beyond.”
Additionally, their pie chart shows IE’s market share down to 69.77%, and Safari over 7%. And their operating system market share graph shows Windows below 90% for the first time in well over a decade, with Mac OS X closing in on 9%. If Macs continue to gain, we could see Safari make more headway in the browser market.
If all goes well, in another five years, we might be looking at a three-way web browser market, which is something I would desperately love to see. When there are only two (major) browsers, it’s too easy for one to edge the other out and make the kind of de facto monopoly we’ve had since about 1995, when “Best Viewed with Netscape Navigator” buttons started sprouting all over the Web. But the more fragmentation we’ve got, the more competition we’ll have, and the more important open standards like the HTML, CSS, and ECMA specifications will be.
I would dearly love to be able to simply code to the spec, and know that if a browser doesn’t interpret it properly, that browser won’t be on the market much longer. Maybe some day, that might actually happen. Internet Explorer toppling from its current “throne” is Step 1 in that process.
And Explorer’s market share being divided among multiple other browsers, instead of simply transferred to a single replacement, is Step Two. It’s just as important.