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In the late 1990s Microsoft's Internet Explorer replaced Netscape's Navigator (discontinued in 2008) as the dominant browser. This was due to the bundling of IE with every copy of Windows. IE hit a peak of 96% of the market share. Since then, new comers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera have whittled away much of Internet Explorer's market share. Microsoft's dominance of the Web Browser market still continues, but the competition is hotting up.
The current market share (as at May 2010) of the Browsers are as follows:
Over the past three months, visitors to this Website used these Browsers:
Firefox is very popular. Internet Explorer 8 has made a solid start, and has taken over from IE7. IE6 still persists, despite all Microsoft's security warnings and the stopping of Google support. It is essential that Websites work properly for the top 3 browsers.
The early Browsers were unstable and had many bugs. There was a lack of Web Standards as each manufacturer added proprietary features, and security holes were endemic. Complex techniques (Quirks Mode) are needed to present these Web pages uniformly in all the different versions of all the different Web Browsers.
Today, the compliance with HTML, XHTML and CSS Web Standards by all the major Browsers has improved. Despite security issues, old Browsers like Internet Explorer 6 (with about 12% of the market share) are still in use.
My advice, when creating a new Website, is to ensure that it works with the latest version of the top 3 browsers. The complexity of the Quirks Modes needed for IE6 and older Browsers should be ignored. Google will no longer support IE6 due to cyber attacks, and key functionality may not work properly.
See also the Management Overview of Website Standards.