Frankly spoken, the time IE as the undisputed king on the browsermarket were expired 2 years ago. Until that time IE were stable, faster and had the better implementation of W3C Standards. Not mention the great developerment tool, too. But after, Microsoft were running in place with future improvement.
That time, the Firefox Browser came up with better implementations and pioneering improvements. The big bang for Microsofts IE and a slap for the develoment quad.
However, Firefox still has the nose ahead. Today the advantage may be small compare to IE, but that is what you see in your statistics.

regards Martin

Overall, the point I think I’m trying to make is a little obvious. But it’s also backed up by some numbers now. Seems like the “creators” (if you will) of web content have largely switched away from IE. And that we’re starting to see a true difference in the browsers used by the creators vs. the pure consumers of web content.

I’m curious though: Are your OS stats also similarly skewed? Macs have been getting around 10% if you count iPhone hits – are you seeing more Mac users?

the browser stats are something that I follow quite religiously, and the figures that you mention above are quite typical for my webmaster centric sites, however my main site is an entertainment based ecommerce website, and is mainly popular with 25-34 year olds in professional or managerial jobs, and 95% in the UK (Im serious about my stats)…

And on this site, the IE traffic far outweighs anything else:

Internet Explorer 1,656,366 78.22%
Firefox 337,743 15.95%
Safari 90,057 4.25%
Chrome 16,924 0.80%
Opera 10,650 0.50%

these are the browsers as recorded in google analytics for the last 30 days rolling. so by my assumption here FF has a long, long way to go before it can boast market dominance.

cheers

MOGmartin

January 2009 / 2008
IE 66% / 76%
Firefox 27% / 20%
Safari 5% / 3%
Chrome 2%

IE 2009 / 2008
IE7 72% / 43%
IE6 27% / 56%
IE8 1%

Internet Explorer 7.0: 52.04%
Internet Explorer 6.0: 23.49%
Firefox 3.0: 15.66%
Safari 525: 2.71%
Firefox 2.0: 2.63%
Chrome 1.0: 0.73%

(I believe Safari 525 is version 2.1. Obviously the Firefox figures will be split between Windows and Mac.)

So that’s more than three-quarters of our traffic still using Internet Explorer, and a third of that is still IE6.

I don’t support IE6 for any of the sites I’ve built recently because the demographic is too small and the time invested too great. I feel it’s our responsibility to end this IE6 thing. People using that browser should come across several messed up sites in a day to make them convert. I’m going to start applying an IE6 test that explains how bad the browser they’re using is, suggesting one of the WebKit browsers or IE7 (with a stern warning against it!)

However, I agree with Ove that Stop Design’s audience is (as Doug stated in the original post) far from a typical demographic. The majority of visitors would, I presume, be web designers — and how many web designers use IE as their regular browser? A minority, I would suspect. The majority will of course be using Firefox if for no other reason than its extensibility and web dev tools. So that would explain FF’s freakishly high showing in the Stop Design metrics.

If you go to a sheep farm then of course you’ll see lots of sheep, but that doesn’t mean that cows are dying out just yet.
(Bees, of course, are another story altogether).

Last 3 years (02/06/06 to 02/06/09)
———————-
Firefox 48.31%
IE 36.76%
Safari 8.58%
Opera 2.91%
Mozilla 1.87%
Chrome .44%
Camino .39%
Mozilla Comp. .36%
Netscape .21%
Konqueror .12%

Last Month (01/06/09 to 02/06/09)
———————-
Firefox 52.30%
IE 29.78%
Safari 8.52%
Chrome 3.42%
Mozilla 2.83%
Opera 2.65%
Mozilla Comp. .17%
Camino .14%
SeaMonkey .05%
Konqueror .05%

Cheers,
- Nick

I figured my low IE rates were representative of my users, but I’m glad to see this is more universal than I first assumed.

I’m getting this (rounded):
FF: 55% (90%+ FF3)
IE: 24% (90%+ IE7)
Safari: 10%
Opera: 7%
Chrome: 5%

Also, university students these days use macs a lot more, I’m seeing 26% OS X. Linux has 5%.

Stopdesign and websites like it will have a different stats on browsers than websites that cater to a more representative population. I don’t think it’s fair to say that stopdesigns stats you posted prove a trend that extends beyond the focus of stopdesign. Unfortunately it can only prove the trend at this specific website :-)

* Internet Explorer users account for between 65% and 85% of all visits
* Firefox and Safari account for almost all the rest of the traffic, and Firefox tends to have 2-3 times the share of Safari.
* 70% of IE users are browsing these sites with IE7. There was very little variation here, even though the percentage of IE users in general varied by 20% across sites.

I also work with http://www.jazzednet.org, which is the membership site for the Jazz Education Network. Their breakdown for January 2009 (1527 visitors):
IE: 40.8%
Firefox: 39.75%
Safari: 17.81%
Chrome: 0.72%

Target audience apparently has a huge impact on browser choice.