What Browser Do You Use? IE6 Or Netscape?

I’d rather use Netscape. I like it more than Internet Explorer 6. I’m also building web pages with Netscape Composer.

That was a flashback. Remember?

The good ol’ days when I used Netscape Composer to code web sites and IE6 to test them. IE6 was quick, top of the line and… the only one. Netscape Navigator was slow, and sometimes not respecting standards. Remember the Yahoo bug when not specifying a background colour, assuming it white, yielded a grey backdrop? Seems like yesterday.

I know I coded two websites using Composer and, by viewing the HTML 3.2 , I learned to code using only Notepad. Took a while to perfect and used Macromedia UltraDev and Dreamweaver.

Oh, but enough with off-topic stuff, Google Apps drops IE6 support (finally),  as noted in an email notice:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ​as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

IE still owns supremacy, as noted by a Guardian.co.uk survey:

Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer 8 has finally become the world’s most-used browser, according to Net Applications‘ figures based on monitoring website usage. IE8 has taken over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP.

In January 2010, NetApps reckons IE8 had 22.31% of the market, with IE6 on 20.07%. Firefox 3.5 took third place with 17.01%, ahead of IE7 (14.58%), Firefox 3.0 (5.29%), Google Chrome (3.92%) and Apple Safari (3.55%). Actually, IE8′s lead is even larger if its 3% market share in “compatibility mode” is counted.

The decade-old IE6 had a transitory spot at the top of the chart because of IE7 users switching to IE8. This put both IE7 and IE8 below IE6, according to NetApps, even while IE6 was losing 8 points of market share.

The ugliest browser market breakdown bulleted list:

• IE8 - 22.31%
• IE6 - 20.07%
• Firefox 3.5 - 17.01%
• IE7 - 14.58%
• Firefox 3.0 - 5.29%
• Chrome - 3.92%
• Safari - 3.55%

Don’t you just feel a bit betrayed? While you, as a web developer, designer, programmer and optimizer, preach the use of Firefox, Chrome and even Safari, Microsoft works behind your back and pushes IE8 to companies. It’s so easy to use a preinstalled browser and see all those coloured toolbars getting added by themselves. What am I saying here, you ask? What the tech degree of intelligence of the people using IE? Zero? You tell me.

I taught my mother how to use Firefox and I’m happy.

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