Knowing which browsers your users actually run is fundamental to making smart decisions about what CSS features to use, which JavaScript workarounds are worth writing, and how much testing effort to budget per browser. Here is a snapshot of the market as of June 2009 and what it means in practice.
Market Share — June 2009
- Internet Explorer 7/8 — ~60% combined
- Firefox 3 — ~25%
- Safari 3/4 — ~4%
- Chrome 2 — ~3%
- Opera — ~2%
Hidden inside that IE figure is an important detail: IE6 alone still held roughly 20% of the market. That is one in five visitors running a browser released in 2001, with no support for PNG alpha transparency, broken box model behaviour, no min-height, and a host of other quirks that require specific workarounds.
Two Sources, Two Different Pictures
The two most-cited data sources in 2009 were W3Schools browser stats and Net Applications. They consistently show different numbers for a straightforward reason: they sample different populations.
- W3Schools samples its own visitors — developers, students, and tech-savvy users. This audience over-represents Firefox and under-represents IE6, because technical users upgrade their browsers.
- Net Applications samples from a broad panel of general consumer sites. Its IE numbers are consistently higher because it captures the mainstream audience that still runs whatever shipped with their computer.
Neither source is wrong — they measure different things. The right source to use is whichever one most closely resembles your own audience. If you run a developer tool, W3Schools numbers are more representative. If you run a news site or e-commerce store, Net Applications is closer to reality.
What This Means for Development
In mid-2009, dropping IE6 support was not yet a realistic option for most projects. With 20% market share, ignoring IE6 meant ignoring a significant portion of real users. The practical approach was to build for standards-compliant browsers first, then add IE6-specific fixes using conditional comments:
<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/ie6-fixes.css" />
<![endif]-->Firefox's 25% share — and its much higher share among developers — meant that building and testing in Firefox first was a sensible default workflow. Chrome at 3% was too small to prioritise but was growing very rapidly month-on-month, making it worth keeping an eye on.
The Trend
The direction was already clear: IE's dominance was declining steadily. Firefox had taken a significant chunk of the market from IE6 and IE7. Chrome, released in September 2008, had reached 3% in under a year of existence — an extraordinary growth rate. The writing was on the wall for IE's monopoly, even if 2009 was still very much an IE-majority web.