Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2008 continued the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. This year the rate was much slower with only 6.2% more IE 7 users ending the year than started it. With a 14.7% loss, IE 6 dropped much faster than IE 7 grew as many people moved to Firefox. Last year I thought IE 6 would virtually disappear as a mainstream browsers. The transition rate slowed, however, and IE 6 still has a 20.5% market share and will need to be included in browser testing of web sites for some time.
Both Firefox and Safari almost doubled their rate of growth from last year. Firefox grew 4.6% this year and Safari had a 2.3% rate for 2008. Most of the Safari growth appears to come from new Mac users whose operating system had the same 2.3% growth rate.
Google's new Chrome browser hit the charts in September and rocketed to an impressive 1% market share in the last four months of the year.
The gains in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome came at the cost of IE, which lost 7.8% last year across all versions.
For web development "web standards compliant browsers" continue to grow quickly with a 14.1 % increase for the year. Web standards compliant browsers is a very loosely defined term that means the browsers follow a generally accepted HTML and CSS standards that allow developers to develop sites in a standard way without a lot of hacks and browser specific CSS. I include Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category.
| Browser | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| Internet Explorer (all versions) | 76.0% | 68.2% | -7.8% |
| Internet Explorer 7.0 | 40.6% | 46.8% | +6.2% |
| Internet Explorer 6.0 | 35.2% | 20.5% | -14.7% |
| Internet Explorer 5.0 & 5.5 | 0.2% | 0.1% | -0.1% |
| Firefox (all versions) | 16.8% | 21.4% | +4.6% |
| Safari (all versions) | 5.6% | 7.9% | +2.3% |
| Netscape (all versions) | 0.7% | 0.6% | -0.1% |
| Opera (all versions) | 0.6% | 0.7% | +0.1% |
| Chrome (all versions) | 0.0% | 1.0% | +1.0% |
| Standards Compliant Browsers | 64.3% | 78.4% | +14.1% |
Operating Systems
Windows users continue to switch from Windows XP to Vista. Vista grew at 10.6% this year which was virtually identical as the growth last year. Windox XP is still the majority of users with 65.2% of the market, but XP and older versions of Windows continue to decline. More people switched from Windows to other platforms and Windows as a whole dropped 3.1% for the year.
Apple's OS X had an even better year than 2007, increasing their market share 2.3% over the year. With a total market share of 9.6%, Macs are about to cross into double digits for the first time ever. Apple has certainly come a long way from the 2.3% market share I recorded at the beginning of 2005.
Linux on the desktop continues to grow slowly. With a 0.3% growth Linux has reached 0.9% of the market in 2008.
Even with the large number of smart phones with good browsers that were released for the year, the iPhone completely eclipses all other phones in web usage. The iPhone trippled its growth this year with a 0.3% increase. Cell phone web browsing continue to be very small percentage of the overall web browsing audience, however, and the iPhone only represents 0.4% of the overall market.
| Operating System | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| Windows (all versions) | 91.7% | 88.6% | -3.1% |
| Windows Vista | 10.5% | 21.1% | +10.6% |
| Windows XP | 76.9% | 65.2% | -11.7% |
| Windows 2000 | 2.7% | 1.5% | -1.2% |
| Windows NT | 0.6% | 0.3% | -0.3% |
| Windows 95/98/ME | 1.1% | 0.4% | -0.7% |
| Mac OS X (all versions) | 7.3% | 9.6% | +2.3% |
| Linux (all versions) | 0.6% | 0.9% | +0.3% |
| iPhone | 0.1% | 0.4% | +0.3% |
Screen Resolution
It's virtually impossible to buy a new computer today that doesn't have a resolution of at least 1024x768 and that is born out in the numbers for the year. Now 92.5% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2009. Now its time to start looking at when web sites can be designed for a 1,280 or higher resolution. Here in January 2009 the percentage is already 55.0%.
| Resolution | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| 800x600 or better | 99.9% | 99.9% | +0.0% |
| 1024x768 or better | 90.8% | 92.5% | +1.7% |
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