Safari and Firefox Gain Ground on IE

An interesting report from NetApplications indicated Safari and Firefox gaining more attention as IE slides from 94% to 85.5% from 2004 to 2005. That's still a huge percentage of browser usage from the boys at Microsoft. I wonder what percentage of that 85% is people who choose to use IE as opposed to users who don't know any better? After all, IE was shoved down people's throats when they purchased any machine with one of Microsoft's bug riddled operating systems.

Even Apple user's were subjected to IE when Microsoft bought a significant amount of shares in the company and Apple didn't have a browser. Now Safari has edged out Netscape, taking third place in the report. That's phenomenal! So many Mac user's were loyal to Netscape for so long and held out until Netscape fell into the hands of AOL. Of course, Netscape carries so much baggage with it and is a hefty sized browser with tons of features that also, unfortunately, made it's operation slow. Switching to Safari was a no-brainer. Faster and lighter than Netscape and with less bells and whistles, it does what it's supposed to do and is getting better with each release.

Firefox is still the browser of choice for many, including myself. There are so many plug-ins and toolbars that you can add on to it that offers unique customization. Tabbed browsing is becoming something of the norm now, but there's more to that in Firefox. Built-in search, built-in news, web developer tools and more. I cringe every time I have to use IE for testing.

With the onset of IE 7 on the horizon, it will be interesting to see what the adoption rate is and if users will go back to IE.