Standards Compliant Browsers

..oO(JoeyD1978)

I base that advice on the fact that IE (still) has the dominant market share.

Sure, but you also have to look at the used versions. Of course I could
say that on one of my sites IE is still used by 63%, FF by only 26%, and
because of that I should design for IE.

But after a closer look the situation appears a bit differently, because
the 63% consist of:

Msie 8.0 - 0.7%
Msie 7.0 - 39.5%
Msie 6.0 - 22.4%

So the majority of IE users is already on version 7, which is much
closer to the standards than all previous IEs together.

This site shows data (only glanced at it mind ya) that I figured was about
right: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

However, looking at the last few months on W3Schools is surprising:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Granted their stats are
more than likely slanted, but regardless of that Firefox usage has grown 10% in
12 months. That's huge!

Don't forget that these are just the stats from their own site, not some
global ones! On other sites the situation might be completely different.

Either way, how does it not make sense to put the most effort towards the
experience of the majority of users?

Today most users are already on standards-compliant browsers or at least
IE 7, which was quite an improvement over IE 6. Given my own stats from
above this majority sums up to more than 65% (with adding Opera, Safari
etc. it's even about 70-75%).

So if you design according to the standards, then in fact you're already
designing for the vast majority.

Micha