Nothing like opening the year with browser stats. Net Applications, a company in the business of selling website stats monitoring widgets has its most current browser usage stats online. I'm always a little weary about the reliability of browser usage stats. I am even more weary about how people interpret them. If Safari has 4.24% marketshare does that mean we can forget about it, and only make sure webpages works in IE6/7? I think it's more important to see where things are going. It seem Firefox and Safari are gaining whereas IE is losing ground (although it still commands a whopping 85%).



Another question I find myself asking is, why should we care? Shouldn't all browser work off the same web standards and render each page the same? Just like all cars work off the same gas, have standard tires, and take the same oil? Hopefully with the seemingly rapid adoption of better-standards-compliant IE7 those concern would be better addressed, and we are a little closer to living in a world with clean rendering on all browsers. All we have to choose then is whether to have leather seats or mag wheels.

It's hard to know how true these stats are, but I am so ready to believe the combined marketshare of IE5.0/5.5 is less than 1%.