I have been looking at the server traffic logs for this site over the last few months, and noticed some interesting trends happening in the area of web browser usage. It would appear from the logs for this site (admittedly a narrow sample), that Internet Explorer usage is declining quite steadily, Firefox usage in increasing very slightly, while non-Firefox Mozilla usage has begun to increase quite rapidly from 3.4% to 13.6% in the space of seven months. In the same period, IE usage has decreased from 66.1% to 53% and shows no signs of slowing this descent.

What is evident from these statistics is that the days of designing websites for IE initially, and then hoping that your site would work on the other browsers, are now truly gone.

When I began designing websites there was a roughly 50/50 split between the visitors to my websites using Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4. Both of these browsers each had a different, propriety JavaScript Document Object Model (DOM), meaning that you had to design two separate versions of everything for both browsers. Luckily newer versions of IE, and all versions of Firefox & Mozilla now support the standard W3C DOM, so if you are writing standards-compatible JavaScript, supporting all of the major browsers now is a lot easier than it used to be.

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Updated 2021 : note that the above post is out-of-date, given this post was originally published in 2006, but is left here for archival purposes.