Firefox and Chrome take over the world

Firefox and Chrome are taking over the world. Internet Explorer is dying. Can we look forward to a bug free world with standards compliant compatible Web browsers? Is that a cute little pig flying past my window?

Size

70 million people start using the Internet every month. The market for Web browsers grows 3 percent every month and will soon hit 2 billion users. Internet Explorer has 63 percent of the current market. Calculating from the 2 billion number, IE has 1.26 billion users. IE usage is shrinking at 1 percent per month, a lost of 40 million people but their share of market growth is 44 million people. Internet Explorer usage is still growing faster than their percentage of the market is shrinking with a net gain of 4 million users.

Firefox has 25 percent of the market and is growing that share at 0.5 percent per month. That means they have 500 million users plus gain 2 million per month from market share growth plus gain 17.5 million per month from market growth. The total Firefox growth of 19.5 million users per month is far greater than the growth of any browser.

Chrome is the second fastest growing Web browser with a market share gain of 0.5 percent per month but they are starting from a 5 percent current market share. They have 50 million users now, gain 2 million per month from market share growth and 3.5 million per month from the overall market growth.

Safari is the next growth area due to the use of Safari in the iPhone but iPhone growth is a long way behind the total Internet growth. Many of the iPhone users already have a decent desktop or notebook computer for Internet access and perform all their Web browsing on the bigger screen, leaving their iPhone to play music.

There are more mobile phones (cell phones) with Internet access options and Web browsing options than there are iPhones but the small screen size makes browsing painful. Many of those devices have Opera installed but few people use it, leaving Opera with an almost static market and depending on overall market growth to get any growth.

There are several new browsers creating interest but the other browser category is not growing, indicating the novelty browsers are not sustainable. many of the novelty browsers are created from the same code as Firefox and their users move to Firefox when they want the full range of Firefox features.

Bug free?

Firefox went through a buggy period and is now stable. Internet Explorer, with a 10 year head start, is still going through a buggy period. Google Chrome will probably, like many Google products, remain in beta for a long while. Almost every browser remains bug ridden except Opera and Firefox, although it is really easy to get fleas from the hundreds of Firefox add on modules.

Safari and similar simple browsers have bugs because bits of their features are missing. You get part way through doing something then find you cannot proceed without an add on module to complete the function and it might need a add on module that is not yet written. The choice is to work slower and harder because your Web browser is missing stuff or to risk using an add on for Firefox.

Standards compliant

How can Web browsers be standards compliant when the Web standards are not standards compliant? HTML is an ancient problem from last century and is a real pain to use because for every rule, there is a carton of exceptions and none of the HTML was designed to any standard. XHTML is HTML cleaned up a bit by forcing it into the XML format, making XHTML easier to use because it is compliant to at least one standard. HTML 5 is the future standard for the Web but is only the ratty old HTML dragged back from last century and tarted up with rouge. HTML 5 is not compliant to any standard.

Microsoft have suggested Internet Explorer 8 might be shipped set to comply with standards as the default instead of using the guesswork system in current use. Microsoft have not attempted to list which standards they would comply with or which of the many versions of each standard they might choose.

Compatibility

The closest thing we get to Web browser compatibility today is the many browsers based on the code used in Firefox. If you convert all your computers to use the same browser and you choose the right browser, you can share bookmarks and other features. You cannot share one bookmark list among IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.... All those browser developers need to set up standards for handling bookmarks, history, passwords, and settings so we can open any browser on our computer and use the one set of information.

A good start would be to change all the configuration and information files to XML or an SQLlite style database. Thunderbird was going to use SQLlite. Some browsers store some information as XHTML files. All they need to do is define common names and ranges for settings.

I found Firefox the easiest browser for manually copying bookmarks from place to place. Opera has automated sharing of bookmarks but only among Opera. There is an automated bookmark sharing add on for Firefox named Foxmarks. Perhaps the Foxmarks author could work with other browser add on authors to produce and share Openmarks.

It is deliberate

Microsoft introduced Silverlight to emulate Internet Explorer and Flash within Firefox so that Microsoft could fight both Adobe and Mozilla. Incompatibility is increasing and it is deliberate. If just one hundredth of the Microsoft Silverlight marketing budget was allocated to the Web, you could design the next generations of XHTML, CSS, and SVG to grow together and cross pollinate in a way that would far surpass the Microsoft/Adobe proprietary silliness.

Unfortunately the Web standards are written by committees that do not have to actually use the products of their meetings to make a living building the Web. The kind of thinking that brought back HTML as HTML 5 instead of expanding XHTML in a useful direction is the kind of thinking that is growing more rampant every year. CSS is going into another generation but it is still focused on adding shiny new bits instead of fixing existing bits. You can now have curved corners but you still cannot have standard colours without writing your CSS in a way that is either unreadable or unmaintanable.

Conclusion

Human DNA is transferred to pigs to make pig organs compatible for donation to humans. We have almost achieved that but cannot do something as simple as making Web browsers compatible.