Please remember that IE6 is barely used in NorAm and Europe (0.59% NorAm from statcounter). It's mostly in China. If China is not your target market, please ignore IE6.
It would be really nice if Google published their browser usage stats based on their Google analytics data. If anyone could have accurate numbers it would be Google.
I actually do most of my debugging in IE now - and I've actually come to like the devkit they've got going. Ok, I am developing for internal intranets which of which my primary is IE, but they've actually come a long way. In terms of PC browsers (Mac is a different story) I'd probably put Chrome first, IE second and Firefox third.<p>I still prefer Chrome, but partly because it is my preferred browser on Mac too - I like consistency. I also think that their devkit is ever so slightly better... but in saying that I'm not unhappy with IE - it does what I tell it to do, it's fairly consistent and feels quite light (compared to Firefox which still feels heavy to me even after their improvements...). Admittedly there are some tricks you need to learn in the IE devkit (e.g. add an attribute of style to create new CSS definitions) but all in all I think they've done a pretty good job at cleaning up their act!<p>PS: I used to do ALL my development in Firefox with Firebug and the Webdev kit. I find now that Chrome/IE handles things very well: though Chrome still allows me to install the Webdev kit if I need it (e.g. rulers, security checks etc). I guess I switch browser camps often based on my needs :)
I have to use IE 9 some at work and lately I've not been opening Firefox unless I'm debugging a website. IE 9 is just pretty decent most of the time.<p>At home I switched back from Chrome to Firefox this spring. I think Firefox performs better on Ubuntu. On the Win 7 netbook I share with my wife we run only Chrome.<p>So uhm, I guess my story is that all three of those mainstream browsers are totally decent these days.
I don't trust Net Application's data. They always seem to show either IE or iOS mobile share being much, much larger than what the numbers of those devices would suggest.
"[..] IE6 fell 0.37 percentage points (losing everything it somehow managed to gain the previous month)[..]"<p>And whats their error margin? Sounds like bad journalism to me.
every time these statistics come up, i will post the last 2 weeks from my own server. pretty much 100% US/CA audience. site category is home remodeling, DIY, contractors.<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgXFz9xLvI4UdHpGR2RNTlpweENyTEhyWExrWXdiRUE" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgXFz9xLvI4UdHp...</a>
I see tons of ads for IE. Never for FF. Microsoft's marketing is working.<p>FF is slower than Chrome (at least the desktop versions).<p>FF still doesn't have separate processes for tabs, so when one fails, the whole browser crashes.
Firefox is horribly slow, and I don't even mean in comparison to Chrome. It's slow in its own right.<p>The constant updates? I'm getting used to it (although I can't really tell a difference one version to the next). It's the slowness and the crashing that gets to me.<p>Chrome has me spoiled I guess.