Firefox finally passes IE6

This is an unfair comparison. No single version of Firefox has greater marketshare than any single version of Internet Explorer. If you take all version of Firefox together, yes they do beat the oldest version of Internet Explorer still in wide usage, IE6, but that's comparing apples and oranges.<p>Web developers still have to target multiple versions of Firefox, and Firefox 2.x supports fewer things than Firefox 3.x. Likewise, developers still have to target IE6 (23.3% share), which supports even fewer web standards than pretty much every other version of every other major browser in wide usage.<p>Nevertheless, it's hard to understand how this comparison is valid or significant.

And my favorite Linux and Windows browser (Opera) continues its downward descent. It seems a bit unfair to me -- Opera always responds like a lean and mean browser with stability and a dearth of innovative features, but for some reason it never gets any traction. Is Free Software/Open Source that much of an attraction? Maybe it's just me but I have a huge respect for well thought out and well written proprietary software.<p>Of course, I guess I'm a little bit of a hypocrite since I use Safari on my Mac. At the same time though, no one can really compete with Mac Safari -- its running profile is tiny and integrates with Mac better than any other browser.

That second graph is horrendously misleading. It does a pretty bad job of comparing the numbers between browsers.

I like the arstechnica pie chart at the bottom. I'm guessing a large percentage of their IE users are in fact tied in by office systems and such.<p>I suppose it's a credence to a tech site that its readers are overwhelmingly tech-orientated compared to the widespread market.

I'm looking at that first chart and noticing Chrome creep up on Safari... Anyone know if this got a leg up when Chrome started being offered by the Java updater?

Umm - this link shows that IE6 just has 10.6% market share. Not 23%...<p><a href="http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp</a>

Just to be clear...<p>Firefox passed <i>IE6</i>. It did not pass IE in general, which enjoys a huge advantage.<p>Or did I read something wrong? Because at first blush, the version number "6" didn't seem that important in the headline. I'm a little confused, though. Why is every version of FF compared to just one version of IE?

i switched to chrome a couple of months ago and have not looked back.<p>Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated.<p>Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE.<p>The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy.<p>I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

This is such bs. Firefox outstripped IE6 a LONG TIME AGO. To back up my argument, we get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, spread around the world. IE6 gets about 3% of our total traffic of about 20 million per month. Firefox(overall, mainly 3.5 and less than half of that 3.0) are at 33%. IE(overall) is about 48%.