That's not what I meant. IE may hold the largest market share, but that does not make them the "world standard" when it comes to proper HTML/CSS compliance. It's well known that IE fails to conform to the standards.

Worth noting here that Microsoft is also a member of the W3C, which is ironic considering they fail in many ways to follow the standards they've contributed to.

IE 7 is making some effort in this area, but with regard to our site, it still fails to follow the CSS standards. And this is why more and more web developers are ignoring IE behaviour in favor of following the standards. And why Firefox and Opera are both gaining market share against IE. Even if it is a bit slowly.

And consider the stats you yourself quote. 60-80% is a far cry from the 95-99% they once had after utterly crushing Netscape back in the late 90s.

That's not what I meant. What I meant is simple. Since IE dominates users, sites would be better off to conform to how it works. And if this is(and it usually is) the case, IE has become the standard. If IE can't support a feature, its not going to become widespread.

Hey guys, guess what? Bill Gates DOES have todo lists. And Microsoft does use bug tracking software! Wow, crazy isn't it? To think reality differed from someone's crazy fantasy.

How do I know this? Maybe because I actually know a lot of people that work for Microsoft? Maybe because I follow news on Gates?

Oh and about IE, Microsoft has apologized many times for it sucking so much. They finally put some developers back on it and are trying to make up for lost time. One of the things they are doing is….making it more standards compliant! Because guess what, real webdesigners use standards first, and compatibility hacks later. If you don't believe me, read a little from my friends (we are real webdesigners) at alistapart.com. You don't have to restrict yourself to that website though, there are plenty of others.

I agree that most real developers use standards first. The standards are geared toward low maintenance, since that's the largest cost of a web site. Although IE is the worst for standards compliance, it's generally close enough to use. The worst failing I've noticed is the horizontal width issue, since that causes most of the noticable issues between browsers. Most other areas degrade gracefully.

If I hired a "real" web designer and they built me a site not compatible with 60-80% of people who browse the net, I'd be pissed.

FYI Brinson, I just checked numbers on a popular site I vist:

Yesterday
23800 Visitors
OP 1.71%
Saf 2.28%
NS 2.16%
FF 23.37%
IE 43.40%

So yeah, if a developer I paid for missed 60% (56.6%) of my viewers, I'd be pissed too.

For the curious, here's our stats from the day Mudbytes opened:

1. Firefox 9,229 72.16%
2. Internet Explorer 2,428 18.98%
3. Mozilla 640 5.00%
4. Opera 394 3.08%
5. Konqueror 46 0.36%
6. Safari 40 0.31%
7. Netscape 6 0.05%
8. gzip 3 0.02%
9. Camino 2 0.02%
10. Mozilla Compatible Agent 2 0.02%

Totals: 12,790 100%

These are just raw hit stats as taken directly from Google Analytics data for us.

Column one is obviously the user agent identified. Column 2 is the raw number of hits, and column 3 is the overall percentage.

I'd say that 81% of our users here might get a bit pissed if we had failed to consider them.

I think it just depends on the content of the site. A site that's meant for more computer knowledgeable people are probably going to not use IE.

My stats:
1. Internet Explorer 14,899 82.92%
2. Firefox 2,655 14.78%
3. Netscape 126 0.70%
4. Safari 121 0.67%
5. Opera 92 0.51%
6. Mozilla 55 0.31%
7. Konqueror 12 0.07%
8. Mozilla Compatible Agent 5 0.03%
9. gzip 1 0.01%
10. Camino 1 0.01%

Totals: 17,967 100%

(Read the same way as Samson's)

And let's not forget that in those site numbers some users of Opera or Firefox (other browsers too) may have their browsers set to identify themselves as IE so those sites that do discriminate will still display properly.

Ok, now I'm curious, let's see what the stats show for the sites I host:
This is for last month according to webalizer:
Top 15 of 230 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 8754 20.18% Netscape
2 4841 11.16% Opera/9.01 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
3 4623 10.66% Micro$oft Internet Exploder
4 2223 5.12% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/2005
5 2128 4.91% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.co
6 1976 4.55% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
7 1510 3.48% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) G
8 1399 3.22% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
9 1208 2.78% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) G
10 519 1.20% Opera/9.00 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)
11 436 1.01% msnbot/0.9 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
12 404 0.93% msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
13 208 0.48% msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
14 196 0.45% Opera/9.01 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)
15 171 0.39% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/200

Oddly enough, it looks as though _I_ should be catering to Netscape…

Wow, your #1 is Netscape?

I should also clarify that the stats for Mudbytes exclude visits from myself, Davion, and Asylumius or they would be skewed even more in favor of Firefox.

Yeah, I'm a little surprised by that one too. But that's for everything I'm hosting right now. Land of Legends' web site, The Castle's Dungeon BBS' web site, Smaug Building Institute's web page, Smaug Building Institute's forums, TopSmaugMuds, and the web page for my son.. and assorted other individual docs, pics, etc. But no one's been excluded from that, which is all the more reason I'm surprised to see Netscape taking the lead given that Dragona and I use Firefox in Linux and Opera in Windows almost exclusively and neither of us uses Netscape at all.

Netscape uses the Gecko engine anyway, so you can just group it under Firefox for development purposes. This is also true of Camino, Kameleon, Flock, and SongBird.

I don't know what the other 215 'unique' browsers might have been, but it said it had 230 unique user agents. I imagine that some could be just different versions of the same browsers, or even the same browser under a different platform, but without opening the log files and manually counting the entries, what I posted is the best you're getting from here. Webalizer has that info for each month from November 2005 through October 2006, but I went with September's data because it's the biggest month I've got of those 12 and it just ended so it's nice and fresh.

I'd say that the majority of those "unique" agents were spiders of some sort.

That would really be my best guess too.