Internet Explorer down to 16%

When Internet Explorer 4 came out, somewhere in the late nineties, it was a revolution. It completely trashed the competition in superiority. Up until that point Netscape had had a monopoly on decent web browsers to such a level that they could even charge quite a lot of money for it. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4 was not only free, it also had a much better support for the then-new HTML 4 and CSS. For years to come, Internet Explorer would win users from Netscape. More than 80% of all WWW traffic, would be surfed with Microsoft's browser.

Those days are finally over *. Today, we are experiencing a new era in the evolution of the WWW, and Microsoft is too late, too slow and too weak. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari,... they are all faster, more stable, and a lot more secure. And they too are all free!

Also, for some reason Microsoft stopped producing Unix and Mac versions of Internet Explorer (yes, we has those for a while). So while other operating systems are slowly replacing Windows on our computers, especially Mac OS X and GNU/Linux, so are those alternative browsers.

Today we ran a scan through our log files to find out which web browser our visitors prefer. And this is what we've come up with: *

1. Firefox at 46%
2. Google Chrome at 18%
3. MS Internet Explorer at 16%
4. Apple Safari at 16%
5. Opera at 1%

And YES, we like this! Why? Well, maybe because we notice that Internet Explorer is not responding well to www.flipz.be. That is, of course, a very personal reason. But a correct one, nonetheless. The reason why it is not liking our site, is because Microsoft seems to keep on ignoring the standards in CSS and JavaScript, pushing their own flavours.

Will Internet Explorer 9 be better? Well, let's hope so! But I am guessing they are too stubborn to comply to the Internet's open standards. Even when they're already down to 16%, coming from 80%. I have tried IE9 on Flipz.be, and there is already one big improvement: the images on the bid-buttons are finally drawn the way they should've been all along.

* One very important notice: these are the numbers from our site. Every site will have different numbers since every site has a different audience. But still, it is nice to know that our visitors have been enlightened.