Tuesday July 13, 2004

Doing my daily news scan, I ran across this article regarding Mozilla takes a bite out of IE. I must chuckle at the title because John Leyden, the author of the article, uses the words "decreased slightly" in the actual article. I don't call that a bite, I call that a nibble or a crumb. Again, trade rags and their use of titles. OK, being a blogger I must admit I am rather liberal in my blog titles, but then again, I am not reporting news.

I must ask myself, what does this data really mean? How accurate are these numbers anyway? Modifying User-Agent has to affect these stats, but how much? Does IE really have 95% of market share or are users simply modifying their User-Agent? How many Mozilla, Opera and Konquerer users change their User-Agent to be IE so the darn web site will render? With regards to the article, are IE users modifying their IE User-Agent to look like Mozilla (to hide their security vulnerability)? Now wouldn't that be ironic?

No matter how you skin the cat, this browser data point is a positive data point in my view. However, its not a trend (yet). I hope it is because ISV's will start to take notice and make my customers life better by supporting web standards instead of Microsoft extensions.