Computer weekly carried the news about it today. FireFox now has 8% of the market. Hardly surprising that Internet Explorer remains dominant since it is issued with Windows and every configured PC ever shipped. But this 8% is significant to webmasters everywhere.

In fact the trend is greater “away from IE” than the FireFox figure shows. This graph is from the log of a pretty ordinary website:

At first sight Microsoft has only 80.34% share of this site, but the 4% of “htdig” needs to be removed, and about 2.5% from the “other” category because those are robots from places like Google. So the corrected figure is just over 86%. Exactly a year ago the same site showed 91% use of IE. That is a four percentage points swing away in a gargantuan market in only 12 months.

So people need to be ever more careful about designing websites and most important Campaign Landing pages, or Microsites, to be “Standards Compliant”, not “Enhanced for Internet Explorer”. The whole area of Web Implementation militates towards W3C standards. And that’s hard to do if your web design team deploys tools like Microsoft Frontpage, which optimises for IE. We know! Our site struggles with that history, and our webmaster curses it quite regularly.

Let’s look at two examples. We found these because we were looking at the Toshiba website for support. We could find and show a whole gallery of similar pictures from loads of other websites here. They show that designing for IE tends to mean that other browsers are left out in the cold. But other browsers are standard and IE is not. “De facto” does not meant it complies with internationally agreed standards, nor does “dominant market share”.

Internet Explorer

FireFox

The question is, “Do the very good marketing guys at Toshiba know there is this formatting problem?”

If your web presence is important to you (and whose is not?) then basic branding issues like formatting need to be corrected at once.

There are other websites we know of that refuse to work when filling in forms in FireFox! You need IE in order to buy things on several eCommerce sites. Sometimes you get all the way to the “Check Out” button and it just sits and does nothing. The result? A purchase abandoned just though incompetent design!

Getting this right is vital for your web presence. Even if you can’t become W3C compliant you can develop your site to display correctly in the browsers your customers are starting to use. That’s just plain common sense marketing.

Tim started in the UK IT industry in 1979 with a small US corporation in the forefront of word processor sales, and moved to Prime Computer, then a major minicomputer manufacturer, where he pioneered marketing Office Automation software, and introduced direct marketing. Today he runs his own web based business http://partnermine.com and is a consultant at Marketing Improvement where he heads up the Data Privacy Practice. This includes assessing client websites for compliance and creating Microsites and Landing pages. He is also webmaster for Marketing Improvement and its clients.