Which is the most popular web browser

Yesterday I went through a ton of data from one of my personal websites DoYouRemember.co.uk , a site mainly about 80s toys, 80s movies and 80s music. I was reading the traffic analysis reports using the fabulous free Google Analytics software (if you're not using this yet, you should be) and was interested to see the latest figures on browser market share. The market has shifted substantially since this time last year.

The figures for August 2007 are as follows (with August 2006 figures in brackets):

74% (82%) - Internet Explorer
20% (11%) - Firefox
4% (3%) - Safari
2% (4%)- Other

And if we break down the Internet Explorer figures a bit further:

55% (96%)- Version 6.0
44% (2%) - Version 7.0
1% (2%) - Older

It's clear from this data that Firefox is becoming a more important player and seriously threatening Microsoft's dominance of the browser market (yay for Firefox!). But what does this data mean for web developers?

Well, the obvious conclusion is that we need to continue developing cross-browser compatible websites and make sure we are still testing on the big three as a minimum - IE6, IE7 and Firefox. Between them they account for 98% of all Internet traffic and much of the remaining 2% will render webpages the same anyway. It's still useful to have a peek in Safari or Opera, of course, since they have their own quirks.

My prediction for August 2008:

66% - Internet Explorer
27% - Firefox
5% - Safari
2% - Other

21% - Version 6.0
79% - Version 7.0
1% - Older (or newer - who knows, maybe they'll get a version 8 out next year!)