No more Microsoft Internet Explorer for the 2010 soccer world cup

a 2010 audience, then these trends are very important. They influence what technology decisions you need to make today to deliver to your 2010 audience. So lets project current browser usage trends over the last year up until the start of the world cup in South Africa, June 2010, to see how that future audience will browse the Internet. This is what I found (my $url[http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pTsRJimJxQubGAWRQDdzaFw,data] source data from $url[http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=1,Net Applications]): Internet Explorer - still the largest market share holder but now commands only 61% of the market (it drops to below 60% in the following quarter). A far cry from those days of 95%. Mozilla Firefox - commands over 25% of the browser market. A full quarter of your potential audience. Alternate browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari) - 1 in 3 people will use these browsers. How does this influence your technology decisions: Must work on all browsers - If you don't you get to lose 1/3 of your audience. Relatively easy if you ensure that you follow W3C standards and use AJAX abstraction libraries. Forget anything that only works on one browser - Really this means forget anything that only works on Internet Explorer. If you decide to target only Internet Explorer and succesfully draw 6 million customers remember that it could have been 10 million. Your business and marketing people will kill you, and rightly so. So no Microsoft Silverlight for you. Forget about new technologies. I'd say if you are doing video go with flash, its proven. If you do want to innovate use native video (It will be in Firefox 3.1 and is part of HTML5, other browsers will follow soon). There is really enough space for you to create an innovative experience with AJAX and existing technologies that work now. Caveats, there are always caveats. I've based this data on the current average monthly changes in market share. Many things can happen to change these both up and down. Events such as: Microsoft might start innovating (or marketing) in this space - this will be neutral or slow the drop, its unlikely to result in clawing back of market share. People who use Firefox, Chrome or Opera make a concious decision to use the product. They would thus need to undecide, which is seems highly unlikely. Many more people move to cellphone usage - our figures are based on desktop browser products. But certainly we don't expect any positive shift for Internet Explorer, since the browser engine that dominates on cellphones is Opera's (and maybe Safari with all the iPhone users). Google Chrome gets used by more the 1% of the market - the current data is so low that I wasn't able to project this in any useful way. We'll see new versions of browsers over this time - The market share figues may stabalise or the trends shift slightly. This will leave us in 70/30 split between Internet Explorer and the alternatives. I don't think that changes your decisions much, its still means you could have had 10 million users when you landed 7 million. See you at the world cup!