Poll Follow Up: What is Your Preferred Browser?
When I created the "preferred browser" poll I was interested in seeing if my assumption that Firefox would reign supreme was spot on or completely off. It turns out that I was right but I have a few other thoughts on the outcome.
The Count
| Browser | Percentage | Votes |
|---|---|---|
| Mozilla Firefox | 74% | 557 votes |
| Apple Safari | 8% | 60 votes |
| Google Chrome | 7% | 54 votes |
| Opera | 6% | 46 votes |
| Internet Explorer | 4% | 29 votes |
| Other | 1% | 5 votes |
The Analysis
- Firefox won by the margin expected. Why? Development tools. Firebug. Web Developer Toolbar. YSlow. Other browsers: learn from this.
- I think if you win the favor of developers, you slowly win the future of the web. If it's easy to program for Firefox and a pain to program for IE, developers will eventually start to program mostly for Firefox and users will follow.
- I wish I would've separated "Safari - Mac" and "Safari - Windows." I have to assume that 95+% of those that answered Safari are Mac users...
- ...although I may as well consider Chrome "Safari - Windows."
- Webkit's speed is what makes Safari and Chrome contenders.
- Opera's tiny 6% is concerning. If Opera only gets 6% of front-end devs in this poll (I realize that this poll is very small in scale), what hope does it have for non-devs? What role does Opera play?
- I don't see non-frequent web users moving to Firefox...but I do see them moving to Chrome. Why? Because Google is likely their homepage and Google can promote Chrome.
- If this post when to people 18-35 that weren't web developers, how many do you think would vote for a mobile device (iPhone)? How about a year from now?
- I think it would be interesting to run a poll on a user's SECOND preferred browser.
- I applaud those honest enough to vote for Internet Explorer.
What are your thoughts on the results?
No surprise here. I’d like to know what the ‘other’ browsers are and their percentile.
I don’t understand item 4. ( …although I may as well consider Chrome “Safari – Windows.””)…
And I, under my breath, call them freaking idiots who are ruining the internet.
Development tools and other extensions is exactly the reason I use firefox the most, but I have to admit I do really like Opera. I would happily move over to Opera if, as you said they learn from this.
I’m surprised to see that Chrome has toppled Opera, which is a great browser that’s always has innovation.
Let’s face it: Opera is great, Safari is great, Chrome is great, Firefox is great and so is Firebug and related plugins. Which makes FF the greatest…
You should give the “second prefered browser” poll a try. I’ll happily use Firefox for general browsing and development (mainly the plugins), but I always use Chrome now for web services at work I need to stay logged in for… Google Analytics & Adwords, SalesForce, Email marketing systems etc, purely because I can keep all them in one space and away from my usual browsing and its as good as firefox.
I really want to like Opera, but xmlhttp requests won’t work on localhost as of 9.5, because of a change made to the security layer. That means I can’t troubleshoot/debug my web applications locally…or even run them. When some investigation revealed that the developers knew about this, that there was no workaround, and they had no intention of changing that, I felt I had no choice but to drop it as a supported browser.
Since I don’t support it, I don’t use it. A shame really, it’s otherwise a great browser. My browser of choice is Chrome, with Firefox for active development.
In work FF is best thing in world, but for free surfing FF sucks.
No sidepanel notepad, plugin gestures are slow, speed dial page slowing down FF.
FF for work, Opera for fun.
FF for dev – I flirted with Opera, but just couldn’t make the transition to Dragonfly.
Surfing, Chrome is sweet – Opera is great because of MyOpera persisting bookmarks across locations (to replace XMarks) but again, FF has so many decent addons in this regard. It’s just slow as a dog with the full arsenal loaded up, so much so that I’ve started disabling extensions that I’m not using to speed it up.
Really want Chrome to get some decent extensions rolling.
Only those who don’t use Internet Explorer take this poll. Isn’t it? IE still holds larger chunk of share i.e. around 60-65%. I hate IE.
not true. firefox is too slow, has too much load from ancient days, ugly interface