Browsers
According to the latest figures at the Browser Statistics page at W3Schools, Firefox is continuing to gain share and now accounts for 34.5% of visits to their surveyed websites. Opera is also gaining share although starting at a much smaller percentage. IE 7 is making gains, but mostly at the expense of IE6. Most of the smaller browser's share remain essentially the same.
If I had to make a prediction on the future of browser usage, I'd say that Firefox will continue building share at the expense of Internet Explorer. Firefox's open architecture encourages third parties to create plug-ins and themes that IE will never have as long as it remains proprietary. As with much Open Source software, Firefox is a high quality browser with a huge community of developers building features that users want instead of dictates from Mount Redmond.
Operating Systems
Windows XP still dominates the OS statistics with 74.6% of the OS market, down just slightly from the 76% it enjoyed in January of this year. Vista now accounts for 3.6% of traffic, mostly gained from losses by WinXP and Win2000. Mac OSX continues it's slow but steady progress at 4%, up from 3.8% in January of 2007 and 3.5% in January of 2006. Linux is holding steady at about 3.4%.
Mac OSX will continue to make inroads into Windows share of the OS market, but Windows overwhelming lead is probably insurmountable and Windows will remain the dominant OS for many years to come. Linux flavors have a loyal user base, and my recent experience with Ubuntu Linux has brought me to two conclusions about the future of Linux. One is that Linux is a lightning fast, non-bloated, rock-solid, full-featured operating system. And second is that there are still too many little quirks in Linux installations for the general public. For instance, my installation of Ubuntu 4.0.7 on an HP laptop was very simple, but I have yet to get the built-in WiFi to work with Ubuntu. A posting on the Ubuntu forum produced a "maybe this will work" response, but it was way too complex for the average computer user to attempt - I haven't been able to set aside the time to fool with it in a few weeks. I'll get it going, but with far more effort than the average computer users will be willing to spend. Once these problems are solved, Linux will be a formidable contender along with Windows and Mac OSX. Until then, it will remain a niche OS.
Displays
For the past couple of years, visitors maximum screen resolution of 1024×768 has held pretty steady at 54%, give or take a few percent. Over the past year, larger screens have become more common and now account for 26% of website visitors. This gain in larger screens has come at the expense of 800×600 displays, whose share is now down to 14% and 640×480 which are now virtually extinct.
There is a practical limit to the size of displays and I think we are beginning to reach it. In the not too distant future, the race for bigger will turn into the race for better. The display used on the "one laptop per child" computer that can be viewed in bright daylight will be improved and find it's way into mainstream computers (I'm looking forward to this one). Brighter, sharper, more saturated displays will be coming as the technology moves forward.
That's about it for this look at web browser, platform and display stats. We'll have another look the trends in these metrics next Winter.
