For my own curiosity, I checked on the browsers that visitors to this site use, so far, in the month of March. Even I was surprised at the results:
- 60% of the traffic to this site is from Internet Explorer, almost two thirds of which is IE8
- Firefox is second with 21.2%
- Safari is third with 11%
- Chrome is fourth with 4.6%
Those stats are done rather like SHARE is with ratings. It measures the percentage of Traffic. Heavy users of the site make up a much higher percentage of traffic than occasional visitors.
As I mentioned above, I use Firefox, but also have the latest version of IE installed, so I can test compatibility of the web sites I work on.
Why I use Firefox is part of a decision I made when I retired more than 4 years ago. Budgets were tight, so I decided to go with Open Source software, whenever practical, then free Proprietary software as my second choice. And only buy when I had to, to get what I needed. My initial plan was to switch to Linux, but Windows actually ended up being cheaper, because of the way that Dell sells their bottom of the line computers.
Internet Explorer is free Proprietary. And so is Chrome, to the best of my knowledge. Which is why I favour Firefox. But I did not actually switch to Firefox from IE until a year and a half ago, and then only because there were about 10 major security flaws in the current version of IE that Microsoft had not addressed.
Open Source software is, as the name implies, supplied with the source code (human-readable computer programs), and licensed in such a manner that anyone can use the software, for free, not just as a user, but can even make it part of their own software, and offer it to others. The largest directory of Open Source software is
http://www.sourceforge.net; hugely popular Open Source software like WordPress has a life of its own; you'll only find a 2004 version of WordPress on SourceForge.
Open Source takes some getting used to, as there is often a base software product, and lots of add-ons, typically called Plug-ins, available from other people, usually for free, that you have to add yourself, to get the additional functionality that you require.