Chrome Gives IE a Run for Their Money

By at least one measure, the browser battleground is changing.  According to data released yesterday by StatCounter, Google’s browser, Chrome, narrowly exceeds world-wide usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer by a few percentage points.  That was yesterday.  Today is another day and the debate over the StatCounter data continues.   Skipping the skepticism, what does this all mean to you and your business website?

Every browser on the market does a few things well and a few things — uh, not so well.   Fundamentally, even the most basic HTML is open for interpretation by the user’s browser.   IE, for example, does a wonderful job of font smoothing. That makes digital content smooth and easy to read.   On the flip side, IE doesn’t support some of the newer CSS3 and HTML5 techniques that bring such beauty to modern websites (such as CSS rounded corners,  transitions, etc.).

For years, web designers and developers have been building sites that look spectacular in FireFox, Chrome and Safari (all support the latest and greatest web technologies) and then retrofitting them with IE-specific rules so they “degrade gracefully.”   Graceful degrading is just web developer speak for “Won’t look too terrible in IE.”   As a fun demonstration, pull up your site’s main stylesheet and you’ll see either a totally separate stylesheet just for IE or, toward the end of the main stylesheet, you’ll see a comment line with “<expletive removed> IE!” and several lines of styling ‘fixes’.

The news that IE’s thrown as the #1 browser in the world is being threatened by open-source, standards-based browsers like Chrome, FireFox and especially Safari (for mobile) may be proof web developers’ prayers are being answered and the Internet will soon be a much more beautiful place.

As far as the debate over the StatCounter data, RedOrbit had the following to say:

A look at the daily data shows that Chrome has gained brief leads over Explorer in the past few months. Between March and the current numbers in May, Google Chrome passed Microsoft Internet Explorer in market share briefly at least eight times. This indicates that the two browsers may have their ups and downs and continue to take slight leads over each other for the next few months before one gains a clear lead over the other.

However the squabbling over the data shakes out, the golden rule remains true.   They with the golden browser make the rules.