[cw-discuss] (no subject)

[Rob]

On Wednesday 06 September 2006 13:42, Jason Van Patten wrote:
> Geeks like us are in the small 5%.  And that's where we're
> staying.  And there's no real business win in making the 5%

Internet Explorer's market share is no higher than 85% by any 
reasonable estimation (recent news reports claim 83%), and is 
shrinking (last August it was 87%.)  At its peak it never got 
much higher than 92 or 93%.  By no means is it just "geeks like 
us" using Firefox, Opera or Safari, though most Linux users 
still fall into that category.

Complaining by itself doesn't work, but complaining combined with 
the statistics most webmasters look at each month eventually 
does.  And, to tell you the truth, it's been a year or two since 
I saw a publicly accessible website that was IE-only (but plenty 
that have been Windows-only, unfortunately, due to requiring 
Flash 8... a threat that will continue to exist until Gnash is 
good enough to handle most sites and is included by default in 
Linux distributions, regardless of what Adobe does.)

Sadly, many regulatory and B2B sites that my clients use are 
still IE-only due to either embedded VBscript written back in 
1998 or so, or more usually ActiveX controls.  More sadly, 
running IE under Crossover or other products like it is not 
usually something the owners of those sites will support, if it 
works in the first place.  As with all sorts of legacy business 
software, it's a waiting game.

Rob