Rewind 5 years (to 2006). Ask any self-proclaimed nerd what the browser market shares were. Market share stats were like the stock market ticker of the Internet Nerds. Everybody knew about it, and everybody cared.
But what’s the market shares today? Did you know that IE is below 50% by most measures? Did you know that Chrome ate up Firefox’s market share? And what’s Safari’s market share if all the iPhones and iPads use it?
You probably don’t know.
Because, who cares.
5-10 years ago, it mattered that IE had 70+% of the browser market because it directly influenced what was possible as an application developer. But mobile changed all that.
Mobile browsers ended up being the adoption wedge for HTML5 and alternatives to Flash thanks in large to the fact users — and developers — treated mobile as separate from regular browser apps. What a blessing in disguise: it let everybody start over. And once the mobile stuff got popular and apps broke, people blamed the bad mobile browser (“My ghetto Blackberry won’t load Facebook right!”) instead of the website. It was the perfect storm to force everybody to start adopting HTML5. Add in CSS/JavaScript standardizing tools (Modernizr, jQuery, GWT, etc.) and developers didn’t even have to do cross-browser testing for simple stuff.
Maybe this is a bad thing to admit, but I haven’t bothered testing in all browsers for a year or two now. Stuff just breaks less often. IE7 is “good enough,” and the other browsers work 99% of the time. Thus, the only time I bother checking browser compatibility is if I’m doing something super complex or a user complains.
Good job, Internet. Ya, the evil Microsoft IE empire is still around, but we won the war and nobody even noticed.
Michi Kono's Blog 