It is hard to work out exactly which browser market share statistic to pay attention to. The numbers vary depending on whether people mainly access from work and by region around the world, as well as the type of site. Be that as it may I think the trend line is interesting and perhaps more relevant.
Below is a chart for Firefox/Mozilla and miscellaneous browsers compared with IE for the past three and a half years as measured by the famous w3schools.com browser market share survey.
The absolute percentage for Firefox/Mozilla et al for January 2006 is 33.60%. This is one of the highest percentages reported. w3schools is generally a leading indicator, because the web cognoscenti and web designers and authors frequent it. More interesting than that is the trend.
Having been involved with many project decisions about which browsers to support, I always felt that 10% non IE was necessary to ensure sites were built to standards and interoperability. That 10% was in danger in 2001/2002. The only thing that saved one high profile site I worked on was the concern about journalist reviews, who were a strong Mac community. Mozilla had not been doing much to capture new users, though I used it right through from version 0.90. Firefox came along just in time really.
Where it will end? I think most users will always want to go with just what their OS gives them. I tend to. On Linux it is Firefox and on Mac OS X it is Safari, which I mainly use. I also have IE on CrossOver Office running on Linux and Firefox and Mozilla on Mac. According to w3schools, operating system visits for Mac/Linux went from 4% to 6.8% over the past three years. This represents a hard base of non IE users. Add to that what can be captured from Windows users. Much depends on whether manufacturers bundle it. This is starting to happen. In October HP announced that users would be able to choose Netscape at install time on and in December Dell announed bundling of Firefox.
No matter where it ends there is now enough non IE marketshare to assure web standards and to avoid Microsoft domination of standards. RSS is an example of something that came out of the community and is now a standard browser feature. Another is tabbed browsing and yet another is pop-up blocking.
The real worry is the low non-Windows market share. There are sites like WebEx and Google that offer degraded or no services to non Windows users. (Try using Google Video as a Linux user for example.) Hopefully the new Macs will help build that share up.
