One benefit of switching my new webhost, [TextDrive](http://textdrive.com), is that they have a much cooler statistics program called [Urchin](http://urchin.com). With it, I can see a lot of information about who’s visiting the site, and what articles they’re reading. Plus, I can learn what browsers they’re using. Here are the current percentages:
26% Internet Explorer
22% Firefox
5% Safari
3% Opera
(The numbers don’t add up to 100%, because I’m omitting RSS readers, robots and specialty browsers, such as those on mobile phones.)
I’m genuinely curious to find out why anyone is still using Internet Explorer, when there are much better options. [Firefox](http://www.mozilla.org) is available for both Windows and Mac, and is superior on just about every level. It’s faster; it blocks pop-ups; it offers modern tabbed browsing. It even automatically imports all your old bookmarks.
If you haven’t at least tried it, stop reading and [get it](http://www.mozilla.org).
One thing the official site doesn’t explain is that it actually makes web pages look much better. That’s because it properly supports modern standards like CSS and .png graphics. For instance, compare the brad icon in the upper left right corner:
Currently website developers have two choices. They can make their sites compatible with published standards (and support Firefox, Safari and Opera), or they can support Internet Explorer. Increasingly, they’re simply giving up on Internet Explorer, which hasn’t been properly updated in a long time.
That’s what I’ve chosen to do. With a day or two of work, I could probably get johnaugust.com looking better with IE, but I’m convinced it’s not worth the bother.