This being based on the assumption that most of the Internet’s most astute technologically speaking have long left Internet Explorer as the Browser of choice anyway.

I update Firefox when it prompts me to.

And before I switched to Firefox, I used Opera, but not always last version. Opera 7 consumed more resources than 6 and was very unstable in first 7.x builds, so I didn’t upgrade for some time. Some builds of Opera 9 worked for me better than later ones with fixes.

Mozilla team approach to builds is more responsible, and I appreciate it ;)

First rule of browser usage reports – any report that has “worldwide” word in it is pile of total crap.

Only report possible is stats for specific period of time for site(s) you own. Rest is stupid guessing.

It is also very dangerous numbers to decide upon. Figures may be drastically different outside USA and outside generalized “average internet user”. I had seen some sites (IT-related) posting their statistics that had up to 40% (forty percent) Opera visitors… If those sites were made disregarding Opera in favor of IE and Firefox (like some are) = suicide.

Therefore MS can charge for their office suite a hansome premium, and therefore Quicktime and RealPlayer are still downloaded. They are officious.

To boot, “out of the box” Firefox is a dog, inferior to Opera, and only marginally better than MSIE 7 in the dullest user experience. Firefox lives on its plugins.

Most users rather stick to “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”. You see, I had a plumber in recently. Once you saw what he was doing it was all quite easy – before that fixing the drip was an unsurmountable task.

Not everybody reads “gHacks”, and not everybody reads “Golden Showers”.