I have seen the statistics from the Xiti and its nice to see that firefox is gaining even more percentage. I think it totally deserves it – by being a more standard-compliant browser, by moving away from the dead end where we have stalled in the past years because of the absence of the concurrence, by being open source, and so on. Dont get me wrong – its far from being perfect, but i think it moves into the right direction. All the things that mozilla guys added in 1.5 realease (excluding for some problems =O)) are nice. I am looking forward to more use of SVG in the future, but of course a lot of the things will depend on the redmond guys (as usual).
I think it is a kind of a natural effect that people are getting tired of some-what buggy browser which has not been updated in several years (oh, of course i am not counting the security updates from the microsoft).I would say that with every month until the IE7 arrives more and more people will move away from IE – and its a good thing. But with the arrival of IE7 the thing will change drastically, cause no doubt microsoft will gain some percentage back, but i am confident that it will be only a question of some time, until people wont start to realize that in order to have all that “newest features” on something other than XP SP 2, they will have to install a reasonable browser – doesnt matter which one – Opera, Firefox, … I know some people who are Opera die hard fans, and though i am keeping the Opera on my computer it is only for the testing and compatibility reasons. There is something about the interface of the Opera which makes me feel less comfortable using it. I hope that maybe in the 10th release they will correct it… A friend of mine from Austria introduced me to the Opera browser in the end of the 90s, but even at that time it had not enough appear to convince me. Anyway – i hope that with much anticipated 9th release they are going to improve their position on the market of the browsers.
p.s.: red panda is my favourite animal =O)