With so many different configurations internet users have their computers set up with, it can be difficult to decide how web sites should be configured so that it is viewable in as many configurations as possible.

So in the last 6 months i have been logging the statistics from my web design site to achieve as accurate a result as possible to answer this question.

The results are interesting reading and in my next few articles i will be analysing this data. First is browsers, and here are the

general statistics :

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and above - 49%
Firefox 1.0 and above - 34%
Apple Safari - 15%
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 - 1%
Macintosh Camino - 1%

One of the things this shows is that Internet users do in the whole upgrade their internet browsers to the newest version. Only a low percent are infact below the newest version.

It also shows that the foothold Microsoft gained in the browser wars is failing. No doubt they will once again gain ground next year with the eagerly awaited new operating system codename longhorn.

The open source mozilla firefox is gaining ground, but i have noticed that this is mainly because of users who are big gamers on the internet have switched to firefox. This is taken from statistics i did on one of my gaming sites which showed firefox on 65% and Internet explorer on 35%. It appears business users stay with Microsoft.

The message here to web designers is that web sites should be configured viewable in the 3 major browsers which are Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. This can be achieved by running the pages through a validator which can be found at http://www.w3schools.com

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