According to StatOwl.com, Bing has around 4% market share. However, it should be noted that they measure traffic driven to actual sites as a result of using search engines for their metrics. So if we assume both ComScore and StatOwl are correct in their reported data. Then around 6% of the new Bing traffic can't seem to find what they are looking for with Bing.

That means that it would appear shockwave users do not frequently upgrade. They probably had to install the plugin to view something and then they forget about it. In this case, this may leave more people open to attack.

This graph shows market share trends for relevant browser versions. Of course, I REALLY wish it was "in the single digits".

The StatOwl.com guys have their reports updated for this month. I know one of the guys who runs it and he mentioned they have been working on a bunch of mobile reports to handle just the mobile data.

See here: http://images.google.com/images?q=mr+fusion. Mr Fusion was pioneered after problems dealing with Iranians who historically had supplied Plutonium out of the back of their VW Bus.

This chart shows that the Flash install base is not as high as some (i.e. Adobe) claim

Over six times less currently. Of course, the general Slashdot usage trends may be different. I am sure Google can steal market share from others though - especially if they release viable Mac/Linux versions of Chrome.

Javascript 1.5 (aka ECMAScript ECMA-262 Edition 3) is what most developers target for good reason. But there are supersets found primarily in Gecko based browsers. But then you throw in the various DOM quirks between browsers and before you know it, programming anything large in Javascript that will be used across a wide variety of browsers can really start to suck due to minor quirks between different implementations. It will be interesting to see how their test cases support/address layout issues, if they do at all.

Microsoft has a history of rising up to destroy the browser competition that exists at the time. They also seems to rest on their laurels afterwards in a manner that stagnates web innovation.

This time though, there are a few viable competitors and the Windows platform, while still dominating, has dwindled since the last browser war. So I think healthy competition will hopefully remain in place this round. Nonetheless, Microsoft should not be underestimated - they now see the value of controlling the Web via a dominant browser, and they also have Windows 7 on the horizon, which may or may not increase their OS market share. You can bet on IE8 being a prominent feature in Windows 7 and pushed to existing Windows users.

I wish the underdogs luck!

I doubt a Linux release will have substantial impact on their market share given current Linux client usage. But I do think it is important for Google to offer support for Windows/Mac/Linux if they want an edge on IE.

This chart shows deployment stats on the "stable" 1.x releases of Chrome. There are instructions on getting Chromium to compile on Linux. Chromium is the open source project behind the Chrome browser.

Linux client market share needs some help. I think it is great to get the word out there that Linux is a viable desktop alternative, and maybe this will turn out to be a good way to win some converts. However, I think perhaps learning from what worked well for Firefox and then perhaps building a similar grassroots campaign combined with a well designed site that shows some real desktop advantages offered by some of the more polished distributions combined with the option to download easily runnable OS images (i.e. VMWare Player) might fare better.