From a recent project I’m developing at Biola.

Update 2005-03-21:

There’s obviously a huge divide between the average reader of blogs and the average person likely to visit a given Biola web page. From the statistics quoted in the comments page (Jon, Luke, and I) IE’s average is 20%. This is not all that surprising; among tech sites IE lost its lead a long time ago. It makes sense to me that blogs should follow.

What is surprising is that its share is so low among a relatively mainstream site like Biola. Biola is still not terribly representative of the world since it has a disproportionate number of Mac users, but it’s still encouraging.

Here’s why: since IE has lost its dominance, people will test their sites in more than just IE. This will be annoying for people who don’t know much about web design and have poor methods for design, but for ‘the rest of us’ it will be a welcome change. If sites are designed according to the rules, some might not look quite right in IE, which ignores several of the rules. If there’s enough pressure from dropping market share, the next version of IE might actually implement the standards.

In the end, I could be happy even if IE regained a majority, as long as the new version of IE is standards-compliant. It’s not that I hate IE intrinsically, I just hate the fact that it mangles sites that are properly designed and makes my job a chore. It’s possible for Microsoft to do something right. (You have to look a ways into the past to find proof of this, but Word 5 for Mac was actually an excellent product.)