According to Wikipedia, Firefox has somewhere between 20% to 24% of worldwide usage share of web browsers, which makes it the second or third most widely used web browser at the moment which equates to over 450 million users around the world. But no matter how many users choose Firefox as their preferred browser, the issue of compatibility still arises from time to time.
Looking back at June last year when Adobe updated their Flash Player to version 11.3 this upgrade was a bit of a problem for Firefox users. According to Mozilla’s online support page, Flash-based videos at that time “may appear black, white or grey and never play” in Firefox. Adobe then issued an apology saying that they sincerely apologise for any inconvenience and thanked users for their continued support. Like it or not this wasn’t the first time incompatibility issues have arisen and it certainly won’t be the last, but this problem is definitely not unique to Firefox.
Internet Explorer on the other hand attained a peak approximately 95% of usage share during 2002 and 2003, but its share has declined considerably since the launch of Safari (2003), Firefox (2004) and Google Chrome (2008) each of which now steadily holds its own in the world of browsers. According to w3schools.com’s website, statistics for browser popularity as of December 2012 are as follows: IE 14.7%, Firefox 31.1%, Chrome 46.9%, Safari 4.2% and Opera 2.1% which clearly shows that whilst compatibility issues may arise from time, Firefox still remains one of the preferred browsers.
It is good to know that no matter what your reason for using the internet be it for research, advertising, or even online gambling that most reputable sites will support your browser. For example in the online gambling industry millions would be lost by browser compatibility issues and thus millions have been spent on ensuring that these problems don’t arise. Imagine the loss to such companies should a would-be big time spender navigate to his preferred casino only to find that his browser isn’t supported. The first thing he will do is navigate to another reputable Firefox compatible online casino.
With the advent of HTML5 though, incompatibility should be brought down to a minimum. HTML5 contains “powerful capabilities for Web-based applications with more powerful interaction, video support, graphics, more styling effects, and a full set of APIs. HTML5 adapts to any device, whether desktop, mobile, tablet, or television,” so says the folks of the w3 consortium.