@Grampy: I'm not going to shoot the messenger, but the problem is, that using a narrow sample, is not going to give you very accurate results if you can't benchmark it to anything. Or how do you explain this:

www.anttiussa.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/webshare2a-2008.png

It's april, may and june 2008, FF is around 45% each month and IE (6+7) about 50%.

I wouldn't trust MS
google better

 I'm not so sure about that, I checked around, and no sites really seem to agree. However, almost all of them had IE at 60%+, Fire Fox at 20-30 and rest different ones.

Other than that, Opera rules :P

@oyvoyvoyv: That's the point. Despite Grampys graph being extremely good, it's just one sample among others. The site used as the sample for the graph i linked (well, apparently i didn't link), have 150-200k monthly users and it contradicts with the Grampys graph.

And one more, a news from january:
http://www.tietokone.fi/uutta/uutinen.asp?news_id=32621&tyyppi=1

Which tells, that according to french Xiti, Firefox has 45% share in Finland, with IE being second with 32% share. Second biggers share for Firefox in Europe has Poland, where Firefox has 42% share.
Globally IE is the market leader, with 66% share, followed by Firefox with 32%.

And the news noted, that from the sites users, 50% use Firefox.

Interesting, if obvious. Surprised it took Google this long. So they have a free web based Office compete product now (Mail, Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation Aid) and now a Browser, plus of course they are leader for internet search.

Clearly they want to try and push MS back to the core OS and out of the apps side (as do many others of course).

Tough times for MS ahead I think. They've got themselves fighting big battles with Apple, Sony, Nintendo, etc. with Zune, Xbox 360, etc. (and are far from winning any of them), Vista was a damp squid of a launch and its specs are still too high just for the OS, and now their other core business, Office and desktop domination is finally getting a serious challenge.

They're not going to be happy at MS HQ about this latest assault.

With Opera being efficient and FireFox also being well featured as well as open source I would rather see Google would design a good clean Windows OS alternative, maybe build on a BeOS (Palm owns the source) or QNX Neutrino foundation to quicken development time.

How sensible is the idea of a purely web based operating system?

A kind of hive mind for the computer...

i don't know why so many people hate ie. i see absolutely nothing wrong with it. both ie and firefox work exactly the same to me except their user interface. but that's it. please someone tell me, why do you think ie is so crap?

Here's a couple more links to browser/ OS stats if anyone's interested-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=1 (their sample seems a bit US-centric, no other sites listed here have OSX so high.)

The Steam hardware survey is usually quite interesting as well, although that obviously only covers PC's running Windows.

 It can't be true , stay away you devil !!.