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So, keep bringing it on, guys. And let's welcome Chrome, and add it to the list.

You could always link to the alternative browsers alliance website
http://www.alternativebrowseralliance.com/

I have across every page i've ever coded.
They all detect IE and refer them to it (not directly, but i will annoy them with a header on every page, ABOVE the actual page header)

If history is anything to judge by, if Safari (or Gecko, for that matter) achieved near 100% marketshare, the browser would stagnate. We're better off with multiple major players keeping each other motivated.

Which begs the question... why not just use Opera? Some of us already do!

Well, Opera faces the same problem Safari does: small marketshare, so too many developers ignore it.

My hope is that, with Safari now available for Windows, some of those developers will start thinking, "Oh, this is the default browser on Macs and I can test it without buying a Mac. It might be worth testing in Safari as well as IE and Firefox." Once they break the two-browser mindset, maybe, just maybe some of them will start using the most reliable method to write code that works in multiple browsers: code to the standard first and tweak it according to browser bugs and limitations. It's a lot less work than targetting browser A, adding browser B, adding browser C, etc.

Plus, a two-browser hegemony is only a little better than a one-browser hegemony. Ideally, there should be at least three major browsers with significant marketshare. Maybe 40/30/20/other, but something where there isn't a "majority" browser. That way, there's healthy competition among browser vendors, there's enough variety that malware authors have to go to a significant effort to get results, and web developers can count on the different browsers aiming for the same specs.

Why in the hell would designers want more rendering engines with their own quirks and varying levels of standards compliance?

Why? I'm glad you asked. For all the varying levels of standards compliance, they're at least converging, so that targeting standards, then tweaking for quirks, has a better chance of succeeding across browsers than targeting the browsers to begin with. On the other hand, security vulnerabilities (other than misuse of intentional functionality, like the IDN spoofing attacks a while back) tend to be specific to an engine+platform combination.

If we've got two major IE versions, Gecko, Opera and Safari, and if each engine has a big enough userbase that "designers" can't afford to ignore it, then maybe we'll actually see more web development instead of IE/Gecko development.

It's a bit simplistic to assume that $browser will always keep you safe. On the other hand, it's important to remember that there are many alternatives available. The good thing about this is that each engine has its own vulnerabilities, so for the same malware to target Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari, it would have to target four different exploits. At least with intended behavior of HTML/DOM/CSS, Gecko, Trident, etc. are (ostensibly) aiming at the same target.

Ever notice that the only vulnerabilities which are really cross-browser tend to be misuse of functionality (like the Unicode domain spoofing attacks a few years back), rather than exploits of bugs?

They're even filing patent lawsuits now! And I thought this post that Firefox was no longer alternative enough to be an "alternative browser" was taking things too far.

Your IE/FF figures of 70/20 and 40/44 are actually plausible for (relatively) normal sites that will work properly in all the major browsers and don't actively promote or relate to any one of them.

For the record, the 70/20 site is Hyperborea.org. The biggest draw there is a comic book fan site I've been running since 1996, which gets a mainstream, perhaps slightly geeky audience. It also contains my blog, some photos from conventions, my wife's website, and some smaller sites I built back in college. The 40/44 site is the Alternative Browser Alliance, a site promoting the use of non-IE browsers and cooperation (or at least civility) among their supporters. Most of its traffic comes from searches for alternative browsers, from technically-oriented sites, and from (interestingly enough) StumbleUpon.

I forgot to mention in the first post, that it's more than just Firefox growing. Safari and Opera may be relatively small, but they're gaining as well. And there are quite a few other modern browsers around. You can expect several of them to grow over the next couple of years, probably at IE's expense.

So even aiming for just IE+Firefox support isn't enough to be sure that you're not still turning people away. Fortunately, many of the lesser-known browsers share the same rendering engine (or a variation thereof) with Firefox or Safari, making it easier to keep compatible. You basically have to target the standards and test in Gecko, IE, Opera and KHTML/Webkit.

What I do absolutely need, however, is a fast browser that's light on resources.

Hmm, I wonder where you might be able to find such a browser that supports modern technology...

Consider that this would be less of an issue if IE weren't used by 70-90% (depending on where you look) of web surfers. Most-used and least-secure is a disastrous combination. This is why alternatives are important. If the space broke down at, say, 30% IE, 30% Gecko, 15% Safari, 15% Opera and 10% random, malware authors would have to go to a lot more effort to exploit the majority.

You want 'em, you got 'em.

Site 1: Hyperborea. Mix of personal website and comic book fan site. Lots of traffic to the comic book section. General audience, but still higher-than-typical Firefox and Opera usage.
MSIE: 69.7%
Firefox: 22.4%
Safari: 3.4%
Opera: 1.2%

Site 1: Alternative Browser Alliance. Highly tech-oriented.
Firefox: 42%
MSIE: 42%
Opera: 7.7%
Safari: 2.3%

The results aren't terribly surprising, given that Site 2's audience is made up of the people most likely to use a third-party browser.

For all practical purposes, the war was over in 2001. For the next 3 years, IE6 was the undisputed ruler of the web. And look what it got us:

For 4 years, Internet Explorer went without a significant upgrade to its capabilities. It couldn't even finish support for the specs that had been defined years earlier, never mind adding new stuff.

With 97% of web surfers using IE6 on Windows, the target was obvious for malware writers: viruses, spyware, and worms burst onto the scene and have gotten so bad that even Microsoft says the best way to get rid of them is to wipe your system and reinstall it from scratch.

I'd much rather deal with slight differences in standards support (like trying to manage the differences between Firefox, Opera, and Safari today) than deal with huge chunks of missing features and major bugs the way we have to when developing something for IE6 and F/O/S.

Having more than one browser out there with viable market share puts pressure on the leaders to keep improving their products. Having more than one major target will make it harder for malware writers to hit the entire web at once, and will slow down the spread of malware.

So yes, we're better off with the competition than without it.

Agreed. A Firefox near-monopoly would be marginally better than the IE near-monopoly, but a duopoly or triopoly (is that a real word?) would be even better. It's great that we're seeing so much convergence toward standards among Gecko browsers, KHTML/WebKit browsers, and Opera. Even IE7, while not everything we (as designers) would have wanted, look slike it'll be a darn sight better than IE6 in terms of what it supports. (Things'll blow wide open once W3C's XHTML 2 and/or WhatWG's HTML 5 really get going, but even WhatWG has more collaboration that you might expect.)

Two or three browsers constantly jockeying for position, with enough common capabilities that people can just write code to one set of rules and have it work everywhere? Sounds great to me!

Not just "the" competition, but competition in general. Forget IE itself for a second, the big problem is monopoly. That's why MS can afford to be so sloppy.

So yes, let's convince people to use alternatives. There are "switch" campaigns all over, most of them focused on specific browsers, most of those on Firefox, since it has the most momentum. Sites like Browse Happy (IE is bad, use something else), or Stop IE (IE will eat your brain, use something else) or one I'm working on, Alternative Browser Alliance (monopoly is bad, use something else).

The trick is finding the right approach -- and that'll be different for each potential switcher.