Again from FC, here are the browser share breakdowns and deltas from Jan ’010:

• Chrome: 5.61%, up 0.39% from January
• IE: 61.58%, down 0.54%
• Firefox: 24.23%, down 0.2%
• Safari: 4.45%, down 0.08%
• Opera: 2.35%, down 0.03%

Any analysis of the deltas, as FC does in its article, amounts to a lack of understanding of basic stats — they’re probably just analyzing noise and sampling error.

Something that often goes unmentioned is that IE’s users are broken into roughly-equal subsegments. First, there are the people who don’t care about updating their browsers (including users who suffer under the heel of lax administrators). Second, the people really into IE (they exist, and include some of the best engineers I know) and people who are forced to use IE by an institution that updates it correctly.

In short: the browser market actually looks more like this (rough numbers pulled straight from my brainhole):

• IE6: 30%
• IE7/8: 30%
• Other, standards compliant: 40%*

* Although the current Opera can’t do the new rounded-border CSS stuff — which I suppose isn’t really a standard, just useful).

Since, as I’ve mentioned before, IE8 isn’t terrible with its standards compliance one can target those standards and blanket most of the users who care about Internet stuff (ie, the market you’re trying to reach with web apps). The rest you can just ignore, like Google (which is phasing out IE6 support starting yesterday).

And: Chrome on Windows is better than Chrome on Mac because the tabs have an infinitely-tall catchment for the mouse (they’re positioned at the top of the screen when the window is maximized). OS X reserves this space for itself, so Chrome’s tabs on that platform are just as hard to target as everyone else’s.