“Experian Hitwise has released its yearly search term statistics and once again, Facebook and YouTube top the list. The remainder of the top 10 includes three more Facebook-related terms, a couple of Yahoo! variants, craigslist, eBay, and MapQuest. Of course it’s highly unlikely that all the millions of people putting those terms in the top 10 are actually looking for information or the latest news about them; they just want a quick way to the site without having to clumsily type dots and slashes.”

The fact that people do this boggles my mind. I remember the first time I saw it – when I was doing support for a local ISP as one of my first jobs in IT – someone searched for Google.com using the Yahoo search field. I nearly fell to the ground. I asked them why they searched for Google.com instead of just typing it into the location bar. They said “What’s the difference?”

I agree with Parish that people aren’t searching for information about Facebook, Youtube, etc. They are, in fact, using search as the location bar. But I disagree that people are doing it as a way to get away from the confusing “dots and slashes”. I’ve seen people type in “.com”. They simply do not know the difference between the search field and the location field.

Think about it. Most modern-day web browsers combine the location and search fields. Safari doesn’t but it only maintains a small marketshare. Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox combine the search and location fields into one field that you can type just about anything in and the browser will figure out what you are looking for. So, are they searching for information about Facebook when they type in Facebook? Or are they simply hitting ‘Enter’ too quickly and they really want to navigate to that URL?

I’m sure extensive user testing would be needed to determine the plethora of habits of people; novice and expert alike. One thing is sure, the browsers should be doing a much better job of taking people to web pages instead of search results in different situations. But, why would they? They make their money on searches too.

Here are the statistics for the last 30 days here on my personal site. Internet Explorer is still #1 in spite of every single geek on the planet wanting it to simply go away. But it isn’t winning by much. Firefox and Safari are pretty close behind and Chrome is catching up quickly.

The Safari number includes both iPhone and iPad as well as the Macintosh and Windows. The Mac and iPhone split up the biggest portion of this with Windows and iPad nearly tying.

Interestingly, if you combine Chrome and Safari, which both run the Webkit rendering engine, then Webkit clearly stands out as the #1 rendering engine for all HTML/JS on my site.

So it looks like it is Internet Explorer vs. Webkit – at this point – as being the two main contenders in this war. Firefox, which is doing very very well on its own, is beginning to show signs of lagging behind both Safari and Chrome in their growth rates. This could all change in one day with one killer update from Mozilla – but I’m not holding my breath.

So why do I say that there are ton of casualties in this war? Because the people who spend all of their time building websites and applications have more browsers to build against than ever before, not less. More screens, more devices means more problems. Choice for the end user means headaches for the builders.

This problem probably won’t go away even if every browser manufacturer united under the banner of Webkit. If they did the spirit and motivation of competition would be gone – leaving only the end-user to suffer from lack of progress.

It appears that this war is not going to end and the bodies will continue to pile.

But, such as it is you are here, reading something on my site, and so I should – at the very least – show you a site that you can read. I didn’t say that I’d cater to you. No no, none of that here. But I will try my best to have my site display just well enough that you can read this – and perhaps switch to another browser.

While at Podcamp Hawai’i I pulled my site up on a screen in front of an entire theatre full of people. There was only one computer available to me that was already hooked up to the projector. I thought “How bad could it be?”. Well, it was pretty bad. My site looked like this. Yeah, that bad.

So today I pulled out a ton of negative margins, a few class specifications that, for reasons I will probably never know, Internet Explorer does not support – and now you can see that the site looks relatively normal in IE.

I could probably do better with my site’s document code and styling to set myself up for multi-browser success. I know this. But, seriously. You could do much better if you’re using Internet Explorer as your browser-of-choice. So there.