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.

Last weekend I rolled out an updated theme for this site when your browsing it with an iPhone. The main reason for this is my mobile photos. When I post a mobile photo my site automatically Twitter’s a link to it, like this, and a lot of people flood in to view the photos and some of them are on iPhones. I wanted this site to load a lot faster than it did before for these mobile photo pages and this definitely solves that problem.

However, another reason to do this theme came up last weekend. Someone asked me about fishing, particularly this fairly large bass that I caught this summer, and I had trouble, on my own iPhone, on my own site, to find that photo. Turns out I hadn’t posted it yet! It was taking forever to search the site and I got fed up with it. But, now I’ll be able to find stuff quickly given that this new theme works site-wide and has a really great search option right at the top.

Those of you without iPhones may be wondering where your theme for this site is? It is coming. I’ll be working to add all Webkit enabled mobile browsers first (e.g. DROID) this weekend and then will be moving onto other mobile browsers until I squash the majority of them.

Happy mobile browsing.

The next version of Webkit that will be released will come with a new version of the Web Inspector, a tool used by Web developers to “inspect” an already-loaded Web page for debugging, testing, etc., that has some really great new features thanks in part to Joseph Pecoraro.

I love that I can choose either Safari or Chrome and I will still benefit from this update.

As it stands Safari is far and away the best browser available on the Macintosh. Firefox, which is a really solid browser and is much loved by many developers, just isn’t “Mac enough” for us real, devout Mac users. There are so many things missing when an application is not built as a native Macintosh application. Simple things, really. Being able to look up things from the built-in Mac OS X dictionary is one thing. Native spell check. Speed! These are simple things, since Firefox handles some of these things on its own, but once you’ve grown accustomed how real, native Mac applications feel – you want that from all applications on your Mac. Opera and Camino, both very respectable browsers, just are not as lean and mean as Safari is. The are other browsers, to be sure, but none that are backed by corporations with enough resources, or an active enough development community, to really push for the top-spot on the Mac.

Which is why it’d be great for a really, really good browser to emerge on the Macintosh to rival Safari. Both Safari and the Webkit teams are on a tear lately. They have made tremendous strides towards making Safari better and Webkit (along with Squirelfish which is now called Nitro) much, much faster. They’ve improved Webkit’s page rendering (or, how it displays the page based on open standards) to such a degree that it is the envy of all other engines. But, they could do better.

For example, Chrome renders pages faster than Safari. I don’t need a fancy graph or test to show me this – I’ve loaded pages on my Macbook Pro using Chrome and the speed at which the page becomes usable is hands-down much, much faster in Chrome than in Safari (and Safari is fast).

For example, Firefox has add-ons which enhance the features of the core browser. There are add-ons for everything like plugging into your favorite Web sites, aggregating content, security and privacy enhancements, music, calendaring, etc. etc. etc. All optional, based on your needs/wants. Chrome will also support extensions, which are similar to add-ons, that will use open standards (this excites me very, very much).

Competition. That is what it comes down to. Not just competition based on marketing or market share or even mindshare – but an all-out race to be the best. The unequivocal best even if you’re not the biggest. If Google Chrome for Mac is released and is only marginally better than the developer preview releases I’ve been using – the people that are responsible for making Safari will need to trot a little quicker to keep up with where Google is going.

Hooray for us.

Side note: Why I can’t use Google Chrome full time, yet

I’d be tempted to use the developer preview releases of Google Chrome for Mac full time but there are a few key things that are ultimately missing from the application that are vital to my daily browsing needs. Here they are, in case you’re wondering:

• Adobe Flash support is simply not yet available. I’m not sure what makes Google Chrome for Mac any different than any other browser but I’m hoping this is addressed soon.
• Google Gears support. Both Google Reader and WordPress, two applications that I use quite often, support Gears and make the experience of using them much nicer. Kind of ironic that Google Chrome for Mac still doesn’t have Google Gears support.
• Import from Safari. I could probably hack my way into bringing all of my bookmarks and preferences from Safari into Google Chrome – but I hope that an upcoming release has this built-in.

That’s really about it. If I had these things I could probably make the jump to do some real testing of Google Chrome for Mac. For now, I’ll stick with the best browser available for the Mac, Safari.

But we haven’t seen that floor yet.

Downloading Firefox 3 today I have experienced, what I feel, is the quickest page rendering experience I’ve had on the Macintosh since, well, downloading the latest version of Safari.  Before that I thought Camino was the quickest at rendering a page on my Mac.  Just prior to that, it was Safari.  And, according to Ariya Hidayat tests, it seems like when the next version of Safari is released to the public it will again hold the top spot in this rendering speed war that is being waged.

Granted the tests Ariya ran on a recent nightly build of Webkit, the rendering engine beneath the Safari browser, are dedicated to Webkit’s ability to parse through JavaScript only (leaving out the all important HTML and CSS rendering speed capabilities) – but one can assume that Safari will feel much snappier when the next update is release.

So, the beat goes on and on and on.  Rendering speeds in these browsers are going to continue to get better until they reach some sort of limit. I suppose the limit could be considered “virtually instantaneous” but I wonder how long it will be until we see that.

When does it end?