Although Internet Explorer’s marketshare slide isn’t proving steep, it almost seems irreversible at this point. Latest trend charts now put IE’s share under 70% for the first time in many years. Interestingly, Chrome’s near-1% doesn’t appear to have been at the expense of Safari and Firefox either, since both are well up on January 2008.

It remains to be seen how Internet Explorer 8 will affect these figures, but for designers still mulling over whether to make the leap to standards compliance and stop designing for the largest market, the path is now clear. Once, you might have been unconvinced by the ‘one in ten using something other than IE’ argument, but with a third of users now browsing with something other than Microsoft’s giant, it’d be absurd to author web pages in any other manner.