I consider IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all as major browsers. Sure, Opera only has 1-2% global market share; but consider the fact that 1-2% global m

I consider IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all as major browsers. Sure, Opera only has 1-2% global market share; but consider the fact that 1-2% global market share means somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million users (assuming estimates of 2 billion global internet users is correct). I consider that a fairly significant browser. Also, there are markets in Europe where that percentage is much, much higher. And those European markets are generally a lot more relevant to me than China (and to an extent other Asian countries like South Korea), where a lot of the IE usage comes from. Due to the greater internationalization, cultural, and regulatory barriers in China, it's not a market that interests me all that much. I generally consider the major browsers to be ones which have their own rendering engines (though Chrome and Safari share one, they both do significant development of that engine and each have their own JavaScript interpreters), actively attempt to be compatible with the entire public web, participate in the web standards process, introduce innovations to the web platform which are later adopted by other browsers, and have a significant number of worldwide users or users in major markets. IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all meet those criteria.