Thought some would find it interesting:

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Sep-06 Sep-07 Internet Explorer 73.43% 63.86% Firefox 11.75% 17.40% Netscape 10.71% 10.21%

I can remember when MSIE had 95% of the market share. You can see the growth since 2006 to current year of 2007.

Firefox and Netscape are essentially the same browser—kinda like Mozilla having 27.61% of the market share.

I often wonder out of the webmaster, programmer, SEO community combined, what percentage use Firefox. (I use it of course )

Yep. Always make sure your site works in Mozilla Seamonkey/Mozilla Firefox/Netscape, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7. If you have got those covered then you shouldn't have any appreciable number of visitors experiencing problems.

Kinda hard to test in IE6 & IE7 since Windows only allows one MSIE browser on the puter. And since Mozilla/Netscape products are so similar, testing with Firefox ought to cover that area of browsers fairly well.

I'm simply happy that Mozilla is giving ole Bill Gates some competition and also happy that Mozilla products are generally safer to use (ActiveX in MSIE has been a huge security issue).

there is a stand alone hack available to run IE6 and IE7 on the same machine

>> since Mozilla/Netscape products are so similar <<

Yep. The / between the names signifies them as being equivalent.

Is testing with IE6 essentially necessary when a person has IE7 on their computer? I'm thinking that the rendering between either version of IE is likely very similar that it probably isn't necessary to test both versions. Any insight?

no, you have to test on both,

But, are IE6 and IE7 different enough to warrant checking both browsers? Or are both browsers generally consistant in rendering web pages?

My main concern with the IE6/IE7 hack is this: is it going to make my computer system less stable by using that hack? I also don't want to potentially cause problems with my computer updating the OS. Since the MSIE browser is tied into the OS, using the hack makes me a bit nervous.

they are different enough to check in both

if you don't want to do the hack,there is another way

I have an old computer with win98 that is too old to upgrade, i have 5.5 and 6 on it and just turn it on to check backwards compatibility

What are some of those significant rendering differences of IE6 & IE7?

the way they handle css and div's. the png issues, page width, ajax and mootools issues, etc

do a search for
webdesign issues IE6 and IE7

and you'll find what people are running into