Accurate Browser Statistics? 137
zyl0x asks: "A co-worker of mine has been made responsible for a large web application for our software product, and he was having a hard time deciding what functionality to implement, and whether or not to sacrifice functionality for a larger user base. With Walmart's harsh stand on browser compatibility, we got to thinking, exactly how many users would we be alienating by using some IE-only functionality on our website? We tried crawling the internet to get some current, accurate browser usage statistics, but we could only find stats for specific websites. I thought I'd try sending Google a request, since we imagine they'd have the lowest-common-denominator in terms of types of users, but I received an email from their press department telling me that they 'don't make that kind of information available.' Where can one get a current, accurate, and un-biased measurement of browser usage? Is it even possible?"
Enter webcomics... (Score:5, Informative)
On average from CG, from the top of my head (not accurate!!!):
* Firefox/IE are major contenders -- ether one or the other flops back and forth the lead.
* Safari rounds out the third
* Konqueror, Opera, Netscape 4, and web spiders scrape out the distant rest.
What I would do is follow Google Mail's lead: Make a javascript version and a non-js version, and if there's a browser not on the tested whilelist, go non-js.
These seem fairly accurate (Score:2, Informative)
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
More than Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
So even aiming for just IE+Firefox support isn't enough to be sure that you're not still turning people away. Fortunately, many of the lesser-known browsers share the same rendering engine (or a variation thereof) with Firefox or Safari, making it easier to keep compatible. You basically have to target the standards and test in Gecko, IE, Opera and KHTML/Webkit.
Standards compliance is cheap. (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, if you jump on all the IE specific functionality you have a few issues. Will it work on old versions of ie? Will it work if people have their active X controls set to "high security"? Will IE break your sites functionality in a security upgrade?
Either way, you're writing off Mac's and all cellphones and pdas, you're writing off a lot of
Now, I think Walmart gives as much of a shit about me as I do about them (if I were bleeding to death I'd drive 10 more miles to get some bandages rather than go to Walmart), so no loss for either one of us. But your company isn't Walmart, whose main customer base isn't remotely online.
If it were me, I'd stick with standards.
Re:Depends on your audience (Score:5, Informative)
Browser marketshare varies widely according to audience.
I'll second this. I do a little work on a Web based interface to a security product for very, very large network operators who can afford to shell out the big bucks. A major portion of our interface was nonfunctional in IE for about a year and a half before anyone noticed because all our customers use Firefox or Safari or Opera or Lynx. If you're actually trying to find information that is practical for your application you need to look at your market segment and similar sites.
Also, any site that already restricts browser access is going to have skewed results, because the potential audience using other browsers has either cloaked their browser to look like the supported one, or has gone somewhere else.
Yeah, IE only sites skew numbers because people fake it or go elsewhere. Likewise, sites that are defaults for a browser (like Google for Firefox or MSN for IE) will have results skewed towards that specific browser, so Google's numbers would not have been all that useful to you. Look for a Web site that targets the same demographic, but does not have any of these factors to muddle the numbers.
I'd also like to echo other people here in voicing another argument against IE specific Web services. No one knows what the market share in five years is going to look like, and ripping out your working solution because IE is down to 50% would be a horrible snafu. Further, as more and more devices start to provide Web browsing capabilities, like phones, PDAs, PVRs, and televisions, standards become more and more important. Your company itself could standardize on Linux from some vendor in the next 5 years. It doesn't hurt to be a little forward thinking and keep your tools flexible. There just isn't much you could not implement to be cross-platform if you have a competent developer, and if you don't you're likely to have all sorts of other problems as well.
IE Upgrades (Score:3, Informative)
This is a good point. In case the submitter isn't aware, IE7 removed or disabled a lot of IE-specific functionality relied on by web apps. Functionality based on the standard specs, however, not only worked across IE6, Firefox, and others, but needed minimal adjustment -- if any at all -- to work in IE7.
In my own experience, most of the changes I needed to make with IE7 involved disabling workarounds for IE6-specific bugs.
Engineering VS Development (Score:2, Informative)
81% (Score:5, Informative)
I manage dozens of websites reaching multiple demographics (i.e., business, home users, education, medical, engineering, agri-business, sporting goods). Our sites see roughly 1,000,000 unique visitors each week.
Removing bots out of the stats, on average, I see:
If your site is geared towards highly technical people, expect to see double the FireFox & Linux traffic. If the site is geared towards the average home user, you might only be pissing off 10-12% of your potential customer base by having IE only components. I can't imagine many businesses surviving very long by pisssing off 1 out of every 9 customers ... oh, wait, Microsoft ... forget I said that.
Get some good analytics and tune accordingly (Score:5, Informative)
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ [hitslink.com]
Their stats are updated regularly, they've got a reasonable level of detail, and lots of pretty graphs.
However, as others have pointed out, you need to be worrying about your particular audience more than anything else. A site like the one I've just given isn't all that useful unless you've got a really huge web site. So here's a three step plan for YOUR web site:
1) At first, design it to work smoothly with as many browsers as you possibly can.
2) Build up a profile on the types of users who visit your site. There are lots of programs that can help you do this. Google Analytics [google.com] does a decent job, and it's free of charge. Another one is Mint [haveamint.com], which some people swear by [mikeindustries.com] (it costs $30 USD). There are lots of others out there, of varying quality and abilities. Take your pick.
3) Once you've got a profile built up, tune your web site to suit the abilities of the browsers that most of YOUR particular users favor. You might discover that only 0.002% of your visitors are using Safari, meaning perfect compatibility with Safari is not a major concern for you. Or you might discover that the Opera users of the world swarm your web site like ants swarm spilled sugar, in which case Opera becomes a priority for you.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
One Data Point (Score:5, Informative)
44.93% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows XP
26.48% - Internet Explorer 7.0 Windows XP
5.26% - Firefox 2.0 Windows XP
4.90% - Firefox 1.5 Windows XP
3.98% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows 2000
2.29% - Safari 419 Macintosh PPC
1.82% - Safari 419 Macintosh Intel
1.39% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows 98
0.92% - Safari 312 Macintosh PPC
0.52% - Firefox 1.0 Windows XP
We do our best to support normal operation on all of these platforms (and several others) because at our volume alienating even a fraction of a percent costs real money. And also in our case it's not hard to make things work cross browser because we use simple HTML and minimal javascript.
You ask what you lose by adding some IE only features. The equally important question is what you gain. Are the IE only features you're considering going to increase the value of your application enough to make up for what is lost in potential users? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. In general I think people overestimate how much fancy features are going to improve usefulness, so be honest with yourself there. Good luck figuring out where to draw the line.
Cheers.
Re:Enter webcomics... (Score:4, Informative)
In the particular case of JavaScript support, this is poor design. Identifying and testing in browsers is a slow, unreliable process, and needs constant maintenance as new browsers come out. It's been best practice for years to use feature/object detection [quirksmode.org].
Re:More than Firefox (Score:2, Informative)
Safari and Opera may be relatively small, but they're gaining as well.
I don't see this. I look after about 20 recruitment websites in Australasia across a number of industry sectors. (The sites are almost all designed and tested for a wide range of browsers, screen sizes and platforms so I'm not trying to exclude anyone at all.)
IE is still a solid 85-86% on our sites, with Firefox breaking the 10% barrier recently. Firefox has been slowly and steadily growing in an almost perfect linear fashion during the whole time I've been running these sites, but a fair bit of that growth seems to have come at the expense of other "alternative browsers". Things like the Mozilla suite and Netscape 6+ are dropping completely off the graphs now. Opera now barely ever registers more than half a percent, and Safari has been fixed at about 1.6 - 1.8% for a long time even though Mac usage has (just) broken the 2% mark.
Re: Wikipedia Browser Stats (Score:3, Informative)
A wider range of visitors than "people with an interest for web technologies" perhaps?
How about Wikipedia's browser stats [wikipedia.org]? It lists stats from many different sources, not just one web developer oriented site.