Accurate Browser Statistics?

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?"

Re:Yes, Macs

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Hey, if you want to block millions of potential visitors, that's your prerogative. Personally, I'd like to keep the doors open for them.

I've always felt that online retailers who neglect the mac Web share are really making a big mistake. Say they are 5% of Web users. Which 5% are they? Well, they are the ones with disposable income who can afford to shell out more for a computer. That means you've eliminated the 40% of Windows users who are pirating it in a country that does not enforce copyright law well. When it comes to potential customers, unless you're selling a product that only works on Windows you are actually cutting out more like 10-15% of your potential customers, and it is one of the most affluent chunks of that total market. It seems like a pretty poor idea to me.

Re:Compatability still a big problem?

[AKAImBatman]

It takes virtually no extra work to write stuff cross browser (or at least close enough), and if you think it does take too much work then your skills aren't what they should be. Just use web standards.

Correction: It takes virtually no extra work to write stuff for all browsers except when you need to support IE for non-trivial work. Getting things working in IE is a pain due to its lack of standards support, and shouldn't be necessary. Thankfully, it's possible to maintain a small list of Javascript and CSS patches that can take care of 95% of the issues. The rest can be fudged so that IE works "ok". It's just that it's not pleasant to do things like maintain an IE-specific style sheet.

Re:These aren't the browser stats you're looking f

[tverbeek]

But just because they [Google] have representative users

Actually they don't. Their user stats are skewed away from IE users, because IE's default home page (which a surprisingly large number of people leave as their browser's home page) is MSN.com and its default search is Microsoft's; and they're skewed toward Firefox users, which have Google as their default home page and search engine, and slightly skewed toward Safari which uses Apple.com as its default page but Google as its default search engine.