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?"
Depends on your audience (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox, the second-most-used browser, seems to have a marketshare of 10-20% depending on where you look. So you'll probably be blocking at least 10% of potential users, if not more, by restricting your site to IE users only. And that percentage continues to grow.
Keep in mind also that IE is only available on Windows (not counting emulation, which is of limited use). The Mac version has been discontinued. Unless you want to block all Mac users, you'd better provide at least Safari or Firefox compatibility.
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.
Since you say this is a new application, you'll want to get statistics from a similar product that works cross-platform.
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
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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 dur
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Ahh, but as the poster says, you need to look at the audience. So, your statistics tell us what the unemployed use. This begs another question, is there any correlation between being employed and using Firefox? (nobody gets fired for using Fir
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.
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Also, I know Safari is based off of Konqueror, and both are pass ACID2 (I think Opera does as well?)
So by having one of these in your compatability list, that should implicitly add the rest, even if all are a relatively lower market share compared to IE/Firefox.
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This reasoning is nonsensical. The relation between "passing ACID2" and real-world site development isn't automatic. The scope of the ACID tests is narrow, and it's a trivial exercise to produce content that adheres to existing recommendation
Not to mention that ... (Score:1)
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While this is certainly true, it doesn't validate ACID2 as a reliable (let alone sole) measure of any browser's competence in handling recommended development guidelines.
What is the point of ACID2? (Score:2)
I personally do not understand the whole point of the ACID2 test. It is not valid CSS, so it does not accurately measure how well the site adheres to CSS.
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What site? Acid2 tests browsers, not sites. As such, it needs to include errors to test whether browsers handle errors correctly. This is not only acceptable, it's actually a requirement to be a proper test. CSS has defined error handling, meaning that the Acid2 test might be invalid code, but it should be parsed in one specific way.
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Not to mention IQ and gullibility index.
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Another thing to consider is the reverse: audience may vary by browser. For instance, some studies have shown that Mac users spend more on software and peripherals per capita. Certain categories of users may have different amounts of disposable income and different amounts of interest in your product and that may be correlated to browser use, so alienating certain categories of users may have more (or less) effect than the raw percentages suggest. I wo
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If your site is called "IEBugFixes.com", you'll probably have 99% MSIE visitors. If your site is called "FirefoxPlugins.com", you'll have 99% Firefox visitors.
Just run your own browser statistics or try to find out the browser statistics for your closest competitors.
The real important question is; what MSIE-specific features would you want to include, and do they really improve your site?
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My main site gets about 80% IE. However, there has been a significant drop over the last year (from over 90%) - rather to my surprise given the audience (UK oriented and a lot of people read it at work).
On the other hand, my blog gets about 55% IE. While not a techie blog, it does have pages on my Wordpress themes and plugins, and a fair amount of content that might appeal to a techie audience.
From a financial point of view, if this is revenue generating, and operational geari
Yes, Macs (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, if you want to block millions [lowendmac.com] of potential visitors, that's your prerogative. Personally, I'd like to keep the doors open for them.
Re:Yes, Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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W3Schools Browser Stats [w3schools.com]
Full breakdown, data going back to 2002, good selection of sources... what more do you want???
Daniel
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.
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Relevance, perhaps? That looks nothing like what I see on my website.
For me, IE6 and Firefox are about 45% each. IE7 is nowhere to be seen. The remaining 10% is split among Safari, Opera, Konquerer, Mozilla, Netscape, Lynx, WebTV, Mosaic -- you name it.
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For the record, the 70/20 site is Hyperborea.org [hyperborea.org]. The biggest draw there is a comic book fan site I've been running since 1996, which gets a mainstream, perhaps slightly geeky audience. It also contains my blog, some photos from conventions, my wife's website, and some smaller sites I built back in college. T
These aren't the browser stats you're looking for (Score:5, Insightful)
I''ll mostly refrain from talking about the monumental stupidity of using IE-only functionality because I know the Slashdot crowd will be (justifiably) beating your head in over that momentarily. Good luck with that.
Re:These aren't the browser stats you're looking f (Score:2)
Re:These aren't the browser stats you're looking f (Score:2)
Well if you have a website that doesn't work well enough in non-IE browsers, most likely those users won't return. Which means that using your own statistics will only reinforce your perception.
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Re:These aren't the browser stats you're looking f (Score:3, Insightful)
No, this is bad advice too. Walmart's just built a web service that only works in Internet Explorer. How many non-IE users do you think they are seeing in their logs compared with IE users? Looking at your current users can only tell you to keep doing more of the same.
What you need to measure is not what your current visitors use, but what your target audience uses.
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That's a good point, but I was thinking from the point of view that they hadn't already implemented IE-only stuff.
It IS really annoying that Google doesn't release their browser stats; I don't know what their reasoning is on that one. I'd also
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Google used to include some of this information in their Zeitgeist, for example see December 2001 [google.com]. But just because they have representative users, it doesn't mean they can collect representative data from traffic analysis. Browser market share data culled from web statistics is good for entertainment, not for basing important decisions on.
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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.
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It wouldn't be an unreliable user-agent identification if web designers didn't restrict the access of their web sites to specific user-agents in the first place. I see no other reason to spoof who you are other than to get around some artards notion of what browsers can access a page.
Re:These aren't the browser stats you're looking f (Score:1, Funny)
"Only abled bodied people buy wheelchairs! What the hell do you want one for?"
And so ignorance becomes truth.
Re:These aren't the browser stats you're looking f (Score:2)
Thing is Google probably has the largest sampling available meaning that their numbers will be most accurate about true browser market share.
As another poster pointed out, your web server logs will reinforce the policy your web site's already had, proving nothing to PHB's about enhancing your compatibility.
A good conversation with a PHB would be: Our users on our sites are 99% IE. IE is 80% of the market, therefore in the long run we
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It almost doesn't matter what percentage... (Score:5, Insightful)
For almost every site out there, the answer to this question is "Yes". If you are in that situation, it would pay for you to use technology that would work on all browsers, or have a browser specific page with equivalent functionality for non-IE browsers. You often see Slashdot comments in these types of threads that say the "extra 5% of the market is too small for the company to care about". Sure, 5% seems small, but the costs of developing cross-platform support for web applications is usually so low that you're throwing away free profit by ignoring even the least-used browsers.
There are other arguments too... Many IE specific features are annoying even if you are an IE user, Using technology that isn't standardized across the industry make maintenance more difficult across platform versions, etc... But really it comes down to the money.
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The answer is more complicated than the question makes it seem; remember that the implementation costs to support a new browser could be spent on adding new features that will grow your market for existing users. Thus you have to say, "What does it cost to support another browser? What else could I spend that money on? Which gives a better return on investment?" If I can spend $1000 to add supp
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Asking whether you should do one thing or the other when the two things aren't mutually exclusive makes for a great strawman in an argument, but has no bearing on reality.
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In reality it's neither as simple as your most recent comment or as my initial comment make it out to be. For example: A better net ROI doesn't necessarily make one decision better than another for many reasons. For example, a net increase in revenue with zero overall ROI will probably be a better choice for a venture backed startup than having the investors money earn interes
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Re:It almost doesn't matter what percentage... (Score:4, Insightful)
Testing with Lynx is actually quite a good idea. Not only will you make sure that blind people can see your site, you can also confirm the complexity of your website and how easily information can be found from there.
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Testing with Lynx is actually quite a good idea. Not only will you make sure that blind people can see your site, you can also confirm the complexity of your website and how easily information can be found from there.
blind people use lynx?
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It's YOUR choice to ignore customers. If the support and dev costs for WebTV is less than what you'd gain by including them as customers, you're simply making a bad business choice. Serving customers and making sound business decisions is usually not about convenience.
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Bad faith (Score:2)
Compatability still a big problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or am I just being ignorant in thinking this isn't really a major problem anymore?
Re:Compatability still a big problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
*you know: Rock and Roll all night, Party everyday! (yes, I couldn't resist)
Mod parent up (Score:2)
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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 CS
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There are lots of folks who have already incurred this pain for you and have written books and/or javascript libraries that you can use to mitigate the pain.
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In all seriousness, you will in time learn what to do and what not to do in order to appease IE, the worst piece of software ever invented. Stay the course and code to standards and 99% of the time you'll be just fine.
This is also why I alluded to the KISS principle: if you can, avoid complex stuff. Less for IE to break. Part of coding to standards is, at least in spirit, simplicity.
For times when
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That actually sounds like every other browser has it wrong and Internet Explorer has it right (yes, in certain rare occasions, it has been known to happen). In HTML, every table with one or more rows has a <tbody> element. Just because the tags aren't in the HTML, it doesn't mean the element isn't th
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Well, then here is yet anoth
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Well <tbody> is optional in XHTML, and <tr> elements can appear as direct children of <table> elements. This is one of the things that trips up people who think that the difference between HTML and XHTML is just in the error handling, lowercase element type names and closing every element explicitly. The following code actually means different things depending on whether it's parsed as HTML or XHTML:
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You're confused. "<tbody>" is a tag and is optional in both HTML and XHTML. The names of elements are written without angle brackets.
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I'm not confused, I just use different delineation conventions to you. Talking about element type names can get confusing when they aren't set apart from the rest of the text (e.g. talking about tables as opposed to <table>s). Just because I use angle brackets, it doesn't mean I'm talking about tags — in the context of the discussion, I'm obviously talking about the element type, and I don't believe for a se
Yeah, internet Explorer 7 is still shit. (Score:2)
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OK full details:
1. Mom finds sight that sells stuff to only retailers (not a problem as she runs a store and this would be good for the store).
2. Fills out stuff, gets a username and password.
3. Go to sign in, prices don't work. She complains and they ask what version of IE she is running? (She's running Firebird 0.7 aka Firefox 0.7 IIRC)(It's a Win95 machine that my parents don't feel like moving off of quite yet. It is hidden
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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.
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Well dùhh! (Score:2)
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].
These seem fairly accurate (Score:2, Informative)
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
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How are you judging the accuracy of these statistics? I don't see any estimated error or confidence level. They don't describe their methodology. Are you doing what most people do and considering statistics "accurate" just because they reinforce your existing beliefs?
Google may not be the best choice (Score:2)
Am I missing something here.... (Score:2, Insightful)
http://validator.w3.org/ [w3.org]
You can make anything you like available on a web server. If someone complains, and it follows the standards, then it's their fault. If it doesn't, then it's yours.
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There should be no problem trying to do what you want, if you just use javascript to manipulate the DOM directly.
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.
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
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Says it all. I am so sick of the misconception "We are gonna do it on the cheap and make it IE only".
Yes I've seen it all. I have a team member whose coding skills are stuck in 1998 and he writes stuff (on the intra
The important ones... (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you want to gamble on which 5% that is?
- RG>
Count users, not hits. (Score:1, Insightful)
I only count "browsers per known user per day". So users that come in more than once per day are only counted once; anonymous users (and robots/crawlers without a credit card in hand) are excluded.
This, not surprisingly, results in a number that's quite different than traditionally published "browser" numbers. The net result is that
Re:Count users, not hits. -- you can't (Score:1)
The parent post said: "I only count "browsers per known user per day". So users that come in more than once per day are only counted once; anonymous users (and robots/crawlers without a credit card in hand) are excluded."
And *how* do you count users/day accurately? With proxy servers, you *can't* always know that kind of information from server logs, though many logfile analyzer s/w packages will try to make you think you can...
See the Analog logfile analyser docs: What the results mean [analog.cx], and particula
Re:Count users, not hits. -- maybe you can (Score:2)
Check your competitors (Score:1)
A Modest Proposal (Score:5, Funny)
If you're even willing to entertain the idea, then why not take it to the next level? Instead of having an interactive ActiveX-heavy website, just have a website that contains one file, a MS Windows-only executable, for your "audience" to download and execute as administrator. Then you won't have to worry about "giving up functionality" at all.
(BTW, you're never going to find the statistics that you want. Having MSIE be in the user-agent header, is practically part of the defacto http standard now. Why? Exactly because of the kind of abuse that you're contemplating. 10 years after the last copy of MSIE has been erased, it will still have 90% marketshare, at least according to the server logs.)
A Suggestion (Score:2, Insightful)
Engineering VS Development (Score:2, Informative)
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Accurate usage? (Score:2)
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.
Browser demographics (Score:1)
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.
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FYI, Mac Firefox 1.5 & 2.0 litter the teens under both PPC and Intel. All the prominent Mac Firefox entries combined pull about 1.8%. Mac IE really is dead, coming in at #44 with 0.05%.
The version splits make some things look smaller than they should. The analytics I'm using doesn't allow very fine grained control over improving that. What I'd like would be a way to group by work-alikes. But then that concept may not really hold anyways.
Philosophy is more important than browser share (Score:2)
Basic common sense (Score:2)
I know I might be playing Devil's Advocate here, but if users alienated >0, wouldn't common sense dictate that the move in question is a pretty bad one?
You'll have to find out for your self. (Score:2)
If I was deploying a new web application I would start by writing it to standards and making it work with IE and FF out of the box. Then I'd keep track of what browsers hit my main page.
Then I'd make a simple business decision:
if (potentialLostRevenue > costToImplement)
implement_browser(someBrowser)
Lets say it will take $1500 worth of manpower to implement Opera. If I'm potentially turning away $5K in b
Also, maintenance (Score:3, Insightful)
Another thing to think about is future maintenance. Take a look at what IE7 did to IE-only Web sites. Lots of IE-specific things that worked find in IE6 suddenly didn't work or worked badly in IE7 because of changes in the browser. If you'd written an IE-specific Web site that actually used IE-specific features (as opposed to "we only tested it in IE" without using anything beyond bog-standard HTML/CSS/JS), you had headaches. Sites designed to work well in Mozilla, Opera and Safari, by contrast, made the IE6-to-IE7 transition with few if any problems.
So you not only have to ask whether it's worth it to accomodate non-IE browsers, you also have to ask if it's worth it to target only IE and deal with the havoc when Microsoft moves your target again (and they will move it, the only question is when and how far).
Think about your developers too (Score:2)
It's irrelevent in many cases (Score:2)
Second, yes, you can make a Web site more cheaply that's aimed at, say, IE 6. Or IE 7. or maybe you could choose Mosaic 1.5, or Nets
Sticking to standards does not always work on IE (Score:2)
Re:Sticking to standards does not always work on I (Score:2)
Liam
85% IE, 10% FF, 5% Other (Score:2)
The breakdown was about 85% IE, 10% FF, and 5% 'Other', which included Safari, Opera (1%), AOL Browser, even some Web TV clients. Over the last few months, IE6 has been shrinking with IE7 gaining and that continues to be the case. Don't expect IE6 to
Troll. (Score:2)