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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?"
Browser marketshare varies widely according to audience. And by audience I mean not just people's interests, but their geographic location. Opera is used more in Europe than North America. Firefox is used more by visitors to techie sites than by visitors to entertainment sites. I've got one site where Firefox accounts for 20% of visitors, second to IE at 70%, and another where Firefox is #1 at 44% and IE is #2 at 40%.
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.
Unless you are Google, don't worry about what Google's browser stats are. Instead, look at the browser stats of your OWN web site. Those are your customers.
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.
Is 1% of your expected revenue greater than the implementation costs of supporting multiple browser platforms?
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.
Just curious, what kind of IE-only content are you talking about here? Granted I've never developed a commerical web app but I haven't come across any major obstacles to implementing cross-browser functionality in anything I've written in recent years. OK so I usually end up with a couple of dozen IE-specific fixes that have to be made and maybe some browsers get less functionality than others but I've not come across anything which worked on one browser that couldn't fail gracefully on another.
Or am I just being ignorant in thinking this isn't really a major problem anymore?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Whatever happens to standards?
http://validator.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.
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.
Perhaps 'only' 10-20% of your visitors will use non-IE browsers. However, perhaps only 5% of visitors to your website will purchase your product.
Do you want to gamble on which 5% that is?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I manage all web services for my employer. Not surprisingly, there are many ways to count "browsers" - by hits, by IP, by "user sessions", by "known users", or something else.
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 the browsers I must support are IE6, IE7, Firefox, and Safari.
But of course, being standards-compliant, it's easy for us to support any browser.
Your numbers will be different, because you're in a different industry with a different customer base.
If you've already got some sort of website going, start logging statistics for it. Get a counter of some kind (like the kind at http://extremetracking.com/ and you can look at who goes to your site. As you start to build the real meat and potatoes you will know what your primary audience. I look at these stats all the time for my websites to make sure that my site look good to the majority of my audience.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
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. Unfortunately, the web wasn't built around this kind of need, HTTP is a stateless protocol with unreliable user-agent identification. What you need is good old-fashioned polling. In-band data can be skewed beyond usefulness.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I wonder if Google's stats might be a bit non-IE-centric, though, as IE browsers default to MSN searching, don't they? I guess that might apply to any non-MSN site, though. It would be interesting to base stats on router traffic rather than web sites. Is anyone making that kind of info available for free?
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).
Actually, the reason it uses ActiveX is because the XMLHTTP request is an ActiveX function in IE. Something like this: http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/ajax_browsers.asp sorts through that specific issue. Well-developed AJAX applications are cross-platform and work in IE, Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror. Just because "Web 2.0" site developers don't know how to code properly doesn't mean AJAX isn't cross-platform.