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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.
Take it from a site that hosts 6000+ webcomics, so you get a good sense of what's being used out there.
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.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
They are certainly not perfect, but it should give you some idea.
= 0
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
I forgot to mention in the first post, that it's more than just Firefox growing. Safari and Opera may be relatively small, but they're gaining as well. And there are quite a few other modern browsers around. You can expect several of them to grow over the next couple of years, probably at IE's expense.
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.
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.
If you follow the standards your site will look good on most browsers, including IE.
/.ers, and pretty much everyone who has a non-ie browser.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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.
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!
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.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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
I'm not privy to what exactly "IE-only functionality" is in your case, but perhaps you should rethink your application design if you can't find a way to create a cross-platform solution. With AJAX, Java, and various other technologies with excellent cross-platform support, the only justifications for creating an IE-only site seem to be either DRM systems or laziness. Then again, we could also be dealing with the difference between a developer and an engineer. If you're hitting a point where IE-only functionality is appearing to be a good option, try rethinking what you need the application to do, and how it can do it, from the ground up. You'll probably find a much more future-proof and robust solution without sacrificing end-user functionality. You're right in stating that the audience is what matters, but platform lock-in also requires you to be absolutely certain that your audience doesn't change, the platform you're on won't drastically change, and that you can live with absolutely no assurance of future-proofing by avoiding standards.
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.
For a snapshot of the web population at large, check this site:
http://marketshare.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 does a decent job, and it's free of charge. Another one is Mint, which some people swear by (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.
Here's the percentages for the site I work on. I can't reveal specific numbers, but we get many millions of unique visitors per day. As many other posters have mentioned, the answer of what to support greatly depends on who your audience is and what you're trying to achieve. Our audience is over 99% from the US, and represents a more average (read: less tech savvy) cross section of internet users, specifically, those that would buy shoes and apparel online. Your potential customer profile is likely much different, but here's the top 10 browsers/platform combonations we saw last week:
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.
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
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).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
A wider range of visitors than "people with an interest for web technologies" perhaps?
How about Wikipedia's browser stats? It lists stats from many different sources, not just one web developer oriented site.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.