Last week we decided to ask a simple question on Facebook, “What browser do you use to browse the internet?” Not a particularly hard question you would have thought, but one that provoked a few tasty discussions at that.
At the moment, IE is still the browser getting the most usage at 45.10%, followed by Mozilla Firefox at 29.98%. The browser that is seeing the most in terms of increased percentage though is Google Chrome, going up from 16.51% to 17.37% just in the past month. Safari, Opera and other browsers don’t get much of a mention. These findings can be seen here.
When looking at these stats it is interesting to point out that IE still counts for IE6, IE7, IE8 and the newly released IE9. There is a similar situation with Firefox, which also counts its legacy browsers, although the uptake from Firefox users to a newer version is always greater. This can be seen by the 7+ million downloads of Firefox 4 on the first day compared to only 2.35 million for IE9 link. Chrome is continuously updated and has incremental builds, something which Firefox is going to be moving towards with their next releases. What this means, it that the user is kept up to date with the latest standards set by the W3C, something that as a web development firm we love to see as we are always looking to work alongside the standards set in place. HTML5 / CSS3 support is now getting to a more acceptable standard with IE9, Firefox 4, Chrome, Safari and Opera all having made advancements in that area.
Now to look at the results we received from our Facebook post.
What’s interesting here is that we are targeting a more tech savvy demographic, and the browsers that come out on top are Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome with 12 votes each. IE still manages to get quite a few votes with 8, whereas Safari and Opera get 4 and 2 votes respectively. Nobody voted to say they use a different browser to the ones mentioned. Now, let's say we look at the Google Analytics for our site, Firefox comes out top, with IE in 2nd and Chrome in 3rd. Safari also has much greater usage.
A question one might want to ask is that do we target our development just towards the newer browsers? The answer is no. We can target these newer browsers by using new technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3, but we also need to degrade gracefully, meaning that anything that works in the latest browser release of Chrome for instance, should also work in IE6, or at least have a viable alternative presented to the user. When it comes to using a web browser it is the users' choice, not the web designers.
For more information about our web design process, click here.