It's been a few months since I last reported on what the current browser trends for people visiting NEO are, so when I saw an article on another site reporting that overall browser trends seem to be pointing that Internet Explorer could be down to as little as 58.% I thought I'd see what last months usage statistics were. Being a site for web development my statistics have always been biased towards Firefox but I was quite surprised to find that in terms of visitors to NEO, browser usage has stayed almost the same.
| Browser | Percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Firefox | 58.8% |
| 2. | Internet Explorer | 32.2% |
| 3. | Safari | 4.7% |
| 4. | Opera | 2.8% |
| 5. | Mozilla | 1.0% |
Again, there is a small percentage of users that visit using an iPod, iPhone or Playstation 3 - but so far mobile and TV browsers are still taking a very small percentage. Visits from users of Firefox 1.0 now seem to have ceased totally, which means it's fairly safe to say I can drop support for it and just make sure pages work in Firefox 2 and above. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Internet Explorer 6, as the usage there is as follows:
| Version | Percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | 7.0 | 64.1% |
| 2. | 6.0 | 35.8% |
| 3. | 5.5 | 0.1% |
Some months there have been visits with IE8 Beta, but is seems at the minute it's predominantly IE7 and IE6 still being used. I would say any browser that consistently has less than 5% usage doesn't need supporting in a design.
Personally I prefer fluid sites, but every now and then you come across a design that has to be fixed width, usually down to the client's preference, and in those case it's usual to make the width of the site around 760 pixels so that it fits nicely on an 800x600 display and allowing for it's scrollbars. This is kind of limiting, and looking at my stats I know NEO at least doesn't have many users with 800x600 (only 1.69%) in which case I know if I wanted to redesign my site at a fixed width of 1024x768 I would only be upsetting 1.69% of visitors.
When redesigning a site I believe it's important to be mindful of statistics like that so you're not unnecessarily limiting yourself or cutting off a large portion of visitors. Treating it as anything less than 5% might not be what's right for your site either, it should depend on your audience really - in my case they're mostly developers so I don't worry too much (but maybe I should!), but in another case such as Apple, just having 1% of customers face a problem caused a lot of noise from them; true in their case it was for a paid product, but it's the same idea.
