If you hate IE raise your hand.
If you didn't raise your hand you may not understand the following post. That's okay, I'll try to be clear.
ONE: Microsoft IE (all versions) is the WORST browser on the market.
TWO: Problems in IE 6, might appear different than problems in IE 7, or IE 8, or god forbid, IE 5 which still shows some tenacity in my traffic on uber.la, a good portion coming from outside the US. (ArsTechnica has a nice collection of how the world is trying to put IE 6 to pasture.)
THREE: Microsoft Killed Netscape Navigator. And then ran uncontested until Firefox and Safari came along. Google's Chrome is still pretty new to the browser market. I have to say I like what Google is doing better than FF or Safari.
FOUR: If you develop websites, or do ANY email marketing, the biggest problem you have, all day and every day is IE. All versions have big problems. If Microsoft decides to fix change something in IE 8 they inevitably break a fix that was created to get IE 7 or IE6 to behave. Quite frankly, Microsoft doesn't give a damn. And these statistics aren't going to change that. But here they are from ArtsTechnica and then my little neck of the woods.
ArsTechnica: IE8 and Chrome have most momentum in browser wars
But I'm not exactly "worldwide" and my hunch is that neither are you. Let me explain and then show you some browser and OS stats of my own.
Worldwide means every single computer connected to the net. And of those computers a vast majority of those are running Windows. Funny thing is a ton of them are running Windows XP or earlier systems.
So of all these computers running Windows there is a huge chance that the user has not ever changed the default internet settings. And each of these settings on a "worldwide" scale affect the balance of browser and OS usage "worldwide" like this:
Setting one: browser = IE.
Setting two: homepage = MSN.
Setting three: OS = Windows.
So it's not to hard to see how Windows still claims the dominant OS and IE the dominant browser. But that's kind of like us in the US declaring English as the dominate language because HTML uses English expressions. There are a few languages that are bigger than English when you go to "worldwide" as your playing field.
So one of the obvious differences here on uber.la is our audience is skewed towards techie and English speaking folks. And most people use FF. IE is a distant second with 25% of the market. That's a pretty big jump down from the 63% on ArsTechnica's worldwide stats. And Chrome and Safari had a pretty healthy percentage as well. Obviously these are not people who have left their settings on the default IE settings.
What else can we see from our little microscope?
And when you look at browser and OS combos the picture is even clearer.
63% of our visitors are on Windows.
35% of our visitors are on Macintosh.
2% of our visitors are on Linux.
*I have filtered my Mac/FF and Mac/Chrome visits out of the reporting. And since the uber.la content is slanted towards techie, creative, literate readers you can see our audience is much more Mac savvy than the general population. And about 100 X more Mac than the worldwide internet population.
I write a lot about Apple, iPad, iPhone and other things OS X related so it is easy to imagine why my stats have such a higher average of Macs.
And finally, I'm a HUGE mobile advocate, but on my own site it is easy to see why mobile is not a primary strategy of mine. I do have a mobile-enabled WordPress extension that allows the phones to see my content properly. But still it makes up a tiny fraction of my traffic.
It has been the year of mobile for the last three years in a row. And many will declare this the "year of mobile" as well. And I believe for the most part mobile connections are for shopping (amazon), gaming, search (google), travel directions (google maps, gps-enhanced apps) and messaging. (Twitter, Facebook etc.) I suspect with the iPad we will see a new surge in mobile browsing and mobile reading. But for longform content, and reading multipage articles the tiny screen is a less than optimal user experience. The busy blog format on Uber.la would drive most people crazy on a phone without the mobile template system I use.
All that said, we don't have much mobile traffic. We don't really have a reason to be pushing our stream on to mobile, but here is how the mobile platform breaks out here on uber.la:
So you have to look at the data and make some actionable decisions and then make changes. For example, I saw that I had a few mobile readers and I installed a mobile-template that auto detects for mobile OS connections and pushes them to a mobile-ready page.
As I said to a friend last week, "The tools are great, but it's the human interpretation of the data that determine success." Data points and visual displays of analytics data are interesting, but we've got to make sure we can make solid decisions based on the data.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/browser-love
ArsTechnica: Google Tries to Speed the Demise of IE6
Another nice ArsTechnical worldwide browser stat: from November 2009
