Browsers and 420 Design

By
Angie Herrera

Like most web development studios, one of the things we focus on is cross-browser compatibility for the site we build. That being the case, I thought it'd be interesting to share the browser usage for our visitors. (I'm a bit of a stats junkie so this stuff is fascinating to me.) Click for larger view While it's not quite at half, most of our visitors are using Firefox, with Internet Explorer not horribly behind. Given our audience, which is typically a mix of business owners and web developers, this isn't too surprising. But what versions? ### Firefox breakdown Click for larger view ### Internet Explorer breakdown Click for larger view A large majority of Firefox users are using the latest version, 3.0.3. That's not at all surprising given the fast adoption rate that FF3 had when it came out earlier this year. Their [Download Day](http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/), in which they aimed to set a Guinness World Record certainly helped in that regard. Internet Explorer tends to have a much slower adoption rate on the whole and for a number of reasons. That said, our visitors using IE are primarily using IE7. (And yes, I'm a bit shocked by that one visitor using IE5.5.) To some degree, the fact that IE6 usage for our site is at only about 25% of total IE users isn't terribly surprising. Earlier this year we decided to no longer support IE6 because it's incredibly outdated (it's 7 years old!) and despite its problems, IE7 is better than its predecessor. As such, folks who visit our site using anything earlier than IE7 will see this message across the top of our layout: > It looks like you're using an out of date and possibly insecure browser. Have you considered Safari or Firefox? Here's a peek of that message in action: Click for larger view So all in all, our visitors are up to date with their browsers. This is great for us but it's not always possible for some sites. In the end, it depends on your viewership / readership. Not sure what browsers your visitors are using? It's time to get set up with a solid [site analytics](http://www.google.com/analytics/) package.