An important factor in the development of web products is understanding of the platforms being utilized to use our products. As the table below demonstrates almost 90% of internet users are using either Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6 or FireFox. I believe it is extremely important that all of our web products, whether it be web applications or web properties, are compatible with these browsers. We've encountered issues with clients using IE6 as well as Firefox and it's important to avoid these issues in the future. Going through some of our sites with FireFox most of our sites have problems ranging from minor to serious. I think it should be a top priority to correct these issues. In the future we should probably setup a computer with the all three browsers so we can test our web products before going live.
Also, an interesting trend to take note of is the apparent migration away from IE towards FireFox. Since March 2005 to March 2008 FireFox has increased it's 'market share' from 18.9% to 37.0% (a 18.1% increase) while IE (all versions) has gone from 72.5% to 53.1 (a 19.4% decrease) during the same period. If the trend continues in 3 years FireFox (55.1%) and IE (33.7%) will have traded places and FireFox will be the most commonly used browser.
| 2008 | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Fx | Moz | S | O |
| March | 21.9% | 30.1% | 1.1% | 37.0% | 1.1% | 2.1% | 1.4% |
| February | 21.5% | 30.7% | 1.3% | 36.5% | 1.2% | 2.0% | 1.4% |
| January | 21.2% | 32.0% | 1.5% | 36.4% | 1.3% | 1.9% | 1.4% |
| 2007 | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Fx | Moz | S | O |
| December | 21.0% | 33.2% | 1.7% | 36.3% | 1.4% | 1.7% | 1.4% |
| November | 20.8% | 33.6% | 1.6% | 36.3% | 1.2% | 1.8% | 1.6% |
| October | 20.7% | 34.5% | 1.5% | 36.0% | 1.3% | 1.7% | 1.6% |
| September | 20.8% | 34.9% | 1.5% | 35.4% | 1.2% | 1.6% | 1.5% |
| August | 20.5% | 35.7% | 1.5% | 34.9% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.7% |
| July | 20.1% | 36.9% | 1.5% | 34.5% | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.9% |
| June | 19.7% | 37.3% | 1.5% | 34.0% | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.8% |
| May | 19.2% | 38.1% | 1.6% | 33.7% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.7% |
| April | 19.1% | 38.4% | 1.7% | 32.9% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.6% |
| March | 18.0% | 38.7% | 2.0% | 31.8% | 1.3% | 1.6% | 1.6% |
| February | 16.4% | 39.8% | 2.5% | 31.2% | 1.4% | 1.7% | 1.5% |
| January | 13.3% | 42.3% | 3.0% | 31.0% | 1.5% | 1.7% | 1.5% |
Table from W3Schools.
Thanks.
1 comment:
Jeff,
This is a very good post and I think it is something we need to pay more attention to then we have been. I have read different articles on this very same topic. As a programmer running in a PC environment backboned by vista, The main browser I view the sites I program of course would be IE7. With all the updates Microsoft has completed from going IE 6 -> 7 we have run into different problems with how they format different styles with ‘DIVS’ witch in the end display something totally different from one browser to the other; Also each browser will process JavaScript different and some code may work on one but not the other. This can be an extremely frustration time for a web developer.
I have read that some web development firms have created a “development machine” that has multiple browser platforms installed on it. They even found a work around in having IE 6 and IE 7 installed on the same machine. If I can remember correctly, the OS has to be XP in order for this to work. I think it would be a great idea for us to start to move more towards multi-platform development.
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