The Ups and Downs of Browser Usage
Posted On: 2014-01-13
There was a time when we paid a lot of attention to what browsers people use just to make sure that the sites we built for ourselves ... and for our customers ... were visible to just about everyone who wants to look at them.
However, in the last 12 months or so, we've hardly had time to scratch ourselves so checking on browser usage has been just one of things we've let slide because we're using what are basically web standards in our design. So I was more than a little surprised when a new client came into the office to ask us to rebuild her online shop because people using the latest versions of Internet Explorer couldn't see it.
That certainly aroused my interest and in this client's case it turned out that she was using a custom shopping cart script developed by someone who had tried his hand at his own coding. That had kept him amused for several years but then he had grown tired of it and had stopped updating the script.
Of course things are changing all the time on the Web and making important tools like browsers backward compatible seems to have become a thing of the past. So letting something as important as a shopping cart script just fade away can be a recipe for disaster for anyone who has been given that script to use.
And so it was with this client ... her website just stopped working for many potential customers but, because she hadn't updated her version of IE in quite a while, she didn't know that there was a problem until one regular customer emailed her to complain that she could no longer make purchases from the website.
A second similar instance cropped up in the same week. Steve went out to a client's place to give a client some lessons on using the backend of a WordPress site we had built for her using a fairly high-end theme. Much to Steve's dismay ... right in the middle of showing the client how to add images to a slider that's a very important feature of this site ... he found that the 'Add Image' button just wouldn't appear.
IE had struck again ... only this time an older version of IE wouldn't display the button. Ok ... so Steve tends to think on his feet sometimes ... and that's what he did this time. Once the latest version of Chrome was installed he went straight back to the lesson and got to the point where the 'Add Image' button actually appeared ... and then discovered that he couldn't click on it.
The problem this time we think is caused by the operating system and maybe a lack of system resources. The client is using an early version of XP on a fairly basic machine so our computer tech is going to have a look at it for us.
So what are the people you're trying to sell your product to using to surf the Net. Are they using the absolute latest technology or are they clunking along with old operating systems and quirky web browsers?
The latest available statistics indicate that more and more people are turning away from Internet Explorer and perhaps as few as 23 percent of all web surfers are now using any version of IE.
The number of Firefox users is also decreasing and in the last 12 months the number of people using Firefox has dropped to just 18.94 percent of total users. I can understand that ... while I love Firefox some of their recent updates have made changes to the browser that only it's designer could love.
The browser used by the biggest number of web surfers is Chrome with an estimated 43.99 percent of users accessing the web via Chrome. That's an increase of over 7.5% in just 12 months.
And for all you Apple fanboys out there here's some good news ... the number of people using Safari to surf the web has risen 1.21%. There's now around 9.13 percent of web surfers who use Safari.
There also seem to be some people out there who still use Opera to surf the web too ... and the number is increasing. But if you're an Opera fan don't get too excited because in 2012 1.24 percent of web surfers used Opera and in 2013 that number had risen to 1.28 percent.
I guess that if you like Opera then any increase in usage is good news.
So where does that leave you and your web design and marketing strategies?