A glimpse of where IE 9 is going

[MikeGale]

Here's a peep at what might be coming with IE9.

http://j.mp/16EYG8

[Albert Wiersch]

IE9 with better standards support (HTML5 and CSS3) and increased performance with hardware assisted graphics sounds really good to me... but it still needs an Adblock Plus extension. Maybe there is one someone, but I've stuck with Firefox and will likely be sticking with it due to the Adblock Plus extension... and security was another concern.

But I'm sure most people will use IE9 like they use IE today.

[Albert Wiersch]

Here's some more interesting info on IE 9.

First Preview: Internet Explorer 9 : Better, Faster, Stronger?

[pfisterfarm]

It's interesting to see how far browsers have come over the years. I've been online since about 1994, and I love to see the new features. I was going to try out IE9, but unfortunately for the moment I'm still stuck on Windows XP. Someday soon though...

[iouri]

IE9 with better standards support (HTML5 and CSS3) and increased performance with hardware assisted graphics sounds really good to me... but it still needs an Adblock Plus extension. Maybe there is one someone, but I've stuck with Firefox and will likely be sticking with it due to the Adblock Plus extension... and security was another concern.

But I'm sure most people will use IE9 like they use IE today.

Do you think that that is still true however? With the exploded popularity of Macs and Chrome will IE be able to still pledge to be the MOST used browser?

[Lou]

Do you think that that is still true however? With the exploded popularity of Macs and Chrome will IE be able to still pledge to be the MOST used browser?

I'm guessing that it depends on who's numbers you look at, keeping in mind that Apple and Google have good advertisement machines.

Taking a quick look at the information from three of my websites for the last 6 months (excluding my IP) it seems to me that IE still has a good showing;

Domain #1 ~95.5K hits

• 32.2% IE/6
• 14.2% Unk Mozilla/5
• 5.2% IE/5
• 4.7% Opera/9
• 4.1% Opera/7
• 3.1% Unknown
• 3.1% IE/7

#17 on the list is Chrome/3 at 1.1%

Domain #2 ~2.1K hits

• 37.7% Unk Mozilla/5
• 6.0% IE/5
• 6.0% unknown
• 3.9% Firefox/1
• 3.6% chrome/21

#8 on this list is Safari/533 at 2.9%

Domain #3 ~3.8K hits

• 30.8% Opera/9
• 11.1% Chrome/19
• 8.3% chrome/20
• 6.7% Firefox/13
• 5.8% chrome/16
• 5.2% Firefox/14
• 4.6% Firefox/9
• 4.4% chrome/18
• 4.4% Firefox/10
• 3.7% IE/8

Safari show up #15 on the list with 0.9%

I don't see Chrome or Safari taking over the browser market. Still I check changed pages with current IE, FF, Opera, Chrome and Safari. I build using FF and then use additional CSS files to get the other 4 to look close.

[MikeGale]

Useful information, thanks Lou.

I was surprised to see a site with Opera in the majority. I test with Opera but thought that 5% would be high. Useful to know.

The browser spectrum varies in all sorts of ways. By country, by web site...

It pays to know what your own traffic is doing. With different advertising or linking that could change though...

[Albert Wiersch]

Yes, Opera at 30.8% seems high to me, but again, I know it depends a lot on the site's audience.

With Windows 8 coming out, I suspect it will strengthen IE's showing, but it remains to be seen how popular Windows 8 tablets will be.

I'm now using Windows 8 on my desktop and I like it. It's working well. There are some things that I wish I could configure regarding the Windows RT UI/Metro GUI. Maybe I can but have not looked into it yet.

[Lou]

I though it odd too. Starting a cross country drive today so nothing in depth but the numbers change a lot if I exclude the phpBB from the count.

More thoughts next week.

[iouri]

Interesting statistics. But here is a relevant article from tomshardware that speaks otherwise...

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/browse ... 15655.html

The article is based on the stats as provided until May 2012:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-d ... 1-20120514

The current situation:
http://gs.statcounter.com


It looks like IE took quite a hit in last quarter of 2011 and first of 2012... according to statcounter, but upon further search I found this article:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/ ... r-than-ie/

which does some analysis and states that for the same period the NetMarketShare recorded presense of IE at 54%; Safari 20% and Chrome 18%...

So go figure.

[MikeGale]

Important issues here might be:

• What share of browsers does my site get?
• What is the browser spectrum of those who matter most on my site? For example if your site sells something, what is the browser spectrum of those who actually buy something.
• If I changed my advertising, the design of my site... how might that change the browser spectrum?
• I'm not interested in browser spectrum at all. I'm interested in contacting and benefiting my target audience. How do I contact them irrespective of the browser they happen to be using on this visit?

With a unique perspective each web site should be different. (Maybe even down to the page level!)

So indication is given by more detailed analysis like this http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120501-20120514-map (from one of the StatCounter pages above). It's a country by country breakdown. (Not very detailed unfortunately, just top browser.)

It suggests a couple of interesting things. For example in the version I just saw:

• There might be an "Anglo-Nordic-African-HighAndes-ChKoJp..." block of IE first. So if you're into some part of that world you cater for IE. I've seen people who are in that group clearly developing on Firefox and not catering for IE. They lose customers because of that. I put it down to lazy development habits. If the MD knew what his web developers might be doing to the audience, I think things would change.
• I see a fascinating block (again at the time of this post 2012-09-28 AET) of Belarus and Ukraine. They are Opera first. If Lou's Opera first site is there it would make a lot of sense.

In my view browser statistics are an important and interesting area but not the real issue. The real issue is my target audience. (Some audiences use different browsers as a matter of routine, most stats. will miss that entirely!)

[Lou]

As is often the case Mike is right on target. If we are going to chew on these numbers, for the record I use the current Sawmill software to look at my Apache access logs.

As Mike suggested when looking at the visitor countries I get:

• Ukraine 25%
• United States 21%
• Russian Fed 17%
• China 10%
• Sweden 6%
• Netherlands 5%
• Poland 4%
• Germany 3%

When I filter the data to look at only U.S. page hits, the browser are:

• 34.6% IE/6
• 8.6% Unk Mozilla/5
• 7.6% Opera/9
• 6.5% IE/5
• 4.8% (Spider)
• 4.7% IE/7
• 2.4% America Online/6
• 2.4% Chrome/19
• 2.0% Opera/7

Now if I also eliminate the phpBB hits which is part of this domain and all spider hits from all indications. It becomes obvious that the main page hits are also mostly spiders.

• Unk Mozilla/5 56.1%
• (spider) 8.4%
• FF/3 8.0%
• IE/7 5.0%
• (spider) 3.0%
• TurnitinBot/2 3.0%
• Aboundex/0 2.2%

Looking at a more active website for the last 6 months, again as Mike suggest filtering to look only at visitors I'm really interested in. (No one from Ukraine coming to see theater in Colorado, I'm not building the bulletin board)

• 17.4% IE/9/8/7 - IE/6 is 11th on the list at 1.8% and IE/5 is 24th on the list at 0.5%
• 6.2% Foxfire/3/12/14/13
• 3.9% Safari
• 6.1% Chrome/19/18/20/21
• 0.4% Opera/9

These are of course the stats I'm interested in because this is the site I maintain.

Looking at the StatCounter stats for the United States vs Global the browser order is similar.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-d ... 1-20120514

IE (~40%), Chrome, FF (both ~20%), Safari (~15%), Opera (~1% with all others)

[Teenzraul]

It’s quite interesting to see how long the browsers came over. Still when we hear the term browser, the first word that comes to our mind is Internet Explorer. For a common man a browser means IE, nothing else. I am sure IE is going to take its place back soon.

[cstanley]

That is silly. IE hasn't equaled browser in the minds of people since Yahoo or AOL has equaled search engine. Going forward, people will be using browsers increasingly on mobile devices. Any browser that doesn't make that realm a priority will be making a mistake.

[MikeGale]

When I listen to commentary about the web I often find myself more confused after than before. Statements like

It’s quite interesting to see how long the browsers came over. Still when we hear the term browser, the first word that comes to our mind is Internet Explorer. For a common man a browser means IE, nothing else. I am sure IE is going to take its place back soon.

From Teenzraul and

...IE hasn't equaled browser in the minds of people since Yahoo or AOL has equaled search engine. Going forward, people will be using browsers increasingly on mobile devices. Any browser that doesn't make that realm a priority will be making a mistake.

from cstanley, both make sense for parts of the audience. In wrestling with those audiences I find it useful to get some perspective comparing Desktop and Mobile usage. I like to look at stats. (I think of the guideline Your model of reality should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.)

This page http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-201111-201211 is useful. Shows current (November 2012) share as 13% mobile and 87% desktop, worldwide. Looking at the rate of change, assuming it remains similar, that's years before mobile comes to rival desktop.

There's really interesting information if you look by country. For example Kenya has a lot of mobile (landlines don't work so well I believe) while the US is below the worldwide aggregate and Russia is a lot below the aggregate for mobile usage.

The real shocker is that some countries have a mobile majority. India, Turkmenistan, Chad, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone that I could see. Presumably countries where landlines are not very good and the mobile network is more available! Should they get a good fibre network I'd expect to see a turnaround!

An interesting picture.