Looking through our statistics for the first six months of 2008, the major browsers used to while visiting our site were:
- IE 6.0, used by 32.6% of visitors
- IE 7.0, used by 49.1% of visitors
- Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, used by 11% of visitors
Other browsers did not show up much:
- IE 5.5 and earlier was used by 0.5% of visitors
- Firefox 1.x was used by around 2% of visitors
- Netscape was used by 0.1% of visitors (including one visit from Netscape 0.6!?)
- Safari was used by 1.8% of visitors
- Mozilla was used by 1% of visitors
- Opera was used by less than 0.1% of visitors
Some interesting user agents that showed up now and then include: Galeon (GNOME web browser)
- Firebird (old Firefox)
- WebTV Browser (63 hits!)
- Konqueror
- Camino (a Mac OS X-native browser)
- Lynx
- MS Pocket IE
- Nokia PDA Browser
- BlackBerry
- WGet
- cURL
- Python and Java libraries
Some thoughts based on these stats:
- I'm surprised how quickly IE 7.0 has made it out there to almost 50% of our visitors.
- IE 6.0 is still around and we have account for that in our development.
- IE 5.5 is not around much any more, making it one less major browser to worry about.
- Opera is barely used by our visitors, something that does not surprise me in the end.
- Firefox is not used as much as I would have thought, but it's still our number 2 browser.
- Lots of unusual browsers access the site, but not very often.
From this it looks like we need to focus our design efforts on IE 6.0+ and Firefox 2.0+. If we can create an accessible site that looks good in both, we're probably covered for the other browsers.
