W3schools.com recently released a fun visualization, showing what browser software people are using – including historical web browser usage over time. It’s a fascinating one page snapshot and you can find it here:
http://www.axiis.org/examples/BrowserMarketShare.html
Top 5 Browsers by Market Share:
1. Firefox (47.40%)
2. Internet Explorer 7.0 (15.10%)
3. Internet Explorer 6.0 (13.60%)
4. Internet Explorer 8.0 (10.60%)
5. Google Chrome (7.0%)
Combined, Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 account for 39.3% of market share.
(Source: W3schools.com’s Historical Browser Statistics, August 2009)
Web designers will rejoice at the shrinking size of Internet Explorer users – with Internet Explorer 6.0 in particular steadily shrinking from 24.0% to 13.6% between August 2008 and 2009.
The reason this is significant is because Internet Explorer 6.0 creates some tricky technical problems for web designers. This is due to the fact that Internet Explorer 6.0 does not display certain types of formatting (CSS) in a way that is consistent with other browsers – so designers need to dig into their bag of programming tricks to make sure websites look, and work, the same in Internet Explorer 6.0 as they do for other browsers.
Big movers-and-shakers of recent months have included Internet Explorer 8.0 – growing from launch to 10.8% market share within 8 months; and Google’s “Chrome” browser – which now accounts for 7% of the browser software market.
Does your web developer understand the differences between the way sites are displayed in some types of browsers? Alliance Software’s web developers do. Click here to talk to us about your web-site.