I’ve made a few improvements to the main website, in my ongoing fight to make it look good in IE, Firefox and all other decent browsers.
While doing this, I’ve used my Google Analytics reports to have a quick look at the visitor breakdown, in terms of which browser they are using.
| Browser | Visits (%) |
| Firefox | 35.6 |
| Internet Explorer 8 | 29.9 |
| Internet Explorer 7 | 12.5 |
| Internet Explorer 6 | 8 |
| Chrome | 6.4 |
| Mozilla | 3.2 |
| Safari | 3.2 |
| Opera | 0.8 |
| Playstation 3 | 0.4 |
Firefox and IE8 are the major browsers, getting almost two thirds of the total visits between them, it’s clear that these modern browsers are where most of the attention should be focussed on keeping the site looking good.
Chrome, Safari and Opera are all much less used, but with good support for standards the site should look good if it works in Firefox.
The use of older IE versions is more troubling. IE7 is not great, but has enough of a visitor presence to be worth devoting some time to. IE6 makes it hard to create nice looking sites, with only 8% of visits from this source I can afford to not spend the disproportionate amount of time I’d need to on this legacy browser.
For quick testing of sites I use IETester, allowing side-by-side comparison of all major IE versions, it’s very useful. Firebug is key to making quick improvements in Firefox, and you should use it if you do any web development.
I hope this numbers and the linked resources are of use to someone, it’s worth spending the time to make your website look good in the major browsers, it’ll be rewarded in more visits and your visitors staying for longer once they find the site.
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