A website owner wants their site to be viewed by other people. We call this 'generating traffic'. Typically, the more traffic our website generates, the better we like it. So we want to make out website as attractive to our target audience as possible. There are many different variables that we might focus on: color scheme, fonts, font size, pictures, etc. in an effort to make it look good on our computer.  But a primary consideration that many of us overlook is this: How will my website look on my client's computer? 

   Even for this one question there are many variables to consider: browser, browser version, screen resolution, color quality. type of monitor, etc. While we may know what web browser we use (usually it's the one that came with our computer) not all of us are aware that we can choose a different browser if we want to.  Most browsers are available for free and many of them have unique features which we might like better than those of our current browser - but that's another blog entry. Suffice it to say that not everybody uses the brower(s) we use.

So, how do we find out what people are using?   The simplest way is to do a web search. Go to your favorite search engine and do a search on 'browser statistics'.  I did a Google search for 'browser statistics' and Google found over 35 million relevant websites. Well, 35 million might take too long to cover in one blog entry, so let's look at the first few results:


                                                                w3schools.com

    The top 2 entries in my search results was for a website named w3schools.com, which is a handy site for web developers with many resources. I use w3schools a lot in my quest for programming excellence.  So the first entry of theirs is entitled "Browser Statistics" and the second entry is "Browser Display Statistics".  You're welcome to visit their site for yourself, but I'll summarize  briefly what they say about who is using what browser.

According to w3schools.com, as of May 2009 the percentage of people using different browsers looks like this:
    Internet Explorer (version 6)        14.5%
    Internet Explorer (version 7)        21.3%
    Internet Explorer (version 8)          5.2%
    Firefox                                               47.7%
    Google Chrome                                5.5%
    Safari                                                  3.0%
    Opera                                                  2.2%
...which leaves                                       0.6%  unknown

    So according to them, nearly half the users  (47.7%) are using Firefox (they don't break it down into versions)
And about 41% are using some version of Internet Explorer
If you look at their statistics for the past couple of years, you will notice that Internet Explorer is slowly declining in popularity and Firefox is slowly growing.  You might also take note that, while Google Chrome has a small percentage right now, it is also growing (and, in fact has only been available for about a year) so it may bear watching in the near future.

    If we go back to our search and follow the second entry (w3schools page entitled "Browser Display Statistics") we'll find that they provide statistics about what screen resolution most people are using and what color depth. Again, feel free to check it out, but the short answer is that 93% of people are now using a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or higher.  They further tell us that 93% of people are using a color depth of 65 thousand colors or higher, which means that the days of sticking to 'web safe' colors has passed us by.

    BUT... How accurate is this information? Does w3schools really have an accurate picture?  I believe so, but let's not put all our eggs in one basket, shall we?  Let's go back to our search  and check out the 3rd result, which, in my case was a Wikipedia page entitled "Usage share of web browsers".

                                                               Wikipedia.com

    So Wikipedia tells us that, as of May 2009, the statistic look like this:

Source: Net Applications^[1]

     Internet Explorer (65.50%;

     Mozilla Firefox (22.51%)

     Safari (8.43%)

     Google Chrome (1.80%)

     Opera (0.72%)

     Other (1.04%)