Website Browser Statistics and Design Quality

Too many web designers don't make quality websites because their websites only work in Internet Explorer (version 6) and not other browsers like Firefox, Netscape, Opera, and Safari.

Recently, one of my known website design competitors redesigned their website. He should have stuck with his old website. The design was better, the usability was increased, but he failed to make it cross browser compatible. His new website "broke" when viewed in Firefox, Netscape, Safari, and Opera. The only thing it worked in was IE v6. If they aren't willing to put the time into their own page to make sure it works on different browsers, I doubt they will be willing to do it for yours.

Now I can hear many of you out there saying that Internet Explorer has the majority of the market. That as long as they have control, why build for any other browser? Well here are some statistics from three different websites (from three different industries) comparing last year to this year (to date) and percentages of the major browsers.

MSIE	86.2%	93.0%
Firefox	9.9%	2.5%
Netscape	0.6%	2.0%
Safari	3.2%	1.9%
Opera	0.2%	0.7%

Browser	2005	2004
MSIE	89.5%	91.8%
Firefox	6.7%	3.4%
Netscape	1.7%	2.0%
Safari	1.9%	2.7%
Opera	0.2%	0.1%

Browser	2005	2004
MSIE	94.3%	97.5%
Firefox	3.4%	0.5%
Netscape	1.8%	2.1%
Safari	0.5%	0.0%
Opera	0.0%	0.0%

Many of you will notice that Internet Explorer still has a commanding lead in the browser wars. However, Firefox keeps chipping away at IE's lead. My personal feeling is that if Microsoft doesn't do something quickly with their new version that will ship with Microsoft's newest operating system "Vista", the same thing that happened to Netscape and IE will happen to IE and Firefox.

Now if I knew that 14% of my customers were using something other than IE, I would want to make sure that they are still welcomed with a clean, well organized page. It is what a website designer is supposed to do. Lets live up to our expectations!

Now these are just some stats that I've gathered together from websites that I oversee. I can't find any recent browser statistics anywhere else. So if you know of a site that provides free internet browser statistics, please let us know so we can track how Firefox is doing against the behemoth IE.

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Filed Under: Browser Stats, IE, Firefox, Website Design

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