Ever since March 1991,when the inventor of the World Wide Web shared his browser application with a group of colleagues, software developers have been trying to make web browsers do just about everything.
One of the regular challenges for Omnitech comes from making sure our code works properly on different browsers, since each browser may interpret code differently. These differences can become critical when we are working with a website or web application which will be used by members of the general public, because we don’t know exactly which browser someone might be using to view the website or web application.
To help us determine where we need to spend some of our development effort, we can get a pretty good idea of what percentage of users are using a given browser. As of the latest numbers from one source that keeps track of this, the top three browsers (all versions) had the following November 2007 market shares:
Internet Explorer 77.35%
Firefox 16.01%
Safari 5.14%
If you add up the percentages, you’ll see that these three browsers account for 98.5% of the browsers in current use. For our purposes, then, other browsers need not factor into our development and testing processes.
However, the percentages we just looked at don’t tell the whole story. Each of the listed browsers has multiple versions, each of which has different characteristics. To put it another way, one version of a browser may display a web page (or menu, image, etc) in a different manner than another version of the same browser.
Going back to our percentages for a moment, you’ll notice that Internet Explorer has roughly three-fourths of the market. Breaking this down by versions, we get the following:
Internet Explorer 4 0.01%
Internet Explorer 5.0 0.14%
Internet Explorer 5.5 0.13%
Internet Explorer 6 40.24%
Internet Explorer 7 36.84%
You’ll notice that the last two versions in the list account for most of the use.
What does this mean for our clients? To put it simply, we keep track of trends such as these and make sure when we are working with clients that we develop the websites and web applications to fit the client’s needs, including knowing and coding for different browsers.