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December 09, 2004
Time For a New Browser Survey
With the release of Mike Chambers' Macromedia News Firefox Extension, I figured it was about time for another browser poll. A year ago, I created a browser poll and found that IE was in the lead (among people who read my weblog, at least) with 49.55%. Firebird was in second place with 17.68%, Safari in third with 15.73%, and Mozilla was in forth place with 10.14%. The total number of responses were 1,233. If you have a second, take the new poll to the right and let's see where we are a year later.
Why is this information important? If you're a web developer, which I'm guessing you are if you're reading this, you already know the answer. Although we all try to make our work accessible to as many people as possible (which often means on as many different browsers and platforms as possible), it's almost always necessary to draw a line somewhere, especially now that many of us have made the transition from tables and fonts to CSS and styles, or even Flash or DHTML. Which browsers do you spend time testing on? Which browsers get highest priority? Is it ok if your app is broken or maimed in certain browsers? In order to answer any of these questions, you have to know the numbers.
I know that this poll is not necessarily representative of the demographic who uses our applications, but it's been my experience that the trends we see with technologists are often the trends which eventually make it into the mainstream.
Posted by cantrell at December 9, 2004 12:03 PM | References
Comments
Holy Cow! It's 15 Firefox to 1 IE to 1 Safari so far. Go Fox!
Posted by: Joe Rinehart at December 9, 2004 12:20 PM
...and do you know why it is so lopsided?
my guess is that it is because if you refressh the page it will let you vote again and again
Posted by: Daniel Roberts at December 9, 2004 12:25 PM
Initially, I was allowing multiple responses since many of us use multiple browsers, but I've changed it so now you can only vote once.
Posted by: Christian Cantrell at December 9, 2004 12:32 PM
My guess is that it will remain lopsided in Firefox's favor, due to the fact that the majority of this site's visitors are people interested and knowledgeable in web technologies and browsers, etc. It always makes me happy to see Firefox w/ a large chunk of the pie. However, whenever I look at the web stats of non tech related websites, IE still dominates by a huge margin. Hopefully someday more people will realize what is good for them. ^_^
Posted by: Jaelle Scheuerman at December 9, 2004 12:58 PM
DER SPIEGEL, German political newsmagazine similar to the Atlantic Monthly, reported that 20% of its online users use Firefox.
I'd think that there is bit of latency between the tech crowd (i.e. early adaptors) and the general public, but the trend is clear.
Posted by: Juraj Betak at December 9, 2004 04:26 PM
of course the tech crowd is more likely to use FireFox, but i believe its share in this particular poll is exceptionally high because of said browser extension by Mike Chambers.
i use it (and i like it), so i knew of this poll right away, otherwise i might have missed it.
Posted by: mark winterhalder at December 9, 2004 05:01 PM
That's an interesting observation Mark. I came through the Firefox extension too. Of course I would have gotten here at some point not long after anyhow since I do monitor this RSS feed, but it is a good point.
Posted by: Aaron Leavitt at December 10, 2004 02:50 PM
It would be interesting to hear how people found the poll last year. I would suspect some RSS aggregators.
Mesh's extension probably doesn't have the penetration yet to skew the poll numbers - especially when a larger number of votes is cast.
AFAIK Mozilla had about 40% market share among techies in a Dutch poll a while back. This means that 70-80% shouldn't be surprising after an extremely popular Firefox 1.0 release. Virtually everyone I know is using it.
Posted by: Juraj Betak at December 11, 2004 05:08 AM