Max d'AyalaWeb DesignWeb BrowsersThe Main Web BrowsersThese are links to the home pages of some of the main web browsers. They are all free to obtain and use. You can either download them, or get them from the discs given away with computer magazines.
With the standard versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer it is very difficult, if not impossible, to have two different versions working on the same computer. This makes testing difficult for web designers. However, some clever people have now put together reduced versions of Explorer 3, 4, 5 and 5.5 that can all be installed on a single computer. Stand-alone versions by Ryman Parman can be found by following the link from this web site: New and Old Browser VersionsBrowsers tend to be split into several categories. Recently released browser versions are all designed to follow the W3C web standards. In general they all work well. Very old browser versions are next to useless for browsing the latest web sites because they can't handle the style sheets used to format the page layout, font types, colours and borders. Old browser versions, such as Microsoft Explorer 4 and Netscape 4.x, are in some ways worse because they only half know how to display a page correctly. The bits they get wrong often make a page look a complete mess. These archaic browser versions are just about extinct, so in terms of web design they are not worth worrying about. Internet Explorer 6, despite being rather long in the tooth, is the main Microsoft browser in use. Given Microsoft's leading share of the market it is essential that web pages work correctly in this version. Although lacking some features, it does follow the W3C standards much better than its version 5 predecessors. Web site designers spend a considerable amount of time adjusting their pages to get them to display correctly in these pre-standard versions. Firefox 1.5 is the newest browser and is a replacement for the Mozilla series of browsers. The current Netscape 8.1 browser is a hybrid that attempts to offer the best of both worlds by incorporating both Firefox and Internet Explorer compatibility. Microsoft has been working on version 7 of Internet Explorer, but when (if) it will actually be released is anyone's guess. Browser StatisticsThe following statistics for page requests are taken from the home page of a site during April and September 2004, March 2005, and March 2006. It is possible for users to change the browser identification string to mimic that of another browser, however most users do not do this. All known robots and spiders have been removed from the data, but some may remain in the category "Netscape (compatible)". Firefox continues to make inroads and is clearly the second most popular browser. The Safari browser for the Mac has probably benefited from Microsft no longer maintaining its Mac version of Internet Explorer. Of the other minor browsers Opera seems to have rallied slightly. I would expect the Mozilla browser to fade away with most users switching to Firefox rather than the independent Seamonkey browser that hopes to carry on the old Mozilla line of development. The new Netscape 8.1 browser is not proving very popular. Microsoft Internet Explorer still dominates but has dipped below 90% of the page requests for the first time. It is interesting how over two years the percentage of version 5 browsers has dropped from nearly 20% to just over 1%. Nearly 99% of users with a Microsoft browser are using version 6. Given these figures it won't be long before web designers are justified in withdrawing special support for these users. Tweaking page layouts to get them to look roughly the same in both version 6 and 5 browsers is a time consuming process, and particularly for a small web site on a tight budget it might not be worth doing at all. This ties in with the OS data where Windows 95 and NT have just about faded away, and a similar fall-off can be expected for Windows 98, Me, and 2000 leaving just Windows XP. With most of the browsers users seem to be upgrading to newer version more regularly. My guess is that factors such as increased security warnings in the press, and added features such as pop-up blocking have given even home users the incentive to upgrade. Also, home computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, meaning that home users can just buy a new one off the supermarket shelf when their old one is getting a bit slow. The percentage of requests that arrive directly at the home page via a Google search has remained remarkable steady again at 28%.
The home page requests were logged server side and processed using Analog log file analyser software. All known robots have been excluded. Web site capture/archive programs have been left in. ConclusionsI'm glad that I looked at the statistics again this year. Last year I took the decision to stop supporting "Version 4" browsers, which means I don't even bother spending any time to see how badly they render a page. Soon I will be able to forget about the "Version 5" browsers as well. Simple things like trying to centre a layout in the browser window will not need to have compensation code added to force the older browsers to behave. What a good day this is for Style Sheet based design. Despite the relatively small sample size these results are very similar to other data published on the web. For more information about this topic, type 'browser statistics' into a search engine such as Google. Page created: 6 May 2004 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||