Browser stats - pulling apart the last year's changes

We were just having a look at the statistics from the last year of visits from one of our customers and thought the information was worth sharing, as there are some significant changes afoot.  All of the changes are Dec 2009 and then Dec 2010:

	Dec 2009	Dec 2010
Internet Explorer	61%	51%
Safari	13%	19%
Firefox	20%	19%
Chrome	3.6%	7.7%

 

Internet Explorer version	Dec 2009	Dec 2010
9	NA	1%
8	51%	72%
7	36%	20%
6	13%	7%

In summary, Firefox is holding steady, IE is falling, but the biggest rise in visitors in this time period is in Safari, which is indicative of the rise of the Mac as a consumer product.  Chrome is still only at 7%, which is the same as IE6 - we're finding this is consistent across other domains, too.

Obviously Netguides strive to deliver websites which are as cross-browser compatible as possible.  This means we're still putting in IE6 work-arounds.  How much longer will people keep using this browser?!  There was even a mock funeral for this most stalwart of browser in March of this year, but still people are using it (even if it's under 10% of IE users and now approximately 3% of total users!).

Thankfully we can report that only 1.5% of the last years visits were via dial-up, so worries about image-rich websites not being accessible are of a relatively low-concern.  Likewise the worry about websites simply not fitting on the default 800X600 screen resolution is also now down to 1.3% of visitors.  Even 1024X768 is looking quite mean now, with a larger spread of wide-screen and higher resolution screens pushing it down from 28% to 22% of visitors.

We were rather surprised to only see 2% and 1% figures for iPhone and iPad respectively.  Is it possible that those who've bought these really are just playing games on them?!  Android and Blackberry devices are both delivering only 0.5% of the traffic, but this can be expected to grow significantly in the next year.

Finally, for 2010 the mobile visitors were split with O2 delivering just under a thousand visitors, Vodafone just under 300 visitors and Orange delivering 150.

Food for thought and we are going to see lots more big changes in 2011.

All Netguides customers have a basic statistics package on their hosting, which is often topped up with Google Analytics, to provide enhanced, industry-standard statstics.  Find out about our Google optimisation products here.  We are also now delivering eCommerce conversions from our GemaShop solution, enabling our eCommerce customers to analyse in depth the purchasing habits of their website visitors. 

We are also using Google Merchant services to successfully deliver products into Google's shopping results, taking customers straight from a picture and price to the buying page on their website.