Hi,

I just re-design my whole website. I would like to test on some most popular browsers.

What are the most popular browser and their market penetration?

P.S. I only know that IE should be the most popular with about 75% market share (correct me if I am wrong).

Best regards

I test the following:
IE6, IE5.5/IE5 (when available)
Opera
Mozilla
Netscape 6 (7 is covered my Moz.)
FireFox
Firebird
K-Meleon
Safari/Konqueror
IE Mac (when available)
Lynx
PDA (Opera small-screen mode)
On my cell phone
Style sheets disabled
Various high-contrast, user-defined CSS settings

I haven't figured out how to test those LCD screens they put in refrigerators, but I figure I can let those slide for the time being :)

the_pm

That's a serious approach! I wish I wasn't as lazy as I am, since I only do IE/Netscape/Opera - covers more then 90% of all users...

Originally posted by Catbegemot
the_pm

That's a serious approach! I wish I wasn't as lazy as I am, since I only do IE/Netscape/Opera - covers more then 90% of all users...
I think about it this way. If you only ensure 90% of your visitors can access your site, you run the risk of turning away 1 out of every 10. Imagine if you owned a store and you had a policy that every 10th person was to be banned from entering your store. In addition to that, imagine your policy applied specifically to people with certain impairments and disabilities. Sounds like a bad idea, eh? ;)

I force myself to test, even though I'm reasonably sure everything will work. I don't want to have to explain to a client later on why someone couldn't use a site I made, when all I had to do was test and revise my methods accordingly. I've always accepted 99% as a reasonable minimum to launch a site (a subjective mark though). If I can show a better accessibility mark (99.5-99.9%), then I'm feeling pretty good about the post development report I'm going to deliver to my client :)

the_pm

You totally right, hands down. But since I personally don't do design, but only manage the work, I rely on developers/designers to do that. After all, if I wouldn't trust them with testing - I probably shouldn't trust them with job either :)

Originally posted by Catbegemot
the_pm

You totally right, hands down. But since I personally don't do design, but only manage the work, I rely on developers/designers to do that. After all, if I wouldn't trust them with testing - I probably shouldn't trust them with job either :)
Amen! That last part speaks volumes - couldn't have said it better myself!

I always tell clients who are looking for substantial work that they need to have a technology advocate on their side, making sure all of the needs they could never anticipate themselves are met by the people who will eventually do the work. I've done advocacy work for a corporation on a contractual basis when they were interested in hiring firms for enterprise-wide projects and I could never have competed for the contract.

Hi all,

Thanks for your valued information.

I have a lot of jobs to do now! I have one more question:

Are all the browsers freeware?

Thanks~~

All the ones I listed are. Opera has a paid version, but it's not necessary to purchase it. You'll get reasonably unobtrusive ads otherwise. I purchased Opera right away. It's too good of a tool to not support in this way. Worth every penny to me ($40), but not necessary for others :)

well.. in this market... creating a site compatible for every browser.. your site would look like google... i test for the 4 top browsers.. IE, nutscrape, mozilla, opera.. one thing i would like to do more is testing it on a mac.. but i have yet to buy one.

my 2Cents

Well at the site I run, 95,5 % of the visitors use Internet Explorer (about 75% use IE and ca. 23% IE5), and then a total of 4,5% use Mozilla/Netscape 7.

So naturally, when I design I usually design with those two browsers in mind, but I also test out the site in Opera. It's good enough for me, since only a total of 0,30% use anything else.

These are according to stats collected by a total of about 5 million visitors over the past six months, so they would be pretty accurate too.

Of course, if I were to do some actual design jobs, I would stretch myself at least to test in Mac browsers as well.

Keep in mind, Lars, that it is not at all unheard of to spoof IE UA Strings in order to bypass browser-sniffing mechanisms. This is accomplished frequently by proxies, both localhost and remote. Check your stats in a little while - perhaps you'll see a hit from a browser claiming both to be IE and with a nasty little message for you concerning Microsoft >:-D

It is extraodinarily rare that IE users spoof non-IE browsers, and you'd be surprised how man proxy services do this automatically. I think AOL might even do this for users who are getting sniffed, though I have no confirmation of this.

So your stats might be giving a very accurate portrayal of a lot of people pretending to use IE. The actual number could be 95%, or it could be much less (75-80% perhaps?). Who know? ;)

i have my developers write XHTML 1.1 compliant code using CSS for layout. We also test the site in almost all browsers and operating systems using www.browsercam.com . while you don't get to test the full functionality of the site in every browser, you do get to see if something isnt working. We also have a really old pc and mac that are used for testing the functionality of the site on older versions of browsers.

what's the point of having a site that looks great in only one browser, alienating all the others?