Wednesday, December 01, 2010 by Robert Leeper
As we work on redesigning the website, we are looking at data that isn't covered in our Community Survey and Prospective Students Survey. One such piece of information is which browsers our visitors are using on the website.
You might be wondering why that matters, so I'll explain. Each browser—Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.—follows its own set of rules. Unfortunately, each browser, and each version of each browser, handles things differently. If we try using a feature on our site that isn't supported by a particular browser, it can make the site look strange or stop working entirely.
Preliminary results*:
- Internet Explorer: 61%
- Safari: 19%
- Firefox: 14%
- Chrome: 5%
- Other: 1%
No surprise that IE is still holding strong at #1, though the margin isn't as great as it once was. If you break the IE results down by each version, it gets more interesting (to web nerds like me).
- IE8: 87.3%
- IE7: 11.3%
- IE6: 1.3%
What does this mean? IE6 has long been a source of frustration in the web community; it doesn't follow web standards (the suggested set of rules) very well at all. The result is that web developers have had to hack their way through sites to get them to look correct in IE6. IE7 and IE8 are incrementally better, and the fact that they have almost completely replaced IE6 means that we can finally consider dropping support for it entirely.
I was a little surprised that Safari has overtaken Firefox for the #2 slot, but since they and Chrome handle standards very well, it's good regardless.
All that to say that it appears we will be able to focus more on a better web experience, and less on fighting browsers to make them behave the way we want them to. It's a win for everyone!
* Browser statistics from Google Analytics, analyzing the traffic to http://www.hsutx.edu/ from Oct. 31, 2010 - Nov. 30, 2010.
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