Which Browsers and Devices Are Used the Most?

It’s an important question for web designers and web design managers. Especially when it come to the more specific question of which version of Internet Explorer (IE) are people using.
Nowadays with the advent of HTML 5 being released into the wild and CSS 3 being released into the wild, both before they are even finished by the way, it’s important to know which features you can use in your web designs because most of these new features don’t work in all browsers.

If you turn to Google for the answer to this question you’ll most likely be pointed to a one of the big tech websites like twocows.com or something and there you’ll see an older or a newer chart that shows how many people visited the web site and what browser they were using.  The problem is that they are a tech web site visited by technical people.  Technical people on tech web sites are far more likely to use web browsers like Firefox and Opera and less likely to use more common browsers like IE and Chrome because of the security and social issues involved.  (IE is part of a scheme to monopolize the world computer and internet technology, while Chrome is too, it’s also actively defrauding  advertisers by making all typed in addresses count as clicked on advertisements when they weren’t.)

So we checked our clients websites. We tried to get a wide sampling of  “typical” web sites that have mostly U.S. based web traffic, we are using fresh (last 30 days), combined data from several web sites and averaged it together and then rounded the results to the nearest whole percentage point:

Here’s what we found (to protect the clients, we are used percentages, not raw numbers):

Browsers:

• IE: 47%
  • The IE browsers by version as a percentage of IE users, not as a percentage of all users:
  • IE 9: 10%
  • IE 8: 65%
  • IE 7: 17%
  • IE 6: 3%
  • IE 5.5: 0%
• Firefox: 17%
• Chrome: 9.5%
• Opera: <1%
• Safari (includes desktop and mobile): 20%
• Android OS (Mobile only): 2%
• Blackberry Devices <1%

Devices:

What type of operating system is a very good indicator of what type of device they are using.  It’s true that you can install Windows on a MAC but not many people do it.

• Windows PC’s and laptops: 75%
• Mac PC’s and Laptops: 14%
• Windows Mobile: 0%
• iPhone: 4%
• iPad: 1.5%
• Android Mobile: 3%
• All Linux: <1%
• Blackberry <1%

What kind of conclusions can we deduce from this data?

Windows and IE:
The overwhelming majority of your users, as always, are on a PC or a laptop.  About half of them are using some version of IE.  Of these IE users, most of them are still using IE 8 (not HTML 5 and CSS 3 compatible).  Twice as many are using IE 7 than IE 9 (the only IE that mostly supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features).

FireFox:
We  didn’t mention it above but Firefox users are split almost in half between  version (3.xxxxxx) and  version (4.0.1).  Firefox users have traditionally kept their browsers more up to date than IE users.  Firefox 3 had some HTML 5 support and Firefox 4 almost totally supports everything in the latest HTML 5 CSS feature set.

Mobile Users:

We  didn’t think it was necessary to include trend directions in our stats above.  You know that more people are viewing websites on mobile devices right?  What you didn’t probably know is that it really isn’t much and probably won’t be for a very long time.  In some instances it makes sense to spend the extra money to make a mobile compatible website   But in most cases it just makes sense  to make a website mainly targeted at PC’s and laptops but still works in a mobile device.

The most surprising trend we didn’t mention:
Android! Those who follow the industry know that the number of android devices outpaced the number of iPads and iPhones combined in the first month after the Android operating system was released.  Those who don’t follow the industry are surprised at this.  The other surprising factor is just how much different the personality of the “i” users are.  Look at how much more they view websites  even though there are less of them for instance.

The biggest surprise, period:
No one uses Windows Mobile anymore?  Really, no one?