You’re a web developer. What web browsers should you support when you consider your website visitors?
Or…
You’re a casual web surfer. Which browser should you stop using in order to guarantee that you’ll still be able to visit your favorite website?
Don’t laugh – Internet Explorer, that venerable browser from Microsoft that everyone loves to hate, STILL HAS ALMOST 50% OF THE OVERALL BROWSER MARKET as of this writing.
- IE – 47%
- Firefox – 12%
- Chrome – 16%
- Safari – 12%
And IE has maintained a fairly steady presence over the past 12 months. Internet Explorer is NOT going away anytime soon. Chrome is on the rise up, most likely at the expense of Firefox, which has dropped in usage a bit.
So you’re stuck having to code for IE for your website. Which version?
- You can totally avoid IE6 – nobody should be using that browser anyway.
- IE7 was fairly decent, but anyone who was anyone upgraded from IE7 to IE8 at a pretty reasonable clip. You should be able to avoid any IE7 specific standards you had in play.
- IE8 – that’s still carrying about 20% of the IE browser market.
- IE9 has a smidge under 10%.
- IE10 and IE11 – together have about 20%, with the growing bulk of that being IE11.
We should see a significant change on browser positions/ranks in the next month or so as high school and college kids ramp up their new computers and upgrade those – along with whatever Apple announces in their annual showcase.