Which browsers to support?

It’s a question that I often find people asking and unfortunately there is no right or wrong answer as it can vary from site to site depending on the market and the types of users it attracts, however there are usually similarities that are consistent amongst users of the web.

I’ll be discussing this topic by using the statistics captured from this site as a discussion point but please keep in mind that this site will mainly attract people interested in the latest technology and will more than likely keep their browser up to date.

The table that follows shows the total usage of browsers for this website:

Looking at these stats more closely, Camino, Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Safari all seem to use the latest versions of the browser. In Opera’s case 22% of users were even using Opera 9.5 which is only in Alpha stage of testing. Firefox is slightly different in that some people are still using version 1 or 1.5 but the very latest version of Firefox 2.0.0.6 accounts for 91% of my users so it’s fair to say that most Firefox users also keep up to date.

So that just leaves Internet Explorer. There’s a lot of talk in the industry, about dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 completely and ignore testing on this outdated, troublesome browser but I disagree and here’s why.

The table below shows the split of Internet Explorer users on this site:

Out of all Internet Explorer users on this site the divide between IE7 and IE6 is almost equal. That means that there’s more than 10% of users still using Internet Explorer 6!!

As I mentioned earlier, this site probably receives visits from people who are quite up to date with technology yet there’s still a significant amount of users on IE6 so I’d expect this figure to be much higher for less technical websites.

So which browsers should I test on?

Whilst the stats on this side maybe skewed slightly, they do demonstrate pretty clearly which browsers need to be supported.

• Firefox – Whilst it’s leading the way on this site, it’s still someway behind Internet Explorer in the browser market but definitely needs supporting.
• Internet Explorer 6 and 7 – Is still the leader in the market and unfortunately IE6 i likely to be around for sometime yet especially as IE7 is unavailable for any operating system older than XP.
• Safari – The leading browser on the Mac.
• Opera – Whilst it’s not up there with Firefox in terms of usage, it does have a user base large enough that needs supporting. It’s one of the leading browsers using the latest web standards so there isn’t really any reason not to support it.
• Konqueror – Arguably leading the way with web standards and was the first browser to implement all the CSS3 selectors.

There are other browsers as mentioned before including Camino, Mozilla, Netscape but these all use the same rendering engine as one of the above so probably aren’t worth testing on there own.

What about older versions of Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 5.0 and Internet Explorer 5.5 still have users despite the stats from this site showing that it doesn’t receive a single visit from them. However, in my experience, there are very few people that do use either of these browsers and therefor it’s debatable as to whether it’s worth checking for errors in them especially as they can cause havoc with the broken box model due to rendering in quirks mode.

However, my advice would be to ensure that any site developed does render and work correctly for these two browsers. Whilst it may be difficult to aim for pixel perfection, it’s not hard to at least make sure the site works correctly and doesn’t do too bad a job of rendering.

Any other considerations

It’s also worth testing in a text only browser like Lynx, not only for people who may be using a text only browser but it can also help raise accessibility problems with the site.

Mobile devices may also be worth considering especially as more users begin to use these types of devices for browsing the web.

Summary

It may sound a little daunting having read this post and realising that you should be supporting IE6 and 7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, Text-Browsers and Mobile devices but as long as you stick to using web standards whilst writing Valid HTML and CSS then, Internet Explorer 6 problems aside (which are well documented and fixable) you shouldn’t find too many problems creating a cross browser experience that is consistent for all users.