Tom McGee's Blog

As of 1Q 2008, IE still dom­i­nates the browser mar­ket with some­thing like 79% of the mar­ket. But as they say, your mileage may vary. Here’s a small sam­plling of how it varies by con­tent type.

Work­ing off of stats from a few sites I man­age or have access to reports for, I found that as of the last month cor­po­rate sites exceed that mark, but all other kinds of sites come in well below. This blog shows the low­est pen­e­tra­tion, a lit­tle over 50%. Part of that is reflec­tive of me, since I’m in it on a reg­u­lar basis tin­ker­ing with things and I use Fire­fox or Safari.

A cou­ple of gen­eral con­sumer shop­ping sites range in the 71–77% range. And the cul­tural and social sites come in with 55–66% on IE.

{spread­sheet id=2 display=table}

Cor­po­rate sites have a more B-to-B audi­ence and busi­nesses, both from what I’ve per­son­ally observed as well as what the stats tell us, are more likely to go with the browser that comes bun­dled with the com­put­ers they put on everyone’s desk. They don’t want addi­tional browsers because then they’d have to pro­vide tech­ni­cal sup­port, and their ser­vice con­tracts and update poli­cies are all going to be con­trolled centrally.

And the iner­tia of all those desk­tops to sup­port means they’re also very slow to move. Over 60% of the IE users on the cor­po­rate sites are still on ver­sion 6. On the con­sumer sites it’s more like 40%. W3C puts IE6 glob­ally at 37.5%. They’re also slower in migrat­ing from XP to Vista. On this point, everyone’s slow and not that there’s any­thing wrong with that because of Vista’s problems.

But at least we devel­op­ers can be con­fi­dent that IE5 and 5.5, with all their quirks, are dead and buried. And we’re near­ing the close of the age when you needed to accom­mo­date 800×600 browser win­dows, I think. Not quite yet though. Where most sites show 2–3% in the sub-1024px width range, one site has close to 8%.

Back in the dark days of 2002–2005, Inter­net Explorer had thor­oughly monop­o­lized the web browser mar­ket, at one point hit­ting 95% of traf­fic. Even though that monop­oly removed their need to con­tinue to inno­vate (what was it, six years between IE6 and IE7?), under­neath the radar some new play­ers were com­ing up. Most notably Fire­fox, but also Safari on the Mac plat­form. IE’s dom­i­nance is still there, but has steadily slipped.