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.

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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.