Many of the browsers to the internet are using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and for most people, the default option within Windows is the one people stick with.
However, for so many web designers, they first design websites to ‘W3C accessibility standards’ for browsers like Mozilla, Safari, etc, and then they work out how to make things to display properly in Explorer (although the introduction of IE 8 has helped a little with this particular challenge for many designers).
A quick check on the last month’s 9,500 unique visitors to a couple of sites (that we’ve designed) brings up statistics over the last 28 days:
- Between 61-75% of unique visitors to the sites are still using Internet Explorer,
- Between 15-21% are using Mozilla/Firefox.
- Google Chrome are averaging just 2.5-5% of unique visitors (although they are compartively ‘new’ to the market). This significant share however, has been helped by advertising heavily on their Google Search homepage to Explorer users, as well as large billboards, etc.
This recent ‘important’ update by Microsoft however should help rebalance these statistics a little more.
Thankfully though, with all new websites designed by ourselves at Parlour Design, because of the way we make websites, they’re not only compatible across all the major browsers (even when javascript or images are turned off), but they can display on mobile phones too!