Question: Do you ever look up browser usage statistics? If you do where do you get them from and how reliable do you think they are? Why is it important to view your web pages in different browsers? And do web pages look different on different operating systems?
UPDATE: Bear in mind that the W3Schools statistics are not based on the Internet population in general, but the population that frequents W3Schools.com's website. They will tend to have more diverse (and advanced) browser preferences.
For the internet in general, I look at W3Schools.com's statistics: Browser: http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, Operating System: http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp and Screen size: http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp. There's a lot of additional, very helpful information on the browser tutorial in particular, and the entire W3Schools site in general. Wikipedia also usually offers great histories of the browsers.
As to reliability, I think these stats are reliable with a couple caveats. My perception would be that the Blair County area is slightly behind the average in tendency to upgrade browser versions and screen sizes, and tends to be more uniform in its browser decisions. More specifically, they tend to use smaller, lower-resolution screens, older browser versions, and tend to prefer Internet Explorer to other browser options like Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. (Chrome was released a week or two ago, and is Google's first foray into the browser market. Check out their very technical comic book here: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/.) I also perceive that State College's browsing tastes would probably be at or above average; we have a client in State College whose site is going live in a month or two. In six months we'll have some good data on exactly what their visitors are like.
Internet Explorer 8 was also released in beta mode recently. We found it pretty humorous that sites like ibm.com, adobe.com and even microsoft.com don't display correctly in it. It makes you wonder why Microsoft even released it before looking into these issues. IE8 was allegedly supposed to conform strictly to W3C standards, but so far they seem to have little success.
Gaining a perception of what internet tastes are like in specific is a function of several factors, like geographic region, perceived age range of target audience, perceived professional status, and industry. For instance, one of our clients has been tracking their site statistics for 5 months now, and the results are overwhelmingly in favor of Internet Explorer, with IE6 and 7 fighting it out.
Cross-browser compatibility is becoming an ever more important issue as Firefox takes an ever-greater piece of the browser market share. When FF was 5% of the population, you could mostly design for IE and not worry about anyone else, but now that FF is over 50% of the market in some regions of the economy, the game has definitely changed. Groups like W3C are trying to establish best practices standards that they hope all browser producers will adhere to.
Note that the cross-browser issue is not just an important one for how the page looks, but also for how it functions. Technologies like Javascript are putting more and more intelligence in code that is directly downloaded onto the browser, and so naturally there are some differences between how Microsoft chooses to render it and how Mozilla (FF's creators) choose. There are also attempts by Javascript framework developers, like JQuery and YUI (developed and maintained by Yahoo!), to create cross-browser functional solutions so that the page functions as expected on every browser. You'll notice, if you read the Chrome comic, that Google has taken an entirely new, out-of-the-box approach to handling browser processes, and while this presents new opportunities, it will also create new challenges for developers as they try to get everything to work correctly in everyone's browser of choice.
As to web pages looking different on different operating systems, the area where this is most prevalent is in character sets, in my experience anyway. The original character set that most computers for the last 20 years have used is called ASCII, which basically comprises the US letters and numbers, punctuation, and simple formatting characters, like borders, arrows, etc. These only required an 8-bit storage container to carry the necessary data. Over the years though, as the international community has become increasingly connected to the internet, foreign character sets have required more storage for more characters, 8, 16, or even 32 bits' worth of storage. The group most actively setting standards for this technology is called Unicode. Windows went Unicode with the release of Windows 2000, and Unix systems have been Unicode for longer than that, I think. Most of the operating systems discrepancies I have seen have dealt with differences in rendering characters, or an inability to print characters created in one operating system on another one.
No comments:
Post a Comment