Most Popular Browsers and Versions

Video segment 11 of 12 - click here to watch the full video.

Well we're getting close to the end, the last set of reports I'll demo are the Browser capabilities and Network properties reports. Day to day this data is not real import to track. But it is important when considering any design changes or when implementing any new technologies that depend certain browser versions or plug ins. Looking at exactly which browsers are being used helps to gauge how much effort to spend making our site compatible with older browsers.

Clearly Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari are the majority. But this isn't really enough. I need to click through to find out which versions of these browsers are being used. For example, I see that for Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 make up almost all its usage. So if we did decide to implement a new feature that I know won't work in the older 5.x versions of Internet Explorer, based on this report, I won't bother with the 5.x browsers. I can get similar data for platform, screens sizes, colors settings and more. Oh, and these days checking Flash versions is important since new Flash features, like this video player depend on the later versions of Flash.


And last but not least I like to keep an eye on my Network Properties info. These days we pretty much assume high bandwidth internet connections, but there are still a few stragglers that don't have affordable high bandwidth access. In particular I look at my bounce rates based on connection speed. If I see a much higher bounce rate with dial up speed I might want to re-consider my design decisions, in this case it's pretty in-line with the rest so I won't concern myself about it.   next >