Browser Statistics of 10 Downing Street
By @edent
· browser firefox internet explorer stats · 8 comments · 250 words · read ~129 times.
It's really difficult cutting through the hype to see which browsers one should support when designing a website. There are many different measures of popularity - but many sites are only visited by techies, or only ever visited when at work, or are skewed towards the young or the old.
Yesterday morning I asked the Number 10 Downing Street web team if they could provide their statistics. I figured that the PM's website gets enough readers from a wide selection of the web community to give a fairly impartial measure of the popular web browsers.
Here's their (very quick) reply
Or, to express it graphically...
Chart Showing Browser Stats
Firefox overall accounts for 25% - a fairly strong showing. But with IE6 stubbornly stuck at 12%, it will be a while before we can consign it to the dustbin of web history. Opera is languishing in the 15% marked as "Other" along with my browser of choice, Lynx.
Wow, I thought I was possibly the only person who had heard of Lynx much less still used it.
Heh. I just used it professionally yesterday.
I would guess that the 12% for IE6 is only that high because civil servants are using IE6 at work. They could probably break the figures down to let you know what percentage of that figure comes from Whitehall itself.
Tom you make a good point, if the figures were broken down so that it was more usable, I think it would be more telling. Lets face it if your accessing the Downing St website from within a corporate network, then chances are it will be on a PC using a flavour of IE. speaking from personal experience the majority of my blog readers use FF. So while interesting I don't think that these finding are very useful as they are.
Just because someone is at work - doesn't mean they shouldn't count towards web-usage stats though, does it? If you want your site to be accessible to large corporates - you still need to design for IE6.
Or even if you want your site to be attractive to those who are browsing at lunchtime - you can't sneeze at a 12% market share.
Of course, given your browser statistics, it may be that Conservatives are less conservative when it comes to upgrading their browser. Perhaps a bigger and more neutral site - say BBC news or The Sun - would be a better benchmark?
Facebook's stats would be the most useful, I think. Very broad cross-section of the public on there now.
I'd be curious to see figures for The Sun, but I hope their readership isn't particularly representative of the public at large.