Don't kill off 30% of your market
3 September 2009
Web designers are always excited by the new and flashy, but ignoring the older standards risks making your site inaccessible to large numbers of customers. Can you afford to kill off that part of your market?
When you commission a new website, how many versions of that website is the designer expected to build and charge you for? The answer depends on the number of browser types and operating systems your business needs to reach.
Windows Vista has received a serious bagging in the press over the years, but is it all deserved? If you ask around my office, the answer is a resounding big fat ‘yes'. Vista is a memory vampire which sucks the life out of the most powerful computers.
Starting Vista is like using a hand crank to start a combustion engine; so much so, one team member here keeps a second laptop running with Windows XP so she can quickly access information on a phone conference while she waits for the Vista tortoise to open a window.
A younger client once commented, "If you resist change, you become old". Ever since I have been updating every facet of my life. But it seems many out there have finally got jack of being bullied into upgrading for features that don't seem to add any real value or practical functionality.
Three years after the Vista Launch, Vista Resistance is still alive. Windows XP, which operated for the five years prior to the launch, still has a very strong following and Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), which was bundled with Windows XP, is still the most popular browser.
Though Microsoft is now up to IE8, latest browser statistics show that IE6 has 27.2% of the browser market share, followed by IE7 with 23.1%, Firefox 3 with 16.2% and IE 8 with 12.5%.
So, even if you commission a state-of-the-art Web2.0 site with rich interactive media, in practice if you do not cater for the older browsers, many visitors may not be able to view or interact with the site in its entirety.
In real terms, this means that you may not be accurately reporting all your site sales or conversions - and most of us live or die by conversions or accurate return on advertising spend.
While IE6 certainly lacks some of the features of the more contemporary browsers, upgrading is still just not appealing to many people. IE6 holdouts are obviously proving to be a problem for Microsoft, however there are other issues that come with older browser versions that could be affecting your business.
Making a website multi-browser compatible is quite a considerable job and with older browser versions not offering the same features, it can mean that for some users your website may not function properly or they may experience errors.
Developers are so sick of having to keep sites compatible with IE6 that many have simply stopped supporting it. But can you afford to dismiss nearly 30% of your visitors and their corresponding conversions?
I don't think so.
So do you cater for the IE6 holdouts, or not? That is up to you - but to ignore 30% of the user market is commercially stupid.
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Should websites cater to users with old-fashioned browsers or should people learn to upgrade if they want to access the latest and greatest content? Have your say by emailing editor@nett.com.au
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The statistics mentioned in this article are incorrect.
View w3schools browser stats for up-to-date statistics.
It's not as if this article is even close, stating 30% when there is really only 12.1% still using IE6 as of September 2009! The date of this article? 3rd of September 2009. As a reader of nett.com.au for some time, I am very disapointed to see this massive fiction within one of your articles.
Thank you for your feedback Aaron -- I've alerted Stephen to your comment.
Not sure about what the stats were in June/July when Stephen wrote this particular post -- perhaps you could shed some light?
[n.b. we work on long lead times and most of the blog posts were originally columns in Nett magazine).
The main problem is that IE6 is not compliant with w3c standards.
Browsers like Opera, Firefox and Safari are compliant and I believe that web sites only have to build to w3c standards and those browsers will all render ok.
They then have to build a different version to accommodate ie6.
One of the new features of IE8 was that it was compliant also.
cheers
fred
I found the table to which Aaron referred, but unfortunately, I can't submit a link to it. It indicates that in June and July this year IE6 accounted for 14.9% and 14.4% of visits, respectively.
This doesn't tell the whole story, however, because it's the browser stats for the W3Schools website. In fact, later on the same page is the following disclaimer:
"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers."
A brief search yielded another survey at hitslink.com, which suggested IE6 currently maintains about 23% market share.
Thank you for your comment.
Statistics are always open to interpretation and different sources will always vary.
However in saying this, we are able to reference some of Australia's leading sites in a variety of industries as they have been clients of ours for many years.
We prefer to reference actual sites trends and in looking at the anonymous data, we were surprised indeed to see such high levels of IE6 and it was on this basis that I chose my comments.
Perhaps rather than the discussion of percentage points- the issues raised still remain.