After warning about the misuse of statistics, I’m likely to find myself hoist by my own petard now, but here goes…

It’s over a year since Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was released so I thought it was time to revisit the issue of browser market share, especially after the dramatic take-up of IE7 in the first few months.

However, first things first. Before getting to the detail of versions it’s worth looking at the overall market share for the browsers themselves. Over on Net Application’s Market Share site they’ve got this graph for November 2006 - 2007. You’ll see that whilst there’s some variation over the period, in general there’s not that much movement - Internet Explorer under 80%, Firefox hovering around the 15% mark, Safari reaching 5% and the rest less than 2%. The statistics collected by TheCounter for November 2007 show a roughly equivalent situation.

There’s …

I have to confess that Yahoo is not one of my usual haunts so I missed this excellent article the first time around - Graded Browser Support. It’s a very clear articulation & formalisation of something that many of us have been thinking about & trying to implement.

Essentially the idea is that you have (at least) 3 grades of web browser:

an identified list of browsers (+ operating system) that will take full advantage of the capabilities of modern browsers and will be tested thoroughly (grade A)
an identified list of browsers that will be able to access core functionality & content, but will only have a representative sample tested (grade C)
the rest that will either take conform to current web standards like the grade A browsers or be able to function at the minimum level of the grade C, however there is no testing and no support (grade X)

Which browser …

I’ve been keeping my eye on the figures showing the breakdown in browser market share on TheCounter.com. When I wrote in December Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) had just overtaken the combined versions of Firefox with 12% of users. Another two months have gone by and now in the figures for February it’s risen to 24% with the corresponding reduction being made for IE6 (down from 70% to 59%). The other browsers have remained more or less static - Firefox on 11-12%, Safari on 3% & IE5 on 1%.

Microsoft were reporting a higher market share a month ago (25% across all websites in the US compared to TheCounter.com’s 20%) as they notched up the 100 millionth IE7 installation. Given the vagaries of web statistics …

Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was released for download on 18th October and it started to be made available through Windows Update on 1st November. It seems that it is now the second most popular browser version being used.

TheCounter.com offers a web site analysis tool for its clients and produces global aggregated result for free. The browser summary for November shows IE7 with 7% of the users (3rd in rank behind IE6 and Firefox). So far in December it’s moved ahead of Firefox (that is all versions of Firefox) with approximately 12% of market share. Over the same period IE6 was reduced from 76% to 70% - matching the rise in IE7. With approximately 80 million users in November and 17 million so far in December it’s fair to say that it’s a reasonable picture of current ‘normal’ …

A key part of our quality control is to check a site and/or templates with different versions of a range of browsers. However it’s virtually impossible to run different versions of Internet Explorer (IE) on a single copy of Windows and to know that what you’re seeing is the behaviour in more normal circumstances. Windows and IE are very tightly integrated, so there isn’t even an ‘uninstall’ option available if you wanted to remove it from your computer.

One way around this is to have virtual copies of Windows running on your computer, each with their own single, different version of IE. Microsoft have such a product and have now made Virtual PC 2004 free to download (Virtual PC 2007 version has gone into beta testing, so that’ll be the version that you’d have to pay for in the future). To run it you’ll need a reasonable chunk of memory …