New Projects for October
Published: October 2010
Web User Trends - Browsers, Search Engines and Screen Sizes
15th October 2010
Web User Trends - Browsers, Search Engines and Screen Sizes
Keeping up to date with current usage trends on the internet is vital to our business. In order to continue to offer the best possible web services to our customers we need to know what is happening to the technology in this fast changing market.
In particular it's important to know
- what the most popular internet browsers are and which versions people are running
- what the relative market share of the search engines is
- what the most popular screen sizes are
plus any other trends on the web, like the take up of mobile web access in a customer's target region, or the most frequent language used by a particular target audience.
To do this we use a number of different websites to get our information.
Today for instance, on the 15th October 2010, if you visit: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2010&month=9 you will be able to see the W3C figures for global internet stats for September 2010.
This shows us the following information about browser type usage:
| Web Browsers | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Internet Explorer 8 | 27.48% |
| 2 | Firefox 3.6 | 23.60% |
| 3 | Internet Explorer 7 | 10.03% |
| 4 | Chrome 6 | 8.32% |
| 5 | Internet Explorer 6 | 5.78% |
| 6 | Safari 5 | 4.24% |
| 7 | Firefox 3.5 | 4.20% |
| 8 | Chrome 5 | 2.58% |
| 9 | Firefox 3 | 2.13% |
| 10 | Safari 4 | 1.10% |
and the following information about screen sizes (aka screen resolution):
| Screen Resolutions | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1024x768 | 22.78% |
| 2 | 1280x800 | 18.09% |
| 3 | 1280x1024 | 9.90% |
| 4 | 1440x900 | 8.13% |
| 5 | 1366x768 | 7.79% |
| 6 | 1680x1050 | 5.14% |
| 7 | 1920x1080 | 2.69% |
| 8 | 800x600 | 2.20% |
| 9 | 1152x864 | 2.00% |
| 10 | 1024x10000 | 1.94% |
This information can be critical to our designs. It can help to answer key questions like - how wide should the main content area be for a website design. Based on these figures we currently build our sites to a width of 1000px. We know from these stats that it will be visible to almost 80% of the global web audience, which gives us confidence in the likely success of our design's effective display.
Similarly when considering the best time to use new technology on the web - like CSS3 or HTML5 - we will look at the Browser stats and check what proportion of web users can currently see the benefit of the new technology. At the moment only a very small percentage of users' browsers will be able to make full use of CSS3 and HTML 5, and so we're not yet relying on these new options in our designs (although we do usually adopt new tech in advance of its major acceptance and use to give our customers a competitive edge).
To find out the current global language trends we visit http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
And to find out the top search engines' market share we go to: http://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=4
As always, knowledge is power, and in order to provide good design, good search engine optimisation, and most importantly, a good experience for the website's visitors we utilise all this information to make the best websites we can for our clients.
If you'd like more information about this topic, or our services then do get in touch: jon@alacrify.co.uk