Revisiting Browsers stats

Depends on socio/economico strata

[henry0]

How many times do we hear or read
“Well doesn’t look too good in Netscape; no worries it concerns only such a small user %”
Of course a WebMaster World member will not spouse such a behavior :)

I recently reviewed a large Agriculture oriented website statistics that I finished about 8 months ago (US site)

Most users are involved in Agriculture, University/College or Ag org.
My statistics show that 20% of visitors use Netscape or any NN flavor
such a result "many" fold the usual Netscape user %

Further 15% use a Mac.

Do not trust bulk statistics and always validate for multiple browsers

Henry

[digitalv]

Yes - and while you're at it, all of you programmers out there make sure you code your applications to work with Windows 3.1, not just Windows XP. Oh yeah and to all of you game developers I expect Doom 4 to work on a Pentium 100, understand?

Get real ... this is a progressive industry. Continuing to make your pages work for those older browsers is doing nothing but helping those people hold out. If they don't want to upgrade, fine, but I'm not going to let a few squatters prevent me from doing what I want. There is all kinds of new technology to take advantage of that has emerged since the NN days - that was 8 years ago. Time to move on.

[diamondgrl]

good post henry0. hold out if you want, digitalv. henry0 wasn't saying you had to mollycoddle users of old browsers, only that you should not expect as many people to use your site.

i personally don't find numbers like 5%, much less as high as henry0 mentioned, to be too small a segment to ignore, especially since many corporate or library or other uers have no choice what browser they use.

[henry0]

Thanks Diamondgrl- you got the essence!-
Indeed I do not even ask validating for NN4.7
Actually I do not suggest/demand anything

I just offer a personal sight on stats that show Netscape as a well used browser among a defined group of users and still quite used by some large chunk of the core user group when looking at percentage within defined user group

By the same token I second myself in dev and validating also for Netscape

FYI I never did mention anything regarding using “HG Wells” to back up the clock!

[digitalv]

Yeah, I know :) I just think that more webmasters should make an effort to render last-century browsers useless instead of worrying about backward compatibility. With the current webmaster mindset, NN will still be in use in another 10 years ... that mentality is restricting growth to help a small minority.

[diamondgrl]

i share your frustration digitalv. it's all ridiculous that we have to make different flavors of javascript and html etc. but it is what it is.