Browser support in 2004

Confirmed! Netscape 4 is dead!

[encyclo]

The useful statistics resource - thecounter.com's stats page, is back online and updated for 2004. I've always found this a good guide of what the general population is using it terms of browser/OS, etc. The good news: Netscape 4 is officially dead, beaten by Mozilla, "Netscape 5" (they mean 6+), Opera and "unknown"! IE6 dominates with 74%, with IE5.x at 18%.

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/January/browser.php

Other highlights:-

Javascript: 94% now have it actived.
Monitor resolution: 1024x768 leads with 49%, followed by 800x600 at 37%

More info here: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/

My fully-supported browsers are: IE6, IE5.5, Mozilla (Netscape 7), Opera 7, with older browsers getting unstyled content. There is [i]no[/i] need for NN4 support now. What does anyone else think? Have your baseline browsers changed for 2004?

[1]Note: no IE-bashing here, please - it's just a browser, not an enemy of world peace ;)[/1]

[tombola]

My pages validate as XHTML1.1 and since two weeks, I don't offer an alternative for out-of-date (non-CSS) browsers anymore.

[ergophobe]

Good stats. I hadn't seen them before.

Also, in the last year, those surfing at 256 colors went from 3% to 1%, so they're a disappearing species too.

One indicator of the type of sites they track is that .net domains account for the largest chunk of traffic.

One indicator of the visitors is that Win98 is 25%

I think you're right - that suggests that these stats track the a less tech-savvy crowd than a lot stats.

Tom

[DrDoc]

Yes, that is good stats. Opera and Mozilla are climbing. And the stats just look a lot better overall than they did last year.

[victor]

There is no need for NN4 support now. What does anyone else think?

It still depends greatly on the market sectors you target. Some (perhaps education and government) may still be as high as 10% Netscape (or at least non-IE)

After all, from a global perspective, I could argue that it is hardly worth catering for orders from the USA: less than 5% of the world's population has a US postal address.

But that may be a misleading statistic for your customer base.

[pleeker]

It still depends greatly on the market sectors you target. Some (perhaps education and government) may still be as high as 10% Netscape (or at least non-IE)

True. We just met with a prospective client in the education industry who confirmed that many schools are still in the NN4, 640 x 480 era. Not the majority, but enough that it would need to be accounted for in the project.

[twist]

My biggest concern is the prices of laptops dropping. Most only sporting 13 or 14 inch screens which make anything over 800x600 difficult to view. Some laptops are as cheap as desktops these days. I don't think it's going to happen for quite some time but with wireless getting cheaper and just the convenience of using a laptop you might see the 800x600 screens making a comeback in the next couple of years.

[hartlandcat]

I have to say, I've never been a huge fan of thecounter.com's statistics, mainly because Windows ME is listed right near the bottom on the operating systems. Yes, I know it's horrendous, but it's still about the 4th most used version of Windows --- the reason why it's listed at the bottom is because thecounter.com obviously don't realise that most browsers show Windows ME as the following in their user agent strings:

Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90

It's being recognised as Windows 98 by thecounter.com. This is what I call "dogy user agent sniffing" -- if they've made this mistake for Windows ME, chances are, they've made similar mistakes for others as well. Unfortunately, I cannot count them as reliable for this reason.

Based on no single clear resource whatsoever, I believe (and generally assume) that the browser market is divided up more or less like this:

90% -- Internet Explorer for Windows
6% -- Netscape 6.0+/Mozilla/misc. Gecko
1% -- Opera
1% -- Safari/Konqueror/misc. KHTML
1% -- Internet Explorer for Mac OS
1% -- Netscape 4.8 and below

I haven't included all the other browsers, like iCab, since their combind use is probably less than around 0.4%. Although those percentages are my personal estimation, if you think about it logicially, it probably is like this. Lets take Mac users (who are around 3% of the internet market). It's around a 30%/30%/30% divide between MacIE/Safari/Gecko, with the remaining 10% using everything else. I know that the number of Opera users is likely to be similar to the number of Safari users, and since probably around 1% of internet users use Safari (because of , there is likely to be around 1% Opera users as well. I realise that Gecko browsers (still primarily Netscape) are the most used non-WinIE browser, and although don't have a huge user base, are likely to be more than the other non-WinIE browsers put together, due to the fact that they run on so many platforms. It's also generally accepted that around 1% of users use Netscape 4 (most of which are using public computers).

[isitreal]

I'm seeing similar, on general intesest sites I do, about 94-5% IE >=4
3-4% Mozillas/Netscape 6/7
< 1% safaris and konquerors
1% Netscape 4, although this number ranges from 0.5 to about a high of 5% over the last 4 months, 5% unfortunately is far too high to ignore still.
Opera coming in under 1%, but I don't know if the stats programs id it correctly or not.

I've usually tried to support 99.75% of browsers, since that covers pretty much anything out there, but this last year I just make sure that the pages run sort of in Netscape 4x, in other words, they don't crash.

The numbers I'd really like to see are from the huge sites, like amazon, ebay, msn etc, those I think would be by far the most accurate for a general survey

[txbakers]

I stopped supporting NN 4 two years ago. Never looked back, didn't miss the business at all.

[hartlandcat]

I stopped supporting NN 4 two years ago.

To be honest, I don't blame you. Everyone has to move forward eventually. Look at it this way: Netscape 3 was released about 10 months before Netscape 4. Many people today still explicitly support Netscape 4. Ten months ago, did those people explicitly support Netscape 3? No. They stopped supporting Netscape 3 several years ago. It's just unfortunate that whilst many people (primarily businesses/schools etc.) upgraded to Netscape 4 from Netscape 3, they didn't upgrade beyond that. It's probably easier to "support" Netscape 3 than Netscape 4 anyway.

But it probably is still best to serve Netscape 4 users limited (or no) CSS, using @import. I somehow doubt that they're too bothered about having to make do with a basic page.

[Reflection]

I stopped supporting NN 4 two years ago.

If everyone followed your lead, then nobody would use netscape 4 at all :)

[g1smd]

Using @import for older browsers, actually improves their browsing experience as the page loads a little faster with the leaner HTML code employed, and then renders faster with no style to be applied to that content.

[tedster]

Look at it this way: Netscape 3 was released about 10 months before Netscape 4

However, Netscape 4.8 was released in August 2002 -- pretty darned recent. There were businesses that asked for and welcomed that support. They were not going to upgrade and do all kinds of security testing for their networks to support nn6 at the time.

Some of the oldest browsers in your logs may come from people surfing at work (on their lunch hour, I'm sure.)

[g1smd]

I used Netcape 4.80 for quite a while before changing to Mozilla 1.1 and adding more RAM to the PC.

[DrDoc]

Netscape 4.8 was released in August 2002

But the rendering engine is from early 1997...
And, most of the recent versions were merely bug fixes.
It's kinda like IE6 -- it has a rendering engine from late 2000, but we received the last update just recently.

[mep00]

Most only sporting 13 or 14 inch screens which make anything over 800x600 difficult to view

Not quite true. For a given size, a laptops the screen is effectivily larger because you tend to sit much closer to it. Also, many laptops support 1024x768, and greater, quite well for the same reason.

94-5% IE >=4

IE 4 and IE 5.x shouldn't be grouped together. IE 5.x can already be called a "modern browser," even if just bearly, IE 4 still falls short.

Opera coming in under 1%, but I don't know if the stats programs id it correctly or not.

They probibily don't, and for good reason. Opera, for some stupid self distructive reason reports itself as IE by default. Normaly, I would say multiply your results by 15-20, but since most Opera users are tech savvy, 2-4 time is probibly colser to the truth.

An important stat that I don't see anyone quoting is the percentage of text only browses. Per cappita, these include probibly the most influencial surfers out there: PDAs/mobile phones and the spiders (they don't call it the Web for nothing!:)). I'll bet there's not a single visitor to this site who doesn't follow a spider's recommendation from time to time.

PDAs and moblie phones form a growing sector of the market made up mostly of two groups who are always worth watching closely: business people and geeks.

[isitreal]

hit key twice..

[edited by: isitreal at 3:47 am (utc) on Feb. 12, 2004]

[isitreal]

Actually, I think the general interest opera stats are pretty accurate, if the stats program is using the navigatoruseragentstring 'opera' occurs in that and isn't masked, it's only the appname or whatever that opera spoofs, my more tech oriented sites report exactly what I'd expect in opera visitors.