Browsers and Website Statistics

It was brought to my atten­tion yes­ter­day that my LunarStu­dio web­site was being cut-off at the top of one user’s browser. Of course, I’m always con­cerned when­ever some­one expe­ri­ences issues and expe­ri­ence the feed­back — it can mean a less pleas­ing end-user’s expe­ri­ence as well as a loss in busi­ness. How­ever, there can also be a num­ber of reason’s why some­thing goes wrong or looks incor­rect on an end-user’s end and not nec­es­sar­ily and fault of my own.

In this par­tic­u­lar case, it was the sim­ple fact that the user was view­ing my web­site at less than 1024x768 res­o­lu­tion on his mon­i­tor. LunarStu­dio isn’t designed cur­rently for view­ing any­thing less than 1280x960. Some might call this a mis­take or a bad judg­ment, but I can ensure you that it is intentional.

There used to be a point in time around 2000–2002 when I designed all of my web­sites to fit the 800x600 web­site stan­dard which was the most fre­quently used res­o­lu­tion. It was gen­eral and safe prac­tice for any web designer to do so. I also made sure that most of my images tried to con­form to a 256-color palette. This was because most peo­ple were just becom­ing accus­tomed to using com­put­ers for home use, they were run­ning on much slower con­nec­tions, used older browsers, older oper­at­ing sys­tems, older (and much more expen­sive) mon­i­tors, their com­put­ing power was lim­ited, and they were run­ning slow graph­ics proces­sors (if any at all.) Quite frankly, design­ing for those stan­dards was very lim­it­ing as well as a royal pain in the ass.

Now that it’s 10 years later, com­put­ing tech­nol­ogy has come a long ways — peo­ple are run­ning on faster con­nec­tions as well as faster com­put­ers. They gen­er­ally have much larger and less expen­sive LCDs. Most of us have the lat­est browsers and oper­at­ing systems.

With the cur­rent ver­sion of LunarStu­dio, I redesigned it with forward-thinking in mind ver­sus a legacy men­tal­ity. I don’t have the time to think of the worst-case or even aver­age view­ing sce­nario and frankly really can’t be dri­ven to care unless I’m get­ting paid to do so. The way I fig­ure it is that if a per­son is hav­ing prob­lems view­ing my web­site, then there’s a chance that they are some­what com­puter illit­er­ate, and this might make a work­ing sit­u­a­tion ten­u­ous at best — they’re sim­ply try­ing to jump from an era of dri­ving a horse and buggy to dri­ving the lat­est Fer­rari. I hope that this isn’t taken as being rude or con­de­scend­ing — I’m just merely stat­ing that a user needs to get with the times or risk becom­ing a thing of the past.

That being said, here are some sta­tis­tics which may be of interest:

Screen Res­o­lu­tion and Colors:

As of 2011, 85% of all users view web­sites at a res­o­lu­tion greater than 1024x768 and the rate keeps climbing.

As of 2011,  97% of all users have a color-depth of over 16 mil­lion colors.

Browsers:

Inter­net Explorer: 22.9% total. IE9: 4.8%. IE8: 12.4%. IE7: 3.9%. IE6: 1.8%.

Fire­fox: 39.7% total. FF7: 1.5%. FF6: 22.2%. FF5: 3.1%. FF4: 2.2%. FF3: 9%.

Chrome: 30.5% total. C15: 0.7%. C14: 11.2%. C13: 16%. C12: 1.1%.

Safari: 4.0% total. S5: 3.8%. S4: 0.2%.

Opera: 2.2% total. O11: 1.7%. O10: 0.1%.

Other browsers: 0.7% total.

Oper­at­ing Systems:

Win­dows 7: 42.2%.

Win­dows Vista: 5.6%.

Win­dows 2003: 0.8%.

Win­dows XP: 36.2%.

Linux: 5.1%.

Mac: 8.6%.

Mobile: 0.9%.

Sources:

Dis­play Sta­tis­tics: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

Browser Sta­tis­tics: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Oper­at­ing Sys­tems: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

My Web­site Captures:

I used a handy tool called browsercam.com when it comes to cap­tur­ing how my web­site should look across browsers, res­o­lu­tions, and oper­at­ing systems.

Here are some links to how the LunarStu­dio web­site looks across var­i­ous setups:

800x600 and 1024x768 res­o­lu­tions (144 variations.)

This doesn’t include every vari­a­tion. This just gives me a gen­eral idea as to how my web­site looks to that 15% of the pop­u­la­tion that I don’t really target.

Sum­mary:

I think the most fright­en­ing thing about the sta­t­ics listed above is that 36% of the pop­u­la­tion is still run­ning on Win­dows XP fol­lowed by a 5.6% on Vista which just blows my mind. The major­ity use browsers gen­er­ally dated one ver­sion back — see­ing that browsers are rou­tinely updated, I shouldn’t have to worry so much about peo­ple using older browsers to view my con­tent. Beyond that, the clear major­ity run high enough res­o­lu­tions and color-depths to sup­port the cur­rent LunarStu­dio website.

Design­ing for the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor when it comes to web­sites is a risk any designer or com­pany takes. Frankly, I think if you’re plan­ning on design­ing a web­site and you want it to be mod­ern, it may not be worth max­i­miz­ing rev­enue based solely on a tar­get mar­ket that is out­dated. If web­site design was my full-time job, I might con­sider that 15%, but for now, it’s not some­thing I’m going to con­cern myself with.