What web browser are your customers using? [BT broadband office]

What web browser are your customers using?

Posted 30 March 2007 at 10:59AM by Simon Dickson in Website development

British web browsers are more reluctant than most of their European counterparts to move away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to data gathered during February 2007 by a European online advertising network.

Frankfurt-based company Adtech reports that 30% of German and 28% of Finnish internet users prefer to browse the web using the open-source Firefox software. But in the UK, Firefox has just over 10% market share.

Germans and Finns were also more likely to use the highly-regarded but little-known Opera, although in both cases, market share was under 2%. The Norwegian browser fared even worse in the UK, registering barely 0.5%.

As you'd probably expect, Internet Explorer still dominates the continent's web browsing, with version 6 accounting for more than half the traffic recorded. Version 7, released in its final version only last October, accounts for a further quarter, giving Microsoft's technology a market share still in excess of 75% despite continued growth for Firefox in particular.

If your business has a website, it's always worth ensuring that your designers have checked site compatibility with all browsers in widespread general use - today, in practical terms, that means both versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox version 2, and Apple's Safari.

Don't forget that Microsoft made significant changes between v6 and v7 of Internet Explorer, and you can't take it for granted that if a design works fine in one, that it will work fine in the other.

Just to make things more difficult, you can't have both versions running on the same PC - but Microsoft has made available a free 'Virtual PC image', effectively a 'PC within a PC', which continues to use IE6. It's an absolutely huge download, but it may be worthwhile if you've upgraded to IE7 yourself - since as this data shows, the majority of your customers probably haven't.

Tags: browser, firefox, internet explorer

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Comments

1. At March 30, 2007 2:23 PM, Lisa wrote:

It's interesting to hear that British users are reluctant to use Firefox. Excellent advice regarding checking your website within all browsers, a website badly displayed can affect company image. It is so important that small businesses in particular pay attention to the development of new technologies and their implications. Ajaz Ahmed, founder of Freeserve is an excellent example of someone who paid attention to these changes and then turned the development of new technology to his favour. Very interesting article to read at
http://www.knowledgerich.com/keynote.aspx?kn_id=42

2. At March 30, 2007 5:46 PM, G Kabir wrote:

Good informations/Statistics
I am using IE7 since its release
initially had real nightmare.....as it would not work.......and could not uninstall .........ending up with reinstalling the Operating system again!!
I am also using firefox and Opera too.........these both are quite speedy then IE though some of the site are not displaying correctly which is where one need to be careful about.
Statistics are interesting for UK which is proving that we are not doing much experimentation with internet thingi!!

3. At April 4, 2007 1:25 PM, N.Salvah wrote:

I am now fed up with Microsoft's IE7. It's slow, full of bugs; use a huge amount of resources and half of the time it doesn't work! I will still prefer using IE6.5 that's the best one although it's slower than Firefox or Opera, but still it's a very strong tool.

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