[thelist] Browser Stats

[Michael Kimsal]

On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 15:59, Ray Hill wrote:
> Rick [Kitty5] wrote:
> >> Netscape 3.39%
> >
> > Looks like a good enough reason to stop supporting ns4.x to me!
>
> I couldn't disagree more.
>
> The misleading thing about percentages is that they are based on a number
> out of 100 (and even when you extend it two decimal places like this you're
> still only getting representation of a number out of 10,000).  And when you
> consider that there are something like 280,000,000 people in the US alone,
> that tiny-sounding 3.39% translates to nearly a million people!  Much less
> when you expand your net to the world.
>
> Percentages are misleading because they don't clearly tell you what the
> percentage is *of*.  If, for example, these same results reflected the usage
> by just your user base, then 3.39% would indeed be a relatively small number
> of people and therefore not worth your time.  But when you're taking a
> percentage of total population (or total browser usage by the population, in
> this case) or any other huge number, the importance of the smaller
> percentages goes up considerably.
>

I couldn't disagree with you more.

Yes, there's millions of people who use old, buggy, difficult browsers.
A few things to keep in mind:

1.  They have the same crappy experience at the huge majority of
other sites.  They're not going to think much less of your site,
most likely.

2.  Most people with sites are trying to sell something.  Selling
implies change.  People using old browsers are, by and large,
averse to change.  Catering to someone using Netscape 3 on a Mac
probably won't do much for your bottom line (unless
you're selling old Mac equipment, for example).

3. Out of the 280 million people you cited, 90% implies there
are hundreds of millions of people you can already effectively
reach by dealing with current browser issues, and ignoring
old browsers.

3.39% is a small amount of anything, regardless of size.  We understand
what percentages are, and 4% is pretty small no matter what.  MOST
business (or churches, or whatever) are going to alienate
a certain amount of people (4%?  5%?) no matter what they do - people
won't like their image, name, logo colors, hair style, nationality,
whatever.  People choose to do business with companies or other people
based on a variety of factors - sometimes browser support is a big
one, but usually it's not.

Someone starting off a website today should have no reason to
use whacked out one-browser-only tags/layouts, but even using 'standard'
middle of the road stuff, things will render differntly on different
browsers.  Normally that 'difference' also means 'uglier/poorer/etc'
when using older browsers.

If the difference between my site looking attractive to 95%
of visitors (tens of millions of people) vs being 'compliant'
to reach 4% of people (who have already demonstrated an aversion
to keeping up with technology) and the compliancy causes
things to look/appear worse to the 95% majority, you'd
be stupid to blindly push everyone into catering to the 4%.  Most
businesses can't afford to alienate the majority to service
an extremely small minority.


Michael Kimsal
http://www.logicreate.com
734-480-9961