There’s no such thing as an obsolete browser

In what seems to be a continuing trend here, a significant number of users seem to be unwilling or unable to upgrade their browsers.

Here’s what February of 2009 brought to eksith.com.

Be afraid! Be very afraid!!

Be afraid! Be very afraid!!

Makes me question the whole purpose of designing sites with the latest browser in mind anyway. All this time, I’ve been thinking about users who have a browser with full CSS/XHTML capability and those with none. It seems there’s a whole multitude of them within a gray area between.

I’m mainly concerned with the Firefox 2.x and IE 6 groups, of which IE 6 causes the greatest concern as they present the largest group using an obsolete browser. Even the old Firefox renders pages to an acceptable degree. IE 6 presents no incentive whatsoever to design pages with semantics in mind. I have to use some kind of hack or other proprietary markup in the HTML or CSS to get it to work as it should. At least with IE 7, they’ve fixed some of the more egregious rendering issues.

And a little update on the OS stats from last year

Downgrades?

Downgrades?

People are abandoning Vista at a dramatic rate or there was simply a jump in XP visitors. Either way, Vista is at a minority this year. And, a bit of a plesant surprise, the number of Linux users have jumped dramatically as well. This would explain why there are a few K-Meleon and Mozilla users in the browser list.

5 thoughts on “There’s no such thing as an obsolete browser

  1. I did a double-take when I saw “Firebird” listed. I cannot believe someone’s still using it.

    Though even in its beta form, I’d take Firebird/Firefox over IE6 any day. The latter is veritable swiss cheese from a security standpoint, and it renders web pages about as well as a brick washes dishes.

    On the OS visitor’s list, I’m probably scattered among the XP/Vista/Ubuntu/OS X crowds, since I use all four on a fairly regular basis. :P Although I’m somewhat surprised there is no listing for Windows 7, unless that’s part of the “Unknown” category.

    • Haha Thanks for contributing to the stats! :P

      I wouldn’t be surprised if Win7 is listed under Vista. I don’t think AWStats has been updated to take into account the new OS and the similarities may be confusing it.

      Firebird just blew my mind. It first came out back when “Minotaur” became Thunderbird. At least we’re not seeing Phoenix in there.

      I’m still wondering who was browsing the site on a mobile device (Symbian).

  2. Pingback: No such thing as an obsolete browser or OS IV | This page intentionally left ugly

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