No such thing as an obsolete browser or OS IV

This is a little update on Steve‘s suggestion. You can view past updates for OSes in 2008, browsers in 2009, OSes and browsers in 2009, and in 2011. And just as before, we still have a few hits from IE 2.0. Though in what seems to be common trend across a lot of sites out there, Safari and Firefox are far ahead of Internet Explorer. Don’t know if this will change with the proliferation of Windows phones and Safari most likely includes a sizable number of iPhones.

On the OS front, Windows is still ahead with XP having the same usage share of Mac OS X. I believe “Windows NT” includes Windows 7/8 and Server 2008.

Browsers visiting eksith.com in September

Operating Systems hitting eksith.com in September

 

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!!

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?

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.