January 3, 2007
In December our three sites (Trade Me, FindSomeone, Old Friends) combined received just over 66% of all domestic page views recorded by Neilsen//NetRatings.
So, our server stats are probably the closet thing there is to a census of the technology kiwis are using to access websites.
| Browser | Market share Dec-06 | +/- since Jul-06 |
|---|---|---|
| IE6 | 70.3% | -12.3% |
| IE7 | 12.2% | +10.8% |
| Firefox 1.5 | 7.1% | -0.3% |
| Firefox 2.0 | 3.8% | +3.8% |
| Firefox 1.0 | 1.9% | -1.2% |
| Safari | 1.6% | +0.5% |
| IE5.x | 1.4% | -0.7% |
| All others | 1.7% | -0.6% |
There has been a lot of change in the last couple of months following the release of IE7 and Firefox 2.0, which together now account for over 15% of our visitors.
Despite all of the good press that Firefox gets within the web development community IE is still dominant with around 84% market share. IE7 has quickly jumped to 12%, no doubt thanks to Windows Update. It will be interesting to see how this tracks over the next few months once all of the users who will receive the update automatically are accounted for.
| Screen res. | Market share Dec-06 | +/- since Jul-06 |
|---|---|---|
| 1024x768 | 54.1% | -2.0% |
| 800x600 | 15.2% | -4.7% |
| 1280x1024 | 13.2% | +1.2% |
| 1280x800 | 6.6% | +2.2% |
| 1152x864 | 2.9% | +0.1% |
| All others | 8.0% | +3.2% |
There is a slow but clear shift towards larger monitors. At the top end things fragment quite a bit, with various different sizes to consider. Over 30% of our visitors are now using 1280x or bigger. But that still leaves a majority using smaller resolutions. It’s depressing to think that many of these people probably have a monitor capable of a higher resolution, but are unable (?) to change the setting.
Personally I prefer Firefox. I switched when Firefox 1.0 was released and haven’t been tempted back. I use a 19″ monitor which runs at 1280×1024.
Which raises some interesting questions for web designers, developers and testers:
If you develop using Firefox do you really have your users in mind? At Trade Me our test team all use IE6 as their primary browser, for reasons that should be obvious looking at the table above.
Have you already abandoned IE5.x users? This is still a big audience. 1.4% of Trade Me users represents around 40,000 unique visitors each month.
How does your site look at 800×600? These stats are a reflection of our audience, but they’re also a reflection of our site. The new Trade Me design, launched in November, targets users with a resolution of 1024×768 or larger, but we’re also careful to ensure that the site still works for users at 800×600. On the homepage, for example, the size of the category links is reduced and the navigation tags are repositioned below the logo and banner advert. If your stats show a lower percentage of users with small resolutions, why is that? If your site works poorly for these users they are unlikely to come back.
How do your stats compare to these?
Source: all of the numbers above come from Neilsen//NetRatings.