I’m pleased to see Trade Me have started posting their browser stats again, something I used to do here, way back in the day.
Here is the latest update, for May 2010: Browsers and Operating Systems
http://images.trademe.co.nz/tm/announcements/full/132922040.jpg
When people talk about Open Data they are nearly always referring to government data. But, I think there are also lots of examples like this, where private companies have data which has a public good, and which they can open up at no material cost to themselves.
Trade Me is such a popular site that their audience can pretty much be used as a proxy for the internet in New Zealand, so this gives developers working on smaller or less popular sites a good idea of the sort of browsers they should be targeting.
Remember, if the equivalent numbers for your site are different from these there are two possible explanations:
- Your audience is a subset of the population which has a browser bias (e.g. if you attract more technical people you’ll probably tend to see a higher proportion of newer browsers and also some lesser known browsers that are not widely used in the mainstream)
- Your site makes it difficult for people with older browsers to use your site, so they choose not to.
Just about everybody assumes #1, when #2 is often more likely.
Remember that the 5% of Trade Me visitors using IE6 is still 31,500 unique visitors per day, or nearly one Westpac Stadium full. Are you happy to turn all of those people away with a message telling them to upgrade their “browser”, what ever that means to them?