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Which browsers and screen sizes
are most popular?
The world of the web is an ever-changing
landscape. New browsers like Google Chrome appear from time to
time. PC manufacturers introduce new hardware. The proliferation
of iPhones and PDAs that access the web mobility is growing at
an incredible pace. It is important to keep an eye on how many
people visit your site using various browsers and operating systems.
Adding Google
Analytics is a good way to track this information, if your
site doesn't already provide web log analysis via some other tool.
Based on trends that we see
in web traffic (see below), Artisan Content recommends that you
optimize your site for the following operating systems and browsers
:
- Windows: Internet Explorer
7 and 8, Firefox 3 and Google Chrome
- Macintosh: Safari 4 and Firefox
3
Other browsers will typically
account for no more than 1% of the traffic to your site, as can
be seen in the Google Analytics reports below.
- We recommend that your website
and content be designed for a 1024 x 768 screen resolution.
- Actual page width and content
size should not exceed a width of 955 pixels.
About 4 out of 10 visitors to
your site will have a 1024 x 768 pixel screen, and about 95% will
have screens that size or larger. About 5% of web users are still
using screens smaller than that (800 x 600). This number has been
dropping rapidly over the past two years and hopefully it will
continue to do so. That's because for those 5%, a site designed
for a minimum width of 1024 pixels will cause them to scroll left
and right to view the entire page. Hopefully since most sites are
now being designed for larger monitors, they will soon upgrade
their screen size and avoid the left-to-right scrolling, which
can be annoying, to say the least.
The only way to make sure your
site looks good and functions properly for most visitors is to
set up a Windows PC and a Mac with the browsers for which you have
decided to optimize. Then, go through your site page by page and
look at it, test the links, test and submit any forms, etc.
The Google Analytics data below
shows operating systems, browsers and screen resolutions for traffic
to both a consumer and a business-to-business website. As you can
see the trends are almost identical.
Consumer-directed site, 3
months of traffic (May-July 2010):
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