When is a browser considered "dead"? [closed]

Question

Keep in mind that I'm not looking for a list of current browsers to support, I'm looking for logical ways to make that list, backed by some kind of hard statistics.

Since it's been a while since my last web job, I decided to do this latest site up from scratch. Now I have to decide again what to support in terms of browsers. Certainly I have a list of what I'd like to support, but the decisions that went into that list seem to be a little arbitrary to me. Where can I go to get a reliable picture of browser usage and what seems to be a good point at which to cut off an old version of a browser from support?

Answer 1

Browsers don't die out completely for about a decade. The first thing you must realise is that you will have some visitors that are using a browser you don't support. The question is not which browsers are not dead, but which browsers are worth supporting (the benefit) relative to the work it takes to do so (the cost).

I've never seen browser statistics I'm comfortable recommending, they all seem to be snake oil. A rule of thumb I feel is appropriate is that a browser isn't worth supporting if somebody using that browser is going to regularly run into problems on other websites as well. In other words "stick with what everybody else is supporting". To that end, Yahoo's graded browser support is useful.

Ultimately, the best choice depends on your individual circumstances and will change over time. For instance, 37signals have recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 and Facebook are slowly heading in the same direction. This isn't a decision that most organisations can make yet, but give it a year or two and you'll see a lot more organisations follow suit. Right now, it's a bold step that you probably can't justify, but give it time.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that supporting as many browsers as possible is automatically the best choice - it may be that you are doing your visitors a disservice by wasting time working on compatibility with a browser used by five people when you could be improving the experience for the other million users you have.

Also, it's worth considering that you can "officially" not support a browser. For example, one thing I've done in the past is use JavaScript served only to Internet Explorer 5.5 and below (via a conditional comment), to automatically remove stylesheets, JavaScript and replace images with their alt text. Without those measures, the site would be unreadable due to Internet Explorer's many layout bugs, but with it, the site at least works, even if it's too much work to "support" it.

Answer 2

The easiest way to do it is sign up for Google Analytics and add their tracking code to your site (there are a number of similar services, but Google's one is the best I've found). It gives you detailed statistics as to what browsers people who visit your site use.

Once you have a couple of months data, you can start making decisions as to which browsers you will support. I work for a mainstream web company who want to make our site work for as many users as possible, so we consider any browser with above 0.5% market share to be within our testing matrix. However, other sites may choose to only support and test on major browsers such as IE and Firefox.

As a rough guide, the major browsers you'll see are IE 6 and 7, and Firefox 2 and 3. This should cover well over 90% of your audience so is a good starting point for the first couple of months. Then use your analytics data and make a business decision as to whether the potential revenue (or whatever you're trying to achieve) is worth the additional effort it will take to support other browsers.

Added 2008-09-18:

Admittedly one issue with this method is that if your support for some browser types is so bad that your site is unusable with them then it will potentially skew the statistics as those people will stop coming back, and thus those browsers will appear to have a lower percentage of users.

To determine whether this is happening, you can use Google Analytics' detailed breakdown of behaviour for each browser type and version. This gives you the bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit, and percent of new visits. If the figures for a given browser type and version are significantly worse than others (i.e. the bounce rate is higher, time on site is lower, pages per visit is lower, or percent of new visits is higher) then it's possible that your site isn't supporting that browser sufficiently well and that you might get more users with it if you had better support.

At this point the figures will still give you a reasonable feeling for how important the browser is (i.e. if it you don't support Google Chrome and it is being shown as 2% of your traffic, then it wouldn't jump to 20% just because you added support) so you can use that browser to see how bad your site is, and make a judgment call as to whether you add support; sometimes this may involve fixing only the worst issues and leaving the site imperfect but usable until the browser gets to a higher percentage of users, or out of beta status.

Answer 3

You could take a look at the way Yahoo! supports browsers at Graded browser support.

Answer 4

The browser is dead when (a) a very small percentage of people use it and (b) you don't care about (selling to? educating? whatever your business is) such a small percentage of people.