Geek says Firefox/Mac/Linux. What will a businessman’s choice be? Well, IE6/Windows.
No matter how tech savvy we want the world to be, there are few OS/Browsers that are common man’s choice – and if you are building a ‘not-so-geeky-niche’ application, keep the common man (and their technology preference) in mind.
Statcounter released their Global stats tool and the graph below tells you the real story (something that new age startups tend to overlook)
Some data points you need to really keep in mind while building your product:
- Browser: IE6 is still popular in India. Firefox 3.0 seems to be catching up though.
- OS: WindowsXP rules Indian world – Vista/Linux/Mac aren’t even close.
- Mobile Browsers – Opera rules, but is declining. Nokia is catching up. No significant trace of iPhone for Indian market.
What’s your opinion on this data? Is your product ‘mass’ compliant?
Please note: Ofcourse, the data is collected from Statcounter’s publishers (and there will be certain variations), but the data seems quite closer to reality and is representative of the real world.
Very interesting stats. At about 60% IE 6+7 users do form a significant bulk of users. If you are selling airline/rail/bus tickets or even movie tickets then for sure these users need to be supported. It would be interesting to see how many people who spend more than 20 hours on Internet in a week use Firefox. Its a bit like Doordarshan vs Cable TV argument here, most of your consumers live in a home with Cable TV connection where would you like to advertise. I have my doubts, IE-6 users who are probably using pirated WinXP(thats why unable to update) or on a dialup quality connection wouldn’t be a target audience for innovative web 2.0′ish startups.
Heeyy great synopsis..always wanted a parameter for the Indian Market….thanks a lot for publishing this, will use it as a guide to my future projects.
Interesting! Though IE has absolute dominance at the moment, one can notice that that gap is closing. A year back ~70% of our visitors were using IE. That figure has come down to ~50%. Chrome has a long way to go in terms of popularity!
Although IE6 support is a must, many developers reserve niceties for browsers with better support for standards. Things like rounded corners can be easily implemented in Firefox, Safari and Chrome with a simple CSS property “border-radius”. Many developers I know refuse to install messy hacks and jump through hoops to enable non-critical features like this in IE.
The reason of course is IE’s buggy support for CSS. Here is one site that documents it: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
Way of target, All the places I have worked at in India it is 75-80 % IE and 15-16 % FF 3 and only for tech sites have I seen greater than 20% FF3 penetration
Hi,
Now a days, I think IE is the one of the bad browser. Because of i dosen’t support css properly. It is a very critical for developer develop cross browser compatibility sites. I wonder why Microsoft behave like this.
Thanking you
sure
Guys, it support or doesnt support all u need to keep in mind is a normal people and what they are using.. I still see systems using windows 98 in many colleges.
Wat are they then? Keep in Mind, Its always better to think in wider scale.. rather thinking high end technology and ending up in a Messy S** Hole
It makes no sense to IE6 for any app. Stop supporting it and people will stop using it. Moreover any self respecting web dev should not work for IE6 hacks