Pavel Lebedev

Pavel Lebedev | 2009-06-29

Monitoring browsers market of the site is probably the most simple web analytics that has immediate direct value for site owner, webmaster and web analyst.

Browsers often render pages differently, and site owner (webmaster, web analyst) needs to know what site looks like for the majority of visitors. Thus, browsers most often used by visitors need to be identified. If Rich Internet Applications (RIA), JavaScript Ajax libraries/frameworks, Flash, etc., are used on the site, then browser differences may become even more significant. Even despite browser vendors target Internet standards and, on the other hand, major JavaScript Ajax frameworks (like Dojo, jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, etc.) target cross-browser compatibility, they have not yet achieved neither complete adherence to standards nor cross-browser compatibility of entire functionality (compatibility is incomplete even for a handful of most common browsers).

Thus, the only practical solution for site owners (webmasters, web analysts) is testing in at least most common browsers. (Testing complex RIA functionality in all/many browsers may be extremely time-consuming.).

This is where the knowledge of browser market among your site's visitors can bring real value.

It is important to realize, that no two sites are the same, even if they belong to the same industry. Each site is very individual, specific thing. Neither knowledge of aggregate global shares of browser market nor such shares sampled from another site or multiple sites in the industry in no way should be viewed as good proxy. Those shares vary widely depending on the composition of website audience, which in turn depends not only on the topic/industry, but also on the traffic sources, i.e. the specific way (mix of the ways) site's audience is acquired, which varies widely even within same industry.

The pie chart above reflects shares of browser market that are specific to our site, www.tracksite.ru. It do not apply to your site – your mileage may vary.

Furthermore, those shares change over time and are now remarkably dynamic.

Thus, you have no other choice, but measure those shares directly. And keep measuring it all the time. That's what web analytics is for.

And yes, with web analytics we just measure a small segment of entire browsers market that in no way give us accurate global picture, but that local segment is the only that matters for our site – it affects experience of our visitors. There is no need for us to know that global picture. Even global trends of browsers market should be measures locally, i.e. the way those trends affect our site. It is entirely useless to know average body temperature of all patients in the hospital – only individual temperature matters.

Of those browsers on the pie chart, I have Firefox, Opera, IE and Chrome installed on my desktop and use each of them from time to time. In fact, I was planning this post to be about some relative merits and drawbacks of those four most popular browsers from the web analyst's point of view. But it was necessary to explain why it matters first (and this explanation do not cover all, including main, reasons yet). So, I hope the next post will be about what this post was supposed to be about.

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Pavel Lebedev, web analytics expert/consultant (pavellebedeff yandex.ru)

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