Nestoria Blog

• You are important to us (Nestoria reader/user)
• You use a browser to get to us
• Therefore, the browser you use is important to us too

3 simple truths, just as true now as they were almost a year ago, when we brought you our original ‘Browser Wars’ post.

With several recent developments in the area (the sad demise of Netscape, and the rise of questionable ‘viral’ campaigns), we thought now would be a good time to provide you with the 2007 data for Nestoria browser usage. Please click to enlarge the graphs.

No major surprises overall. The Windows-bundled Internet Explorer led the pack, with a 2007 average of 84% of all visits. Firefox came in a respectable second, with 12% of visits. Safari representation was uncharacteristically high at 4%, Opera bringing up the rear of the big hitters with 1%. Interestingly, our statistics vary considerably from W3School’s, which has Firefox only 20% behind IE.

So what about specific IE / Firefox trends? Well, there’s possibly a very slight negative trend in % of IE use, and a very slight positive trend in % of Firefox usage. Relative share seems fairly stable.

Possibly the most interesting data is that for version share. IE7 overtook IE6 around October 2007 - showing that Microsoft’s big push hasn’t been in vain. However, there’s still a high number of IE6 users - I would hazard a guess that these are mostly within the workplace, where managers have not yet made the move to IE7. Unhindered by similar issues, the switchover from Firefox 1.5.x to 2.x was quick and progressed almost to 100% usage of 2.x.

To conclude
What do these statistics mean? For us, they mean time spent testing and tweaking our site on the appropriate range of browsers. For you, faithful user*, this hopefully translates into increased site performance and Property Hunting Pleasure?Ѣ?Ć.

As always, please feel free to fire off a comment, or send us some feedback.

* For the crazy cats accessing Nestoria on their PSPs, PS3s, Wiis, iPhones, we’ll do our best.

?Ć This isn’t really trademarked…