This article was written on November 30, 2006 by CyberNet.
Creating websites is no easy task if you are trying to make it cross-browser compatible. Especially since you have to keep in mind old versions of Web browsers because not everyone upgrades right away. Looking at the statistics for our site over the past month reveals that we have had more than 165,000 unique visitors and here are how the browsers stack up:
- Firefox – 51.69%
- Firefox 2 – 71.56%
- Firefox 1.5.0.8 – 14.91%
- Firefox 1.5.0.7 – 9.49%
- Firefox 1.5.0.6 – 1.01%
- Firefox 1.0.7 – 0.87%
- Internet Explorer – 42.18%
- Internet Explorer 6 – 59.93%
- Internet Explorer 7 – 39.49%
- Internet Explorer 5.5 – 0.18%
- Internet Explorer 5.01 – 0.17%
- Internet Explorer 5.0 – 0.09%
- Opera – 3.21%
- Opera 9.02 – 59.64%
- Opera 9.10 – 13.76%
- Opera 9.01 – 9.08%
- Opera 9.00 – 7.71%
- Opera 8.54 – 4.43%
- Mozilla – 1.43%
- Mozilla 1.8.1 – 52.61%
- Mozilla 1.9 – 22.81%
- Mozilla 1.7.13 – 4.31%
- Mozilla 1.8.0.7 – 3.80%
- Mozilla 1.7.12 – 3.58%
- Safari – 0.97%
- Safari 419.3 – 82.66%
- Safari 312.6 – 9.38%
- Safari 417.9.2 – 1.68%
- Safari 420 – 0.92%
- Netscape – 0.22%
- Netscape 7.2 – 33.96%
- Netscape 8.1.2 – 31.32%
- Netscape 8.1 – 12.08%
- Netscape 7.1 – 9.81%
- Konqueror – 0.12%
- Konqueror 3.4 – 52.35%
- Konqueror 3.5 – 45.64%
- All other browsers have less than 0.10% of the traffic on CyberNet
So the results show one thing and that is everyone doesn’t use the latest browser. There are even some Internet Explorer 5 users still out there that are visiting our site but the problem that Web developers have is testing their sites with these older browsers. Getting your hands on an old version of Firefox has never been a problem because you just have to checkout their FTP server. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is much more difficult to try your website out on.
I wanted to make sure that CyberNet News was looking okay in Internet Explorer 5 and I eventually found a site called Evolt that offers IE 3, 4, 5, and even 6 as a standalone browser. That means you just have to download the ZIP files and run the executable that is included. The screenshot that I took above shows both IE 5 and IE 3 running on my XP machine without any issues, well, IE 3 obviously doesn’t read the stylesheet but the browser runs just fine.
Evolt has a whole directory devoted to Web browsers many of which I have never even heard of. Looking through some of the folders, like the Mozilla one, does show that it hasn’t been updated in over a year though. It is still a great tool for anyone looking to test a website in an older browser like IE 5 or 6.
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