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.

Answer 5

Unfortunately, you won't find a good answer to this; even if you found some hard statistics on browser versions for visitors to your website, that almost certainly doesn't tell you what you need to know.

What you need to know isn't "what percent of my visitors use Browser X", it's "what percent of my revenue comes from visitors who use Browser X". That one guy visiting your site using an ancient copy of IE might be the managing director of a big company wanting to buy a site license; the 10k visitors you had last month using Firefox 3 might be college students wanting to plagiarize your documentation for an essay.

Really, you need to know your market - not just the raw browser statistics. If you pay the bills by selling stuff to graphic designers, then rock solid Safari support matters a lot more than if you're in the job of selling Visual Studio plugins. Not helpful, I know!

Answer 6

There are 2 main groups to target. (There are plenty of others though)

Group #1 is browsers that use Webkit (Safari for example), Presto (Opera for example), KHTML (Konqueror for example) or Gecko (Firefox for example). These browsers should all get the same markup, CSS and Javascript code (as they're all in the same group of standard-compliant browsers). Only work around bugs in one of these if you absolutely have to and have the resources to do so. Instead, test in the latest stable versions of each (as you're developing so they can keep each other in check as to what the expected behavior is) and (after checking in the nightlies for the bugs) file bug reports. Again, avoid workarounds for a specific browser if you can. Instead, plan a cross-browser compatible solution from the beginning.

With Group #1, you don't have to worry about older versions much, if it all.

Group #2 is browsers that use Trident (IE for example). Target IE versions you care about and still only workaround the most severe bugs.

Also, don't deny browsers you don't officially support. Let them fend for themselves instead of blocking them (either intentionally or through crappy browser detection).

Also, remember that when looking at market share percentages, try to figure out the numbers they represent so you can see how many millions of potential visitors with that browser there are. 1% or 5% might not seem like a lot, but that could still mean millions.

Most of all, listen to the visitors. If you're getting multiple complaints about a certain browser, look into it if you can. Even if it's for a browser with low market share, if it's a trivial fix, you should just do it.

Ones that are definitely not dead are: IE6 (starting to push it), IE7, IE8, latest Opera 9.x, latest FF 3.x, latest Safari 3.x and others that have about the same capabilities. FF 2.x isn't dead either and is needed for Win9X users (if they don't want to use Opera)

Answer 7

See also this topic

Answer 8

You should use a good UI framework that solves most of the compatibility issues among browsers, like YUI!, jQuery, and so on...

Personaly, I recommend YUI!

Answer 9

Try to answer this locally, consider your audience. For example when I was developing my own Blog Engine, my appeal was mostly to .NET developers. I hope it stands to reason what browser I primarily develop for. From that point I consider the market share and try to ensure a "reasonable" support level for all other browsers. For example even .NET developers occasionally use Firefox, maybe even Opera. Safari and Chrome are possibilities too now. So my current level of support ranks in this order:

• It MUST run perfectly in Internet Explorer 7. All features I intended to build are there
• It MUST run reasonably in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 3.0, Opera 9+ and Safari for Windows, not everything has to be flawless, but it can't look downright ugly either

Everything else I don't care about. I just don't have the time and willing effort to support everything.

How do I determine whether or not I want to even consider supporting another browser or continuing supporting one of the above browsers any more? Simply I look at the market share and the statistics of who is hitting my page. If someone is dying, or I just haven't seen them in awhile, then I consider support dropped.

So in short, I would simply make a statement to yourself about the browsers that must run your code perfectly then reasonably and update periodically as the browser world changes. For the first run of your website, just think about your audience, for subsequent updates, your statistics should tell you enough.

Answer 10

My (very poor) solution was to get stats from w3schools and base my decisions on that. While those numbers aren't really terrible, they are skewed because viewers of that site are more likely to be upgrade-conscious. Also, it doesn't give a breakdown of any browser versions except FF.

Answer 11

If you purely build to standards, some browser won't render correctly since no browser supports all standards. You have to pick a few browsers and test your site in those.

Don't try to be too bleeding edge. If you must use some cutting edge CSS, then you have to expect it not to work 100% of the time.

Answer 12

What are you really going to do with the list? Are you planning to block browsers you don't support? What if the user hacks the User-Agent response?

Like others, I would strongly suggest going with something like Yahoo's "Graded Browsers" and, if possible, leveraging YUI or other libraries so you don't have to do it yourself.

Answer 13

<1% market share isn't a criteria - esp if the browser is new.

For me, < IE6 is dead, and the HTML monkeys I work with WISH it was dead. < FF2 is dead. Opera is a nice to have. < Safari 2 is dead, tho most are designing for Saf 3 now.

So it's: IE6,7,8 FF 2,3 Saf 3,4 Chrome (which is basicly Saf4)

But depending on your app, and how many people you think you are going to get wih hold machines, you COULD drop IE6, which would make your life so much easier.

Answer 14

I would say IE6 and below are dead... but many are still stuck using it.

This site has a nice live listing of each browser and its actual age.

http://webbugtrack.blogspot.com/2008/08/browser-life-statuses.html

Answer 15

I'd go with the http://browser-update.org/ defaults, which currently say the following are dead:

IE <= 6 FF <= 2.0 Op <= 10.01 Sf <= 2.0

Answer 16

My opinion (has always been) build it to the standards and leave it to the browsers to render it correctly.

Answer 17

Start with the browser with the highest market share and work your way down from there.

If you have existing metrics on browsers that visit your site, use those instead of the general market share.

Answer 18

Whichever has < 1% market share.

Answer 19

I agree with Unkwntech.

You should try to make the website compatible to both IE and Firefox

Answer 20

It's simple - most users keep using the browser that came with the PC when they bought it (think of your mom). The browser is dead when the machines that it pre-installed with are not longer used for Internet access... which is probably around 5 years. As prices of new PC's drops and they become more of a consumer electronics item then this period will drop as people will easily buy a new PC