Website Benchmarking Initiative Insights: Comparing Browsers

The four charts above illustrate the difference in browser usage among visitors to our collection of websites participating in the website benchmarking initiative. The pie charts show the overall breakdown in 2011 and the same period in 2010. The bottom two charts illustrate the distribution of the data across the studied institutions.

What we found

Internet Explorer

• The usage of Internet Explorer shrank among visitors to continuing education websites by 14%.
• Although usage has shrunk, Internet Explorer still represents half of all visits to continuing education websites.
• Across various continuing education departments, we can see from the bottom two charts that the shrinking importance of Internet Explorer is true across most participating departments. It has changed from a highly negatively skew, i.e. very dominant market choice, to a more moderate curve.

Firefox

• Firefox usage also shrank by 6.6% between 2010 and 2011.
• The second most popular web browser for website visitors in the continuing education industry, Firefox represents one-fifth of all visits.

Safari

• Usage of Safari, Apple's default web browser, increased by approximately 25% between 2010 and 2011.
• While the increase in usage of Safari was large, Safari still represents less visits in the continuing education industry than Firefox. About 16% of visitors use Safari.

Chrome

• Chrome visitors increased dramatically, by approximately 85%, between 2010 and 2011.
• Despite these huge gains, Google's browser still represents only 11% of visits in continuing education.
• Chrome's curve in the bottom two charts shows the opposite trend as Internet Explorer's. Chrome has moved from a very positively skewed data set (i.e. extreme minority market choice), to slightly less skewed.

What does this mean?

Overall, usage of web browsers still leans towards Internet Explorer. However, the trend in the last year has seen an equilibrating across multiple browsers. Of the browsers studied, the smaller ones saw the the fastest increase or the slowest reduction. On the other hand, Internet Explorer, while still the dominant browser, saw the greatest decrease. Because of the negative relationship between market share and growth, we expect these trends to continue. Within the next few years, browser usage will likely be even more evenly distributed.

You should take a moment to look at the current breakdown for browser usage for your own website. Even take time to look at some of the other browsers and consider mobile visits as well. Every browser has a unique way of interpretting the code that is used to display your website. That means that even if your website looks great in Internet Explorer, it may not look the same in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or one of the other myriad browsers used by visitors to your site. Take some time to download a few alternate browsers and check out your own website. Does it look the same in all browsers? Do parts of it look terrible or unprofessional?

Just a bit of caution first. Brace yourself before trying this exercise; you may be unpleasantly surprised.