Full Service Creative Digital Design Agency

Testing Testing!!!!!!

Thursday, March 6th, 2008 | Website Design | No Comments

When Impact Media are asked to design a website, we do not just ‘bash’ it together and hope that site visitors can access the site, we dedicate our time to ensuring that visitors can view these websites in some of the most common browsers.

Since Netscape is now ‘no more’ we have removed this from our testing list, allowing us to concentrate on the latest and most advanced web browsers.

The most common browsers are Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera. Although these are just a few because there are so many different browsers out there, and more being created each day, to change the user experience whilst surfing online.

The other day I learnt of Flock, a recently newish browser that is quickly becoming a popular choice which people who enjoy social networking, as it allows you to save and instantly upload to your blog, Flickr photos, RSS feeds and more. Flock and many of the other new browsers work and look very similar to Mozilla Firefox, but they all seem to pick ideas from each other as they further develop their selves and aim to take the largest market share.

Currently (Market share from January 2008) the market is dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer slowly followed by Firefox.

Below are the statistics showing the current market share for internet browsers in January 2008.

1. Internet Explorer 75.47%
2. Firefox 16.98%
3. Safari 5.82%
4. Opera 0.62%
5. Netscape 0.61%
6. Mozilla 0.32%
7. Other 0.17%

What browser do you use?

As mentioned earlier there are new browsers popping up all the time, another of which is Maxthon. Maxthon boasts on their homepage that they have had 138, 192,542 downloads and rising. That’s a fair share of users! Yet still Maxthon are not even mentioned in the top 6, that just shows how many people are now online, and waiting to view your website (through the browser of their choice, of course).

So you can see why we only test our websites in the most popular browsers, and we are always keeping our eyes out and monitoring new and up and coming browsers as technology moves forward.

Tags: browser, firefox, flock, internet explorer, maxthon, netscape, opera, safari, website