Online Demographics

When developing solutions for the online world, it's important to know how your customers are interacting with your services before you even begin. Many developers enter this blind, making assumptions or just ignorantly.

The unreleased Internet Explorer 8 has nearly as many users as the die-hard IE6, something most web experts wish would just go away. So what does this mean when you consider where you distribute your effort.


It's a common rule of thumb not to put 80% of your effort into 20% of the gain, and 20% of your effort into 80% of the gain (or simply, avoiding the Pareto principle). So what if we're spending 80% of our effort for the 6% of users still using Internet Explorer 6.

The above graph could be easier simplified as 39% IE and 61% DOM compliant. Unfortunately thats just the way things are. At least IE7 fixes many major things we require for attractive and interactive web-design. So then, if we aim for an IE7+ development compatibility, then we address 94% of users with a drastically reduced work load.


Most Windows developers aren't even aware of inter-OS issues with websites, although this applies little as the browser does a good job of differentiating, it's important to know that Firefox on Windows looks very different to Firefox on Mac. The biggest problem here is font-compatibility as the operating systems "clear-type" font rendering.

This graph does however, make good point at considering where to consider your desktop application support, and did anyone notice the iPhone sneak onto that graph? Although there are many other mobile web browsers, particularly the Playstation Portable and the Symbian OS (largely Nokia phones), the iPhone is the only real mobile platform capable of a realistic attempt at web browsing.

This is the important one for all web developers. Knowing to what size you should design your website is paramount. The vertical resolution doesn't matter as vertical scrolling is expected. The different horizontal resolutions don't matter either, what matters is the minimal horizontal resolution we can use for either fixed width designs, or for the minimum width of variable width designs.

Although higher resolutions dominate this graph, a frighteningly low 1024x768 occupies 3rd place with 13% of of users still on this resolution. This is the lowest horizontal resolution that made it onto the graph, which means to us that we need to fit our design into no less than 1008 pixels wide (allowing for a standard 16px scroll bar). I'd rule that off at about 1000px, noting that not all browsers remove the side bezels of the browser window.

_{These statistics are taken from novatek.com.au, March, 2009.}