The background for wanting to acquire this information was to discover what influence mobile browsers are having to the overall mix. As I uncover this more precise information (which I am keeping internal for the time being), I thought it would be good to share with you the more general trends.
As you can see in the graph below (click graph to see larger version), Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates but its overall influence (across all IE versions) has declined from 72.7% to 65.6% between January and September 2010.
This reduction is taken up by the small but increasing influence of Safari from 4.8% in Jan 2010 to 8.1% in Sept 2010, and Google Chrome doubling from 3.7% to 7.4% in the same time period. Firefox has hardly moved - from 16.1% to 16.6%.
"Other" browsers have declined from 2.7% down to 1.9% although I am uncovering some evidence that a few such browsers masquerade as leading brands (indeed you can change a setting to select a suitable masquerade from IE to Firefox!). I guess this is happening to 'fool' web sites that check if a browser is valid for the functionality on their site.
Taking just the Internet Explorer trends, I obtained the graph below over the same time period (click for larger version). I don't think there is much of a surprise here. IE7 is giving way to IE8, although IE6 battles onwards if downwards! In September 2010 IE6 represented 8.3% of all visits, more than all the other individual competitor browsers other than Firefox. Given that it launched in August 2001, IE6 has served its Redmond master well, even if it has caused us a few headaches over its interesting take on HTML, Document Object Model, and JavaScript compatibility over the years...
Thanks to Dave Merrilees from Tesco.com's IT user-interface team for sourcing this information for me.
Just to note, I've found when using Safari on the Iphone, while browsing tesco direct, the browser freezes when attempting to load up 3 pages in a row. I have to resort to copying my current page, and pasting it into a new tab, every time I need to click a link, otherwise I'll freeze for a good minute or two. I actually use this website to assist customers with direct purchases (I'm a Tech Team member).
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