Web browser trends on Tesco.com site

As part of my fact-finding role I have received statistics that reveal the web browsers that customers are using to access the Tesco.com web site.

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.

Tesco.com Grocery Accelerator for IE8 now live

If you have Microsoft's latest web browser, Internet Explorer 8, try out our new Tesco.com Grocery Accelerator.

http://tesco.cloudapp.net/ie8.aspx

Then, whenever you read a web page anywhere on the web that mentions food and drink, click the blue 'accelerator' icon that appears next to the word(s) you highlight on the page. When the accelerators menu appears, hover your mouse over 'Hover to search Tesco.com grocery' in your list of accelerators. A small window will appear which, after a few seconds, will list up to five Tesco.com products matching the highlighted text.

If you click the 'Hover..' message (rather than just hover over it), a new page opens with some extended search results.

The accelerator is actually an XML document which has commands to tell IE8 what do. You can see the XML itself (in any browser that renders XML) if you navigate straight to http://tesco.cloudapp.net/addTescoIE8Accelerator.xml

The accelerator XML points to page ie8.aspx (running at our space in the Microsoft Azure 'cloud') whose behaviour depends on parameters supplied in the page request, namely  'searchfor=' and 'preview=n'.

So, searching for highlighted text 'chocolate' becomes:

http://tesco.cloudapp.net/ie8.aspx?searchfor=chocolate  in preview mode, and

http://tesco.cloudapp.net/ie8.aspx?searchfor=chocolate&preview=n  in full-page mode.

The page ie8.aspx is, of course, using the Tesco.com grocery API to perform the search. The page does not have the actual credentials of the customer, so it calls the API with an account pointing to our Brent Cross store in north London, which has an average-sized product range.

Soon I intend to both improve performance and also update the service so that the customer can login to the service quickly, search their own store, and add the search results straight to their shopping basket - ideal if, for example,  they are on a recipe site and want to obtain the ingredients.