Mashable reports:
An analytics company called Net Applications has determined that Google’s Chrome web browser is stealing market share from both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
In January, Chrome (Chrome) grew by 0.57% to 5.20% of the browser market. Meanwhile, Firefox (Firefox) shrunk by 0.20% to 24.41% and IE shrunk 0.51% to 62.18%. Safari and Opera both stayed put, more or less; Safari (Safari) grew 0.05% to 4.51% and Opera (Opera) shrunk 0.02% to 2.38%.
Here is what that looks like in pie chart format:
So why should nonprofits and foundations care?
You need to make sure any websites you have — your main organizational website, your blog, your Youtube page, your Twitter profile, etc. — display properly in all popular web browsers. Each browser renders the HTML (and other code) in your website slightly differently. This can impact the design of your website both in terms of spacing issues and coloration. A few years ago you could simply check Mozilla (Firefox) and Internet explorer. Now there are five browsers worth testing.
There are two simple ways to do this type of testing:
1) Download all of the browsers on your computer and test them. The advantage of this approach is that you can see for yourself exactly how the website displays with each browser. The disadvantages of this approach are that it can be very time consuming, especially if you test for different screen resolutions as well.
2) A service called Browser Shots can generate screenshots of any website with a broad variety of browsers, settings and screen resolutions. The advantage of this approach is that you can test for nearly every setting. The disadvantage of this approach is that you end up viewing screenshots, rather than live versions of the site in various browsers.
Want to dig further on this? Using Google Analytics you can determine which browsers visitors to your website are using. To do so, follow these instructions:
1) Select the date range for which you’d like to get data on browser usage.
2) On the left-side navigation, click ‘visitors.’
3) Under that, click ‘browser capabilities.’
4) Under that, click ‘browsers.’
This will display a list of browsers in order of popularity, as well as a pie chart. Here is an example:
So for this site, for example, Firefox was considerably more popular than it is across the web as a whole. If this were my website, I’d take Firefox into greater consideration when designing my website than I would for most other sites.