Google Chrome

Chrome is Google’s own browser that promotes speed, fast loading pages and (not surprisingly) direct access to search from the address bar. Give it a try – it’s really fast.

The report shows that Firefox usage has dropped for 2 months running. The top browser is Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). IE6 usage is falling but unfortunately has still not reached zero  (I say unfortunately because IE6 is old and has a lot of ‘features’ which mean it doesn’t support certain web standards properly).

So what do these trends mean to you as a website owner? Overall it means more and more different browsers to support, which means that you’ll need to do your homework and ensure your website works well across all of these. It’s good to get to know a few tricks to ensure compatibility across multiple web browsers. Some of the best tips are to start off well with clean code that meets the W3C standards and is validated and free of errors. Use a STRICT DOCTYPE to force browsers to apply the rules properly and test your site on as many different browsers as possible.

The survey is based on a limited sample of 40,000 users and might not reflect your own site. The best way to do this for your website is to check your Google Analytics results under the visitors tab. For example I see Firefox is the most popular browser for one of my technical sites but IE8 is the most popular for my non-techie sites.

It’s hard to miss the number of portable devices out there these days and the huge number of people who are regularly using them to visit websites. You don’t want to ignore this part of the market so it’s wise to think about making your site work well on these devices.

There are a couple of problems here. One is the limited resources (small screen, limited user input, etc) and the other is the vast range of devices that you need to support. Most of these devices demand some fairly major changes to your site layout and content to make it work successfully. This can be the biggest headache for you and your site.

One solution here is to pay attention to the market – the iPhone and iPod Touch now account for at least 0.23 percent of web traffic in the US. That may not seem a lot, but it’s a growing number, and it’s larger than the share of any other mobile browser. So it may be a wise solution to target your site just to these devices.

The good news here is that the iPhone has improved the user experience massively. It’s a joy to use and includes support for many web standards, such as XHTML, CSS2 and Javascript. The iPhone is able to do this because its browser is based on the Webkit Open Source Browser Engine (as do the Nokia N95 and Android phones).

This means that you really don’t have to make many changes to your site to get it to work on the iPhone. Great news. Of course the iPhone brings some amazing capabilities for browsing full-sized websites, with easy zooming and scrolling using the touch screen display.

If you want you can take this further and target your site more towards the iPhone: change the site so it’s more ‘small screen friendly’, with button-style navigation and less use of zooming. This makes it more of an iPhone-like application (think of how iTunes looks different on the smaller display). Actually this can be a useful exercise in itself – can you distill your pages down into their key content, just focussing on headlines and titles?

The iPhone keypad is pretty good but still not as useable as a full-size keyboard, so it’s good to find ways to reduce the requirement for visitors to type in text.

Also why not explore some new capabilities that are unique to a mobile site? What can you do with an onboard camera? What about location information?

Even if you don’t dive headfirst into these fancy features, you should be able to create a good user experience for your site using the iPhone. By doing this you are making a decision not to target the older, less capable devices. In a way you are ignoring the long tail of multiple mobile browsers.