Tomorrow is a holiday here, and it puts me in a good mood. Thanksgiving forces me to take some quiet time to ponder how truly blessed I am. So today I’m in an appreciative frame of mind. It also makes me feel somewhat child-like because I remember the smell of huge Thanksgiving dinners with my grandfather’s family.

This atmosphere has put me in kid mode. That’s the only way I can explain why I found it so fun to get wrapped up in cool web statistics that I found at StatCounter.com. Am I the last geek on the planet to find this site? StatCounter, I’m grateful for you.

What at first caught my eye was the percentage of usage for each web browser. Knowing how many people are using Firefox vs. IE vs. Chrome has value to me since the browser affects performance of websites (user perspective). It’s also good to know IE 6 vs IE 7 vs IE 8. When Firefox came out about 6 years ago, I started using it primarily because it performed better. Now, Chrome and Firefox seem to be implementing the best new functionality and speed improvements, so I fire them up almost interchangeably – which is problematic for my bookmarks.

However, I was surprise to see the Mashable article declaring Microsoft Internet Explorer Loses Browser War. It seems to me IE still has the most share, but the drop from 99% to 49% over the past few years is noteworthy. Perhaps there are millions of nerds celebrating from a feeling of schadenfreude as they watch MS lose ground somewhere in the software industry. Come to think of it, I have a bit of thinly-veiled grudge residual from the hundreds of “blue screen moments from hell”.

Anyway, here are the facts ma’am:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

The graph above shows that with all major versions of each browser combined, IE still looks to be the leader in market share. So why are so many people not availing themselves of FREE software that would improve their web surfing experience? Don’t they know that pages load faster in Chrome? Don’t they know all the extraordinary plug-ins you can get for Firefox? Don’t they know how poorly IE handles Javascript? Don’t they care about standards implementations?!!

Nope. Most people are not geeks like us.

The World is Generally Browser Agnostic

I’ll bet that most Internet users don’t really care if they have an Apple or Dell, Windows or MacOS.
The majority of computer buyers are still unsure about the existence of an operating system, nor do they really care of whence it came. Web surfers generally don’t have a desire to know much about web browsers.

Many people I’ve spoken with that aren’t in our industry (normal people) have such a lack of understanding that the web, ISPs, HTML, cable providers, servers, pages, iPhones, Google, and www are all synonymous with the Internet. In fact, the Internet to them is actually an icon on their desktop that when magically clicked brings up what they want to see. Portal doesn’t mean anything significant. Web browser is a vague concept related to using the back button or typing in the address of a site they heard about on the radio.

Of course, those of us that are web performance engineers, application developers, or load testers DO care about browsers. I think we just take ourselves too seriously to realize that IE is going to be around for a long time. Have you noticed that IE 6 still has almost 10% of all usage? And that browser was probably written in COBOL!! It’s an antique. IE 6 is as obsolete as a dot matrix printer.

Lesson for Web Performance

The first lesson I would submit to you fellow nerds is that we need to stay realistic. The actual universe of people hitting web pages are considerably different from us. We are disconnected from the typical browser user, and that affects how we perceive our mission.

Be careful to assume your user base will shop around for the best browser. It’s a fallacy. Most don’t invest any time in choosing a browser, and they certainly understand the performance degradation they are experiencing is because Microsoft chose poorly when implementing IE 7. Nor should we assume they will even upgrade their browser browser to get the bug fixes. Most don’t, unfortunately.

Therefore, I recommend that you test your websites and applications in several browsers. Using YSlow or Google Page Speed is a good way to profile your pages in order to make improvements. Those tools can show you the harm of that 200k png, how incredibly slow your Javascript runs, or that you should merge those 62 CSS files. However, those tools are only going to show you actual numbers based on Firefox.

Run some tests using webPageTest.org too. It allows you to choose IE 6 or 7 to see how bad it can really get. Using one of these historically underachieving browsers may be a terrible idea for you and I during our work day, but as performance engineers, it is in our best interest to explore the worst case experience. Unfortunately, there are still about 25% of web users out there that won’t give up IE 6 or 7 until their spouse gives them a new computer for Christmas 2013. It would be unwise to ignore them when we are doing performance testing. 25% of a billion Internet users? Even my Kentucky public education can figure out that real money is involved.

Fortunately, the younger generation appears to be aware of browser performance. Most people under the age of 25 are quite savvy on just about anything with computing power.

Warning: proud father reference contained in this last paragraph
I just asked my seventeen year old (the one that made the U17 USA National Rugby Team) what browser she prefers. “Firefox definitely. It’s way faster than what came on my computer.” She currently has a Vista machine, so IE is not her favorite.

With the attention Google has put on page performance in this past year, it seems that the issue of browser speed is starting to hit the awareness of mainstream Internet usage. Let’s hope so.

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