This is obviously a smaller subset of the internet than even visitors to the brochure-ware site. We have limited it to anything greater than 1%, and had a total of 187 different user agents (although different browser plugins will mean that the same browser will report as different).

We like the fact that there are still a few users still running IE6 on Windows 98 who access our site – perhaps they truly realize the importance of testing for Cross Browser compatibility.

Details of how you can use the Cross Browser testing facility within the Cloud Testing service are available at www.cloudtesting.com.

First looking at which browser our visitors use, Firefox is the clear leader with Internet Explorer second, and the rest bringing up the rear.

Browser used

If we now drill into various versions of the browsers, again Firefox is well out in the lead, but look at the IE split – more visitors to our site still use IE6 rather than IE8 – we suspect that it’s all those corporate desktops locked down, but it shows you that you still need to check what your site looks like in IE6 if you want to get to those users.

Browser version used

Finally, if we look at which Operating Systems our users have come from, we’re in for even more of a shock – they’re all still on XP – well not all, but head and shoulders above the rest.

Operating System used

So what does our investigation show us?

The majority of our users are still on XP, but are running Firefox, so probably corporate users, who haven’t been allowed to upgrade their version of IE, but are allowed to install other browsers such as Firefox. Our mix of OS and browsers are also well out of line with the big surveys of usage, but then this by volume is skewed by the large number of consumer installs.

It also shows us that the profile of visitors to your website is an important thing to think about when testing, and making sure that you do cross browser testing for all those your visitors use – even the small percentage ones.

Details of how you can use the Cross Browser testing facility within the Cloud Testing service are available at www.cloudtesting.com.

See also – Browsers used by visitors to Cloud Testing Portal