There have been a few articles about changing market share for browsers and whether browsers are supported by services. Since I have the reporting tools, and as it's the end of year and so I have a full set of data for 2008, I thought I'd share some information on how salesforce.com's service has seen browser versions change. If you are looking for total share numbers, normally Jerry covers that - e.g. in June 2008 he shared his results on browser share. There are also a set of good comments in that article in response to Jerry's questions about how users use IE6 and whether they can upgrade.

We're a web application used normally by businesses - so our total numbers might not line up with somebody measuring all accesses from all browsers.

Versions of IE

Here is the split between May 2004 and December 2008 - you can see when IE7 came out, and is slowly being pushed down to upgrade IE6. IE8 isn't statistically significant yet - it's still in beta as of January 2009.

Internet Explorer changes fairly slowly - users are either happy with their current experience, don't want to upgrade, or are not in control of their PCs. For instance, in one of the comments in Jerry's blog post above, the user says that their IT department controls the deployment over their 5000 PCs

Version of Safari

The Safari version split shows a quicker movement from version to version - particularly version 3 which replaced all the other versions pretty quickly. I'm not sure why the number of 1.3 and 2 versions went back up - it's probably be customers trying Safari 3 on Windows - released in March 2008 - then going back to other browsers or switching to FireFox 3 because they are the cool kids.

For instance, in this idea to make Safari 3 supported - it says Safari was faster than the FireFox at the time. Then there were articles saying FF3 was faster than Safari 3 so people must have then changed again - and looking below, when Safari 3 is loosing ground, it's when the avalanche of users upgrading to FireFox 3 is happening.

Firefox

One look at the FireFox graph below tells the story of a quick upgrade cycle. People are definitely in control of their Firefox installations, and seem to press the "upgrade" button without hesitation. And it's getting faster each time! That nagging window telling you to upgrade to a new experience really works.