There was a time when the majority of people used Internet Explorer and the questions web designers' asked had to do with their nervousness about people with old browsers, for example: "what proportion of people user Internet Explorer version 6". Oh how things have changed!
A lot of usage now comes from mobile devices and all those have modern browsers (mostly Chrome or Safari), plus a large proportion of desktop users have also opted for Chrome or Safari. All these modern browsers are aggressive in encouraging people to upgrade when that's necessary so web designers can be confident that this proportion of users all have very capable browsers.
To get hard data for you we've taken a representative sample of 10 UK law firms and looked at the proportion of people using each browser. The firms in our sample range from large to small and city-centric to village-centric but they all have modern sites - we've then calculated a weighted average:
| Chrome | Safari | Internet Explorer | Firefox | Other | Size (sessions last month) | Percentage of sample | ||
| Site 1 | 40% | 33% | 14% | 4% | 9% | 59,810 | 57% | |
| Site 2 | 55% | 20% | 14% | 4% | 7% | 9,566 | 9% | |
| Site 3 | 36% | 27% | 22% | 5% | 11% | 8,680 | 8% | |
| Site 4 | 58% | 21% | 14% | 3% | 4% | 6,981 | 7% | |
| Site 5 | 36% | 26% | 22% | 5% | 11% | 6,350 | 6% | |
| Site 6 | 36% | 29% | 17% | 3% | 15% | 5,499 | 5% | |
| Site 7 | 36% | 29% | 23% | 5% | 7% | 3,530 | 3% | |
| Site 8 | 34% | 33% | 18% | 6% | 9% | 1,704 | 2% | |
| Site 9 | 50% | 23% | 12% | 6% | 9% | 1,531 | 1% | |
| Site 10 | 38% | 25% | 23% | 5% | 9% | 1,172 | 1% | |
| WEIGHTED AVERAGE | 42% | 29% | 15% | 4% | 9% | 104,823 | 100% |
The points in this that stand out for me are:
- Less than 20% of people use Internet Explorer (on average it's only 15%) - I bet that's less than you expected
- Only a tiny proportion of people now use Firefox (on average it's only 4%) - a lot less than I expected
