Website Redesign, Which Browsers to Target?

In part 1, Why an updated web design?, we reviewed the rationales behind our decision to go for a design update.

In this part, we describe which platform/OS/browser we will support and test our web site against.

Step 1: Get stats from Google Analytics

We used past 3 months of Google Analytics to get the following statistics on our visitor base.

1. Operating System:
   
2. Browsers:
   
   Need to go into more details 
   1. Chrome
       

      Very messy and not really useful…

   2. Safari
       

      Quite a range…

   3. Internet Explorer
       

      Definitely useful, still close to 20% of IE users using IE8, guessing corporate computers running XP…

   4. Android Browser
       

      So only 4.x, no need to worry about older versions…

Step 2: Making Sense of it, Threshold selection

Now let’s make more sense of this, using excel and setting some targets

1. Operating System:
   

   OS	%	S%
   Windows	53.9%	53.9%
   iOS	16.9%	70.8%
   Macintosh	15.7%	86.5%
   Android	12.9%	99.5%
   Linux	0.3%	99.7%
   Windows Phone	0.1%	99.9%
   Others	0.2%	100.0%

2. Browsers:
    

   Browser	Version	actual %	∑ %
   Safari	7.0.x	17.02%	17.02%
   Chrome	36.x	16.96%	33.98%
   Chrome	37.x	13.53%	47.52%
   Chrome	35.x	7.17%	54.69%
   IE	11.0	6.14%	60.83%
   IE	9.0	3.66%	64.49%
   Android	4.x	3.04%	67.53%
   IE	8.0	2.89%	70.41%
   Chrome	1.5	2.40%	72.82%
   IE	10.0	1.68%	74.50%
   Safari	5.1.x	1.00%	75.50%
   Safari	8.0	0.85%	76.35%
   Safari	6.0	0.84%	77.20%
   Opera		0.51%	77.71%
   IE	7.0	0.38%	78.09%
   IE	6.0	0.04%	78.12%
   in bold the browsers to be used for full testing

Next Part: Choosing targeted screen resolutions