How to know Browser usage statistics of your target audience

An extremely important thing to note before you start developing a website is to know what browsers your target audience would be using. You would not want your site to fail due to some cross-browser or design issues on the browsers most commonly used by the site's visitors.

If you are building a private website you can get this information from the client you are building it for but if its a public website you will have to know which set of browsers your target audience will use.

Finding which browsers your site’s visitors will use is obviously not a easy thing but once you know what geographies they are predominantly going to come from, you can make a calculated guess about the browser set you should focus your efforts on.

StatCounter is a popular web analytics service provider that offers its visitor tracking tool to web publishers both for free & a fee. They reportedly aggregate browser-related data from a sample exceeding 5 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites & present this on their StatCounter Global Stats website.

As per StatCounter Global Stats, IE8 is the world’s most popular browser with a 25.98% share (at the time of writing) & the combined share of all the IE popular versions (6, 7, 8) is 53.59%.

During the current year, the use of IE6 has come down to roughly 5% in the US & UK but IE6 remains the the most used browser in India (26.2%) & China (59.29%), two of the world’s largest countries with fast growing Internet usage.

Among mobile browsers, the Opera Mobile browser commands the first position in Asia (50%) but ranks fifth in North America where iPhone (28.03%) tops the charts.

StatCounter Global Stats also provides search engine usage stats & other useful information by country and region. All this information is available through line & bar charts as well as in a downloadable CSV spreadsheet format.

Although the methodology used by StatCounter Global Stats may not exactly be representative of actual users worldwide, it provides important trends for planning development of a website.