Your website from Nicely Done Sites is an entrance to your business. It is an employee that requires no sleep, no coffee breaks and no lunch break. When visitors come to your website they will be viewing the same page but yet may be arriving using different programs. The browser that is used to bring a visitor to your page can seem unimportant but yet can be very important.
In the days of yesteryear it was common for a website to display differently in different browsers. Most of the variations were small and could easily be ignored but some were major issues. Applets may not work correctly, login pages may not log people in or graphics might just not display. That is not as much of a problem anymore as technology and awareness of this has improved but it can still happen.
Browsers have been competing for your usership since the day Mosaic was released to the world in 1993. Internet Explorer had a near monopoly as their browser was included as a part of the Windows operating system leaving their nearest rival Netscape Navigator out in the cold. The two companies sued and counter-sued but while Netscape won in the court of law Internet Explorer won on the Internet.
This led to websites being designed with Internet Explorer in mind. As long as the site looked good and functioned in IE nothing else mattered. While Netscape Navigator has disappeared from the Internet other new browsers have stepped in to take its place and compete with Microsoft. Opera, Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome as well as Navigator’s next evolution Firefox which was released in 2009.
Microsoft’s market share has continuously declined in recent years. From a high of around 69% in 2008 it had about 18% of the market when Internet Explorer was replaced in July 2015. It’s replacement, Edge, it seems has never enjoyed the popularity its predecessor has keeping about a 4% market share despite being loaded on every Windows machine. For Navigator and its successor Firefox it too has come down in popularity. When Firefox was released in 2009 it had about a 30% market share. That has declined in that time to about 12% as of the end of 2017. Of course some people have not given up on Internet Explorer and around 4% of the World Wide Web still use it despite the fact it hasn’t been updated in years.
So what are people using to surf the web? Opera has never gained more than about 4% of the market. Safari, being the principle browser for Apple computers as well as having a Microsoft version, enjoys about a 6% share. That leaves one browser left. The most popular browser today is Google’s Chrome. Chrome’s acceptance was slow when it was released in September 2009 but when it began to grow it never stopped. At its peak in 2017 Chrome had over a 60% market share.
So chances are when a visitor is coming to your page they are probably using Chrome to do so. Have you checkout out what your site looks like in Chrome? You probably should. At least have a look at what it looks like on a mobile device. Over 50% of all web traffic is done today via a mobile device and Chrome is the most popular browser in that medium as well..