[Gllug] browsers

[Tom Gilbert]

* Steve Nicholson (steve at kiwibum.com) wrote:
> > than it is now.  We decided to make our site compatible with IE and Netscape
> > because these were, and still are, the browsers used by the overwhelming
> > majority of web users.  Since then (almost 2 years ago), Opera's popularity
> > has grown but it is still insignificant - a recent survey estimates that
> > less than 1% of web users have Opera as their browser
> 
> The thing that always annoys me about people making decisions from
> these statics is they don't look at the numbers just the percentage.
> 1% is a small amount until you look at it out of 100,000 or 1,000,000
> visitors a month, then it starts to mean something.  I know sites that
> made the decision to only bother with IE because, "it has 80% of the
> market and not worth the extra work for the other 20%".  They were
> looking at over 100,000 visitors a month, so basically with out even
> thinking about it said "we are going to piss off 20,000 people a
> month"!  Funny thing is I don't see any real shops in the high streets
> thinking this way with their customers.

Dead right! The number of companies I know that would absolutely *KILL*
for a 1% market share in their area of business... Well it's a lot :)p

I recently had some success with wrapit.co.uk, a wedding list service
and online shop. As always, money talks loudest, so when I emailed them
explaining that 95% of my friends and family would be shopping in non-IE
browsers, and that various features of their site required to _spend
money_ didn't work, and that I was compiling a reasonably large list of
wedding gifts for purchase.... Well the next day I got a call from the
CTO asking what I'd like him to fix and how best to fix it :)

If you can talk money, there's bugger all need to quote statistics or
surveys ;)

Tom.
-- 
   .^.    .-------------------------------------------------------.
   /V\    | Tom Gilbert, London, England | http://linuxbrit.co.uk |
 /(   )\  | Open Source/UNIX consultant  | tom at linuxbrit.co.uk    |
  ^^-^^   `-------------------------------------------------------'

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