Trade Me Browser Stats: March 2013
It's stats time once again at Trade Me and the general theme is "more of the same" as we see the trends from late last year continuing to play out. There are a few exceptions … more
Trade Me Browser Stats: September 2012
Back in the day, Trade Me alumnus Rowan Simpson used to post Trade Me browser statistics to his blog, providing a very handy resource for kiwi web folk who were able to validate their own observations on browser trends in New Zealand. For the nostalgic, his last post in May 2007 showed IE commanding about an 80% overall browser share, with good old IE6 a whopping 51% all on its own. Those were the days.
We'd like to start sharing this data again. Every three months we'll publish the previous 13 months of data so you can easily see the trends over time and we'll provide some brief commentary around what we think that data might indicate. I hope you find it useful!
Trade Me Desktop (www.trademe.co.nz)
We separate browser usage into two sets; those above and those below a 5% usage threshold. The latter is a kind of "birth and death" chart which shows us when new browsers pop up and, importantly, when browsers are likely to fall under our official support threshold of 1% (we had a small party when IE6 fell below this a year ago.)
We're seeing a general decline in IE7 and IE8 with a corresponding, but reduced, uptake of IE9. Chrome and Safari are on a slow, gradual rise while Firefox is holding fast around the 15% mark. The Rendering Engine chart backs this up and we expect to see the Webkit browsers overtake IE next month. Interesting times!
On the Operating System front, Windows is still king. We're still seeing a decent number of XP users (22% last month) which must be a bit of a headache for Microsoft and something perhaps Windows 8 will help remedy. Those users still on XP must either stick with IE8 or try switching to a Webkit browser, which might help explain why overall IE share is in decline. Watch this space.
Trade Me Touch (touch.trademe.co.nz)
In May this year we started redirecting mobile web browsers from the Desktop site to our Touch site. We also provide a toggle at the bottom of every page on both Desktop and Touch to allow members to switch between the two (and we respect that choice instead of constantly redirecting.)
Since the floodgates on Touch opened up we've seen the iOS share hold steady at about 50%. iOS6 was released late in September and early indicators are that adoption is pretty healthy. Next month should see an iOS6 spike and a corresponding drop in iOS5 usage. Android continues on its steady rise, which is great to see.
That's all for today. I'd love to know if you find this useful or if there's other data that would be genuinely of use. Fire your comments and questions to us @trademelabs (and/or to the author @tarkwyn.) We'll aim to get the next round of stats out in early January.
Finally, please remember that while this data represents a hefty cross-section of New Zealand browsing behaviour, YMMV and you should always look at your own site stats to make your own decisions about which technologies your site should support.
12 Comments
scott stevens said
proud to be a part of the Linux 0.6%!
Tom said
Definitely useful to see a more NZ relevant benchmark for these sorts of stats - a site as widely used (in NZ) as trademe is great for this!
Allan Kent said
This is excellent to see. So much of the stuff we read about regarding this sort of thing is out of the US which doesn't necessarily translate to the market here. I'll be sharing this on our Facebook page.
Thanks
Max Dashwood said
Thanks! This is really valuable to NZ web devs. Thanks again.
Steve Yeoman said
This is a great asset for Kiwi webbies, and clearly shows my clients why they shouldn't be spending their money supporting dying technologies like IE8.
Myles said
Great to able to see this and the trends as it is very NZ specific.
Thanks.
David Blair said
Great, thanks for sharing, I echo Allan's comments, great to see some NZ data!
Lee Reichardt said
Something that would be useful also is the a percentage of Desktop vs Mobile usage. So we can see a possible future line of where mobile usage in NZ is heading.
Stephen Logan said
Thanks for the stats guys
this is invaluable!
Bryce Pearce said
Interesting that you split the different versions of IE out but do not do the same for the others?
Andrew Chilton said
Great to see not just the graphs, but a bit of analysis around it too. :)
Lee Reichardt said
Can you let us know the mobile share bs desktop share. This is quite important too. Very interesting stats though.