Targetting specific browsers based on web stats

Friday 5th September

Time and time again, I see advice along the lines of ‘Add/drop support for a specific browser when your web site stats back up that decision’. Although this is, generally, sound advice, I want to make it clear that there’s a big caveat to that statement.

Say I’m a ‘Browser X’ user. I go to a certain website, that I really want to use, and it looks all screwy, the result of some non-portable CSS. Being a stubborn-minded user, I leave straight away.

Later, the site owner looks at their stats, specifically their page views. They see a single page view from me and, when all such visits are extrapolated across their total traffic, conclude that interest from ‘Browser X’ users is too small to be worth bothering about. So the site continues to ‘fail’ under ‘Browser X’, and that browser's users continue to abandon it.

Conclusion

Examine web stats carefully, paying particular attention to:

Visits, rather than page views (or hits)
Bounce rates — if they’re significantly high in a specific browser (or according to other factors such as screen size), that could point to an unsatisfactory user experience

Targetting specific browsers based on web stats

Conclusion

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