Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 7

I was digging around in Google Analytics last month and noticed a slightly worrying trend: while IE6 usage has gradually been gradually falling to an almost insignificant amount, the number of visits from IE7 users has been showing hardly any sign of waning over the last year, holding steady at around 6% of all our traffic.

Surprisingly, a very large chunk of the IE7 traffic was coming from devices on the University network, even though most people are running either IE8 or 9. It turned out that this was because there's a setting in IE9 to 'Display intranet sites in Compatibility View' (where Compatibility View makes IE9 behave as if it's IE7), and this was enabled by default for york.ac.uk.

A couple of quick emails to IT Services later, and a change was pushed out to all supported desktops to turn this setting off (unless the user had manually set it).

The change was immediate:

Change in internal IE7 traffic after disabling Compatibility View for intranet sites (the regular dips are weekends)

We're now down from 18% to 6% for our internal IE7 traffic, and overall it's come down a couple of percentage points from 6% to 4%.

Google dropping support for Internet Explorer 7

Yesterday, Google announced their plans to stop supporting older browsers. From 1 August 2011, only the current and previous versions of the main browsers will be guaranteed to work with Google's suite of web applications (which for a lot of people primarily means Google Mail).

For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

With Internet Explorer now up to version 9, this means that they will no longer support version 7 (not too surprising, given that it's nearly 5 years old).

Looking at our own stats for the University of York website, last month we saw IE7 account for 5.7% of our traffic, with ten-year-old IE6 still hanging on in there with 2.7% of our visits.

With Microsoft also behind a campaign to move the world off Internet Explorer 6, things are looking promising for getting people to move over to much more modern browsers.

Mobile browser trends into 2010

Who doesn't love a good graph?

Following on from Dan's post about Browser Trends into 2010, I though it would be interesting to look at all smartphone traffic to the site over the last year.

A year ago we had just over a thousand visits per month from iPhones, Androids, Blackberrys, etc. We're now up to almost seven thousand. Still small numbers in the grand scheme of things, but a huge increase percentage wise.

For anyone who's interested, this graph was created using an advanced segment in Google Analytics, configured to include traffic with a browser or operating system that matched the regular expression:

android|black|HTC|iphone|ipod|lg|nokia|
palm|samsung|sonysymbian|vodafone|treo|xda|netfront

Browser trends into 2010

I noticed a post by Nick at UCL a couple of weeks ago about browser trends in 2009 on their site and it prompted me to have a look at our numbers too.

As Nick noted in his post, these trends are not really a surprise but they're still interesting and it's worth keeping an eye on the big picture.

Here are our trends over the past year:

IE6





IE7





IE8


Chrome


Safari


Mac


iPhone


(Caveat: we've been rolling Google Analytics out more widely over the past year so a small amount of upward trending is likely down to us covering more pages over time)


Update:
Someone pointed out that I forgot to include Firefox, so here's just one more:


Update 2!:
Arthur noted that comparisons would be more useful, so I pulled some of the data into Excel and came up with this (click through to see a bigger, almost-legible version):