Web apps that rely on features that only modern browsers can offer are becoming a standard feature on the Internet. Sadly, though, the fact that a lot of users don’t regularly upgrade their browsers (or that their IT departments don’t allow them to upgrade) complicates matters greatly for those developers who want to use the latest and greatest features of modern browser technologies like HTML5. The latest data from Pingdom and StatCounter, however, notes that a surprisingly large number of users (71%) already run the latest official versions of their browser.
Thanks to Chrome’s built-in update mechanism, the latest stable version of Google’s browser (Chrome 7) now powers 90.6% of all Chrome users’ Internet experience. Given Chrome’s fast release cycles and the wide availability of beta and developer builds, chances are that a large number of those who don’t run Chrome 7 actually run even more up-to-date releases of it.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer haven’t upgraded to the latest version of their browser yet. Only 60.2% of IE users are running version 8 yet. The total number of IE users has been dropping for a while now and has recently dipped under 50%, but IE remains the most often used browser on the Web (we hesitate to call it the most “popular” browser). The upcoming release of IE9, though, could prove to be a turning point, as it is faster and far more standards compliant than previous versions. For the time being, 14% of Internet users are still running IE6, which was released on August 27, 2001.
Do You Run the Latest Version of Your Browser?
Are you using the latest and greatest version of your browser of choice? Do you use Google Chrome’s canary builds and the latest beta version of Firefox 4 to stay on top of things? Or are you still stuck on IE6 at work because your admin locked down your machine and your company’s internal Web apps still only run on IE6? Let us know in the comments.
