The Curse of the Obsolete Browser

MSIE versions 5.5 and up, and Netscape 6.0 versions and up, both do a good job of displaying pages that are written in accordance with current W3C.org specifications. But earlier browser versions do not suddenly disappear just because new ones come out. There are businesses and government agencies that still use Windows 98, even Windows 95, and cannot upgrade to the latest browsers. There are also people who are satisfied with their current software installations the ones they got working "just right" in 1999 and haven't changed since and are not going to change until a major hardware failure forces them to buy a new computer.

Table 8-1 is an excerpt from the actual browser statistics for a low-volume transportation industry Web site from March, 2002. At the time, the latest MSIE was version 6.0, and the latest Netscape was version 6.21.

Note that the latest browser versions are in the minority. This list includes only browsers and versions that hit this site more than 100 times. 79 users viewed the site on Macs using MSIE 5.01, and hundreds more viewed it on browsers ranging all the way back to Netscape 3, and 31 used text-only browsers that haven't been updated significantly since the mid-90s.

One thing in the above table that shouldn't be taken seriously is the fact that AvantGo (www.avantgo.com) is in the number one position. AvantGo is a service, not a browser, and once AvantGo adds a site to its list, its automated crawlers tend to hit it frequently, looking for updates. AvantGo recreates each site that it crawls in a simpler format than appears on a regular monitor screen, and that simplified site is what users of the service see on their PDAs, cellular phones, and other small-screen devices. While the owner of this site is probably happy that AvantGo is showing it to clients, chances are the number of AvantGo users who actually looked at it was much smaller than the 441 displayed in the site statistics.

 #reqs: browser   441: Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; AvantGo 3.2)   362: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01;  Windows NT 5.0)   338: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows  NT 5.1; Q312461)   304: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv: 0.9.4) Gecko/20011126 Netscape6/6.2.1   301: sitecheck.internetseer.com (For more info  see: http://sitecheck.internetseer.com)   266: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows  NT 5.0; Q312461)   240: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows  NT 5.0)   232: LinksManager.com (http://linksmanager.com/ linkchecker.html)   213: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows  NT 5.0)   180: Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/si; [e-mail];  http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html)   180: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows  NT 5.0; T312461)   166: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows  98; DigExt)   158: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows  98)   153: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows  NT 5.1)   151: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/ bot.html)   141: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows  98; Q312461)   141: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22  i686)   116: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows  NT 4.0)   115: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows  98)   106: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows  NT 5.0) Fetch API Request   104: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows  NT 5.1; Q312461; MSIECrawler)   100: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows  98; Win 9x 4.90)