Google Chrome continues its upward march in global populatiy, and Internet Explorer (IE) its downward spiral, as this graph clearly shows.
It’s incredible that only a few years ago, Internet Explorer was so completely dominant. At time of writing, there’s little to suggest that Google Chrome won’t stop rising, and IE won’t stop falling. But then again, things can change very quickly in IT!
One significant difference between Google Chrome and IE is that, give or take, almost everyone who uses Google Chrome is using the same (latest) version. This is because Google Chrome has always auto-updated itself to the latest version by default. Conversely, IE has not even offered up this service until very recently, meaning that IE users are fragmented across the latest and previous versions – 10, 9, 8, 7, and even 6 – as this rollercoaster graph clearly demonstrates.
The fragmentation of IE users across different versions is a major pain in the neck for website developers like Itomic, and website owners. We primarily design and develop sites for the latest, most popular browsers and versions. But sometimes website features that work great on these latest versions aren’t backwards-compatible with older versions, and this can involve additional time and money to resolve.