Browser share for SaaS apps is different - and discontinuing support for IE6 in Zoho

This comes as a surprise to no one, but today we are discontinuing support for IE6 across all Zoho Applications. With all the hoopla about IE6's death, which even included a funeral, this was a long-time coming. We just wanted to give IE6 users a little more time. 

Looking at our traffic, from January 2010 to July 2010, IE6's share (which was already very little), got cut in about half. We know it will take years before it reaches 0.00% (if it ever does!), but thought this was a good time to just kill it and focus on the newer, better browsers. We will not actively block IE6 users from trying to access Zoho applications, but we've stopped testing on it.

Now, speaking about browsers... Some other properties will see different traffic patterns, but because Zoho's applications are one of the most advanced out there in terms of pushing the browsing experience and technologies to its limits, we tend to attract those people that care more about having a great browsing experience in AJAX-heavy pages.

So, with that in mind, we thought we'd share some stats about how the main browsers have been doing with us so far during the year. As you'd expect, the trend is exactly the same as some of the reportsoutthere: Explorer continues to decline, Firefox is still second but seems to be declining now, while Chrome is making rapid gains. What's different here are the actual shares of the browsers that we are seeing. For example, NetMarketshare pings IE's share at around 60%. For us is a bit below 38%. Chrome is almost double to what they show. Again -not saying those stats are wrong- we're just highlighting how different the browser market share looks from a SaaS-vendor perspective.



Rodrigo

Comments

2 Replies to Browser share for SaaS apps is different - and discontinuing support for IE6 in Zoho

  1. Sad to hear IE6 won't be supported. My NT4 clients won't be too happy. Don't laugh. We still got businesses here using Windows 95 on Netware LANs. Zoho was a wonderful way to urge them into better ways manage business tasks. And to tempt them to use Linux or Solaris in modernizing their hardware investments because of lower resource requirements.
    Since I use Linux so much, let me just explain that Opera seems to have page formatting problems on either Windows/Linux. And Mozilla's SeaMonkey has freeze problems not present in using sister app Firefox. But I'd rather use SeaMonkey! Google Chrome is still basically beta in Linux. When their OS comes out tho, I think you'll see a jump in Chrome use.
    No Mac users in my clients so I only play with Safari on an XP desktop and have not experienced the problems like I've had with Opera and SeaMonkey.
    Keep up the good work. And watch for the phone app market for your services. These browser stats may seem irrelevant sooner than you think.

  2. Sad to hear IE6 won't be supported. My NT4 clients won't be too happy. Don't laugh. We still got businesses here using Windows 95 on Netware LANs. Zoho was a wonderful way to urge them into better ways manage business tasks. And to tempt them to use Linux or Solaris in modernizing their hardware investments because of lower resource requirements.
    Since I use Linux so much, let me just explain that Opera seems to have page formatting problems on either Windows/Linux. And Mozilla's SeaMonkey has freeze problems not present in using sister app Firefox. But I'd rather use SeaMonkey! Google Chrome is still basically beta in Linux. When their OS comes out tho, I think you'll see a jump in Chrome use.
    No Mac users in my clients so I only play with Safari on an XP desktop and have not experienced the problems like I've had with Opera and SeaMonkey.
    Keep up the good work. And watch for the phone app market for your services. These browser stats may seem irrelevant sooner than you think.

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