Sent by Ian Anderson on 30 January 2006 10:10
Bob Easton wrote:
> If you are trying to make a decision about which browsers to support,
> the *only* place you should be looking is your own site's logs.
> Determine what your actual audience uses, not some sample of an unknown
> audience.
I think this is potentially bad advice in that it can be easiy
misapplied. I don't disagree with the basic idea you're trying to get
across, which is to support what your desired audience uses, but relying
on your own server logs as the main method is of determining this is flawed.
Imagine that the site in question has some accessibility problems, or
uses Flash in unpleasant ways. Looking at the server logs will primarily
tell you which configurations are more successful with the current site,
not reflect the wider audience that would like to use the site. I have
seen server logs used to justify maintaining inaccessible design techniques.
Also, many UAs identify themselves as MSIE to get around sniffing
techniques.
Also, a huge proportion of the site traffic will be search engines and
other bots.
The server logs can be a really unreliable way to find out what people
are using, never mind what people would *like* to use to access your
site. As an example of this, some authors may not be aware that
assistive technology such as screen readers don't show up in server logs
at all.
I use this site to get a rough idea of what's going on in the general
browser world:
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/
Cheers
Ian
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