Web Browser Market Share Statistics Are Lies - Microsoft Alters Info

February 12, 2009 by Curt Siters

I had been struggling with trying to get something to work in both web standards compliant browsers and Microsoft internet Explorer. When I did some under the hood checking, using php and javascript, boy was I surprised!

I've been dealing with computers since high school in the late 1980's with a mainframe and punch tape terminal. I was there when Radio Shack had the TRS-80 and Apple had its Apple ][. The first computer I owned was a Macintosh SE 256kb of ram, dual 3 1/2" floppy and no hard drive that I purchased in 1987.

Microsoft did not have Windows. It still used DOS. When I purchased my Mac I also purchased Microsoft Word 5. It was a great word processor. Quick easy to use. You could insert graphics and do quite a bit of page layout (columns, tables and such.)

That was the last thing I have found from Microsoft really worth buying, much less using. As time goes on I am finding less and less to like about Microsofts products and the company itself.

When your web browser contacts a website it sends information to the server the website sits on. This information contains nothing personal. It sends the operating system, os version, browser and browser version among some other stuff. It gets recorded in the web server access logs.

It is well known among website programmers that Microsoft is a pain in the ass (sorry I am pissed about this). It doesn't handle html all that great and is worse when it comes to CSS - both of which are international standards. Opera, Firefox and Safari all strive to be web standards compliant (granted they aren't without their problems) so that if you design to the standards the web page will look almost identical.

Anyway, I am working on a website that is a little more complex in the html and css. Everything looks great in Opera, Firefox and Safari on both Windows and Mac. In Internet Explorer it looks horrid.

To work around Microsofts problems web developers have figured out what are called "hacks" to try and trick Internet Explorer into presenting the web page correctly. That would be ok, if it wasn't for the fact that these hacks don't work in every version if Internet Explorer. The end result is that you have to have seperate hacks for IE 5, IE 6, IE 6 quirks mode, IE 7 and from what I've seen IE 8 will be continuing the progreession.

So, to try and work around these hacks I set about trying to detect for Internet Explorer so that I could include a separate css page to just make the corrections in the css to get IE to present the page the way it was intended.

I created a test page that used php to detect IE but that, I found, was unreliable. Not everyone has javascript turned on, so I ruled that out. I am not sure why, but I then rewrote my test page using both php and javascript to display the browser information. Whoa momma!

What I discovered was that the information that was being sent from my Sony to my server was absolutely identical for Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer! I don't mean close - I MEAN IDENTICAL. Yet the browser information that was obtained by javascript showed that the USER_AGENT (i.e. browser info in geek speak) information for each of those browsers was totally different. Apple's Safari browser showed the correct information (with the exception that Mozilla was thrown in) whether obtained from the website server or javascript.

So, don't ever trust your web server statistics when it comes to browser market share. Don't believe the media when they say IE has 80% market share. They don't. It is probably closer to 20%. But we won't know until Microsoft stops hijacking the information.

The upshot of this is that web servers are recording the exact same information, if you are on MS Windows, for ALL web browsers, except Safari and maybe a handful of small market share browsers (I can't and won't test them all.)

If you are website designer I am asking you to say "screw you" to Microsoft when you design a website and design just to the web standards. Use javascript to detect for IE and tell the site visitor that they are using IE and request that they switch to Fire Fox, Opera or Safari. If a company as big as Microsoft can't get a web browser right (simple when compared to programming a database or spreadsheet or photo editing software) can you trust them to get more complicated software correct?

From this point forward I refuse to design to non-standards compliant browsers - so if you visit a site that tells you to stop using Internet Explorer - it is probably one I designed.

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Curt Siters is an Independent Associate for Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc. He is also aYoung Living Essential Oils Independent distributor and publishes articles on YourWebReference and at TheVeryEssence. He also does web work such as website design, website maintenance and SEO for websites.

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