OK, so you are putting up a new website or giving yours a major overhaul. In the planning stages of the project, someone on the team raises the question: which browsers do we optimize for?

Internet Exploder is a no-brainer, as it still commands more than 65 percent of the browser business. IE 8 just came out, so it’s in, as is IE 7 and probably even IE 6. The poor schmo still using IE 5 is just going to have to be out of luck.

Mozilla’s Firefox is definitely in, with nearly 22 percent of web traffic crossing it’s highly-configurable architecture.

Which bring us to Apple’s Safari, at about 8 percent of the market. It’s easy to write Safari off as something that’s Mac-only and therefore not significant enough to matter.

But consider this: Apple’s iPhone, running Safari, had 50 percent of the mobile web traffic in February 2009, more than twice that of second place RIM, maker of the Blackberry. iPhones accounted for 0.5 percent of all traffic on the internet in February.

Suddenly, it’s harder to ignore Safari. And it’s getting a lot harder to ignore mobile web surfers as well. Using Safari on the iPhone is a delight, a far, far cry from the crappy WAP browsers of old. While visiting friends in Amsterdam in 2003, I had my first experience with a web-enabled phone and visited a few WAP sites. Not only were they slow, they were limited to text only. Today, I get full access to the web through my iPhone. (OK, not having Flash is still a drag….)

So if you are updating you site or launching a new one soon, be thinking mobile. By extension, that means you are going on a Safari.

— Jonathan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Content, Editorial, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.