How Forums Lose 30% Of Their Members In An Instant
While Internet Explorer is one of the most problematic web browsers today, it is still one of the most used browsers. It is so problematic, that even France and Germany have urged people not to use it. Yet even with those problems, there is a rather large percent of people in the world that use Internet Explorer. According to W3Schools.com, 31% of users use Internet Explorer as of September, 2010. That is a huge percent and even though Internet Explorer has a lot of issues, you still need to cater for those users. An annoyed user is a gone user. If your members can’t properly use your forum, they will just leave!
Getting The Exact Number of IE Users on Your Forum
If you really want to know how you should cater your users’ browsers, it is important to know which browsers they use. Thank goodness Google Analytics has the tools that allow you to view this. If you’ve had Google Analytics on your forum for some time (a month is enough), then go to your Dashboard -> Visitors -> Browsers. GA does a great job at giving you stats on your visitors and you can see exactly how many users use each browser on your forum.
So What Do You Do?
You have to cater to all of the major browsers used on your forum. If only one member uses Opera, then it’s not a big deal to make sure it works for him, but if 15% use Opera, then you need to make sure it works properly! Getting cross-browser compatibility can be difficult and this is one of the biggest challenges for programmers and webmasters. IE is by far the most problematic with cross-browser compatibility, yet you have to make sure your forum works properly in it! Getting any code to work properly on every browser is difficult, but it is your job to know what is broken in each browser, so here is what you do:
Download Each Major Browser:
Those are the 5 major browsers today. If you can get cross-browser compatibility with those 5, you are golden. Doing so can be difficult, but it is important that your forum functions correctly on those main browsers. Periodically do a check-up and make sure your forum is running smoothly on each browser. Every time you add a new feature or modify your forum in any way, make sure it is working correctly!
Cross-Browser Compatibility Is Not Easy, So What Do You Do?
It really isn’t… I’ve had my fair share of frustrations with IE and I’m sure any programmer will tell you about all the troubles it causes. It’s not easy to get IE to work properly, so the best thing you can do is not add too many modifications on your forum. The more you modify the initial forum design, the bigger the possibility something will break with a browser. Don’t get too many modifications because it might end up making your forum members leave.
Notify Users To Update Their Browsers
Ask your members to update their browsers to the latest version! A newer version usually has less issues (IE excluded), so making your members have the latest and greatest version of their browser should keep you and them happy.
Stay Updated
Browsers are always updating, so you must also keep up! Make sure your forum is working at its full potential with the latest update from each of the 5 main browsers. Users will usually update their browser when a new version comes out, so it can make your life easier to do so as well! If not, then just give them that little notice to update and you should be fine.
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November 2nd, 2010 at 9:23 pm
I have to agree. Being an IE user, I’m always disappointed to see forums and websites that don’t support it. No matter what statistics say, IE is the greatest used, every person new to computers uses it and the reason being is, it’s preinstalled on Windows. It lacks in many ways compared to other browsers but yes, it still needs to be cattered for. Strange thing is, if you can get it to work in IE, it will most likely work perfectly in other browsers. I always work IE first and then from there, knowing that the user is most likely going to be using IE.
I have a question thought. Is IE 9 the future or is it just as bad?
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November 2nd, 2010 at 9:29 pm
Haha it is true when you say, “Strange thing is, if you can get it to work in IE, it will most likely work perfectly in other browsers.” But making it work on IE is pretty tough sometimes and programmers are easily frustrated because of this.
There are whole websites that must be recoded to work properly on IE and that, in my opinion, is ridiculous. Microsoft should be able to produce a quality browser, yet it does the exact opposite.
I have not actually checked up much on IE 9, but considering Microsoft hasn’t been able to produce a quality browser so far, I wouldn’t have my hopes up, but hey… I could be wrong. I just haven’t really taken the time to check it out yet.
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