It is a fact that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is losing the browser market share. According to the latest Top Browser Share Trend by NetMarketShare.com, IE market share dropped from 60.65% in March 2010 to 56% in Jan 2011 and Firefox dropped from 25.52% to 22.75% in the same period. IE and Firefox losses was Chrome and Safari gains!

My Own Website says Firefox is Number 1

However, according to Google Analytics data of a 1-month old travel guide website, the market share for all the four browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safar and Chrome was between 20.91% to 30.49%. From above table, you can that more people are using Firefox than IE which attracted only 24.56%, far lesser than the 56% reported by NetMarketShare.

I was surprised to see the result of the browser market share on the new website. And the result has proven that cross-browser compatibility should a requirement for every website development and is more important than 1 year ago.

More People are Using Firefox, Chrome and Safari

Because this is a brand new website, the main traffic source was from Facebook. Also, most of the visitors are from Singapore, Southeast Asia and India.

Now, does it mean more people are using Firefox, Chrome and Safari to log on to Facebook?

And people who started to use Facebook in the past 12 months prefered to use non-IE browsers because they are more IT-savvy?

Have you made your web design compatible to all the top four web browsers listed in the table above?

I received several email responses to the previous post on Google Apps – Free Business Email Hosting. Some readers were wondering how to know if their e-commerce site is fast enough. Here, I will outline a simple method to benchmark the performance of your web server.

Site owners are concerned if their web servers are fast enough for their customers. To those who run e-commerce sites with shopping cart, how quickly a web page loads up is very important to your visitors.

So How Do You Know If Your e-Commerce Site Is Fast Enough?

You can do this simple benchmark test.

1. Clear or delete all your browser cache.
If you do not know how to clear your browser cache, view these video tutorials:

2. Load up your e-commerce website.
(Time it with a stopwatch if you have to.)

3. Load up Amazon.com.

If you feel your website loads up as fast as Amazon.com then you are ok.

You can also compare the loading time of your site vs your competitors’.

If your web server is slow to response, then you may want to see if your mail server(and anti-virus software) is taking up valuable CPU/RAM resources and consider migrating your email to Google Apps to improve the performance of your web server without upgrading any existing hardware.