BitWare Reports

The following report is intended to give our readers a better understanding of how to conduct business on the Internet. New reports will be added each month. If you have questions about any of these reports, or you would like to see a report published, just fill out our information / suggestion form and we will be happy to assist you.

Report: Reaching A Larger Internet Marketplace!

Originally, the Internet was a chaotic collection of semi-related protocols: ftp, telnet, smtp, and an entire collection of UNIX shells. It was a place reserved for high tech computer nerds. The Web, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and many others, has changed all that by integrating these protocols under a single user interface, the browser. The Internet is now a user friendly point and click environment. Millions of technically impaired users are now surfing the web. Many of these new Internet users are logging on with old 386 systems that have been discarded by their employers. Others are using set-top systems like Web-TV. A substantial percentage of these new potential customers are using browsers that do not support VRML, 3-D, Active-X, Frames, Java, and many other new features. Many of these new users lack the technical knowledge and/or system resources necessary to download the latest browser or browser extensions.

Today, the dis-integration of the Web is unfortunately underway. Netscape and Microsoft are introducing deliberate incompatibilities by publishing extension to the HTML 3.2 standards, standards that they don't comply with in the first place. Web pages are now being published that are literally useless without downloading specific extensions to specific browsers.

Sadly, many businesses have been misled into publishing these pages on commercial sites. If your site is "Best viewed with browser X", you are insulting a substantial number of potential Internet customers, you are telling them that you don't want their business. You might as well copy the top of our home page and add it to your web site.

Techies and advertising agencies will try to impress you with their high-tech capabilities. They will try to convince you that your business must remain current, when in reality, they are placing limits your potential customer base.

What are these limits? How many customers are we talking about?

The following browser statistics come from access counters for the University of Illinois, engineering student home pages, for March 1997.

           Total   Version 4   Version 3   Other      Other % of Total



Netscape   73.2%     3.0%        67.2%     29.8%           21.8%



Microsoft  24.3%     0.2%        86.6%     13.2%            3.2%



Other       2.5%                                            2.5%



                                  Total non-current users: 27.5%

There is more than one way to represent these statistics. Many web designers can honestly say that "Their pages are designed for Microsoft and Netscape, the browsers that 97.5% of the surfers are using!". That statement is statistically true, but if you look beyond the the first column of the table above, a full 25% of the 97.5% are using older versions that do not support all of the features of the current versions.

These numbers are further skewed by a number of other variables. The statistics were gathered by a web server in a high tech environment. Many surfers browse with graphics turned off. Many surfers have turned off ActiveX and Java for security reasons.

Just remember that it is your web site. You make the decisions. Insist on pages that are designed to work on any browser and you will get pages that are visible to a larger customer base.