If you didn’t know that Google had 90% IE users – you could happily go about coding Site X and assume 60% FF use on it was standard and no big deal. But knowing that Google reports 90% IE traffic tells you that Site X’s 60% FF score is “special” for one reason or another.

Perhaps Site X has found a niche (good thing). Perhaps IE doesn’t render the page correctly, driving customers away (bad thing). Does the 60% FF use mean that Site X is missing a sales or revenue opportunity with all those IE users that aren’t coming back? Do people who use IE represent a market segment that hasn’t been tapped?

I feel like these are all important questions – particularly for eCommerce sites. But without a valid reference set, you don’t really have anything to compare to. Therefore you don’t have a good understanding of where your site strengths and growth opportunities are.

meyerweb.com shows a similar usage pattern, and that’s perhaps interesting, but it’s of no practical use to someone who has their own site to worry about. If 95% of your users are on Netscape 4.x, well then you have to worry about how the site works in Netscape 4.x. If your site gets 90% IE/Win users, then IE/Win isn’t something you can ignore. For Brian Sparks and my site, Firefox is the “baseline” browser; the one that has to be considered first, because it’s the majority.

(Note I didn’t say “considered to the exclusion of all others”. I wouldn’t expect you to draw that inference, but I have to state it explicitly because every time I bring up this point, somebody accuses me of being unrealistic and advocating dropping support for IE, when I’ve never done any such thing.)

At any rate, interesting to see another site with similar demographics to mine!