User distribution by browser

[Jim Campbell]

>       From "Margaret F. Riley":

> 
> In working with the corporate clients and business contacts that
> I now have, I can assure you that few outside of academe and
> various research groups are upgrading as fast as the browsers are
> coming out.  Most, like myself, are waiting for the majority of
> the bugs to be fixed and wondering where we will get the money
> to upgrade the hardware to handle the monstrous software.


I'd add that upgrades are not necessarily that common in
academe either. We have a well-wired campus, but many
departments rely on part-time people or on secretaries to be
network administrators. These people are typically far too
overworked just keeping up with the basics to worry about
installing every new browser version. My visits to offices have
found many copies of Netscape 1.1, many people who upgraded to
2.0 just about the time 3.0 came out. Our recent installation
of a Web interface to our opac that requires 1.1 or higher
turned up a small but significant number of people still using
1.0. Netscape is the standard almost everywhere, though we're
encouraging the people who have problems with a mouse or who need
non-Roman alphabet material to switch to MSIE.

I'm a little less sure about "waiting for the majority of the
bugs to be fixed." For better or worse, the browser market
right now is driven by novelty, not by a quest for perfection.
I don't see too many sites that find something really useful
to do with all that novelty. but there are some and we jsut
have to make individual decisions about what we need and what
we're willing to put up with to get it. A friend of mine was
proud that he still used Netscape 1.1 but switched immediately
to MSIE 3.0 when he saw how easily it handles Cyrillic.


    -  Jim Campbell
    Acting Director, Systems and Networked Information

    University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA
    campbell at virginia.edu * Tel: 804-924-4985 * Fax: 804-924-1431