Here is a recent table of the typical popularity of browsers, courtesy of eXTReMe Tracking:
|
|
| MSIE 5 | 16979 | 32.73% |  |
| Netscape 4 | 12697 | 24.48% |  |
| MSIE 4 | 7432 | 14.32% |  |
| Netscape 3 | 7197 | 13.87% |  |
| AOL 3 | 3045 | 5.87% |  |
| WebTV 1 | 1491 | 2.87% |  |
| MSIE 3 | 915 | 1.76% |  |
| Netscape 6 | 850 | 1.63% |  |
| Other | 758 | 1.46% |  |
| AOL-IWENG 3 | 314 | 0.60% |  |
| Opera 3 | 106 | 0.20% |  |
| MSIE 3 | 61 | 0.11% |  |
| IBrowse 1 | 6 | 0.01% |  |
| AmigaVoyager 2 | 4 | 0.00% |  |
| Amiga-AWeb 3 | 3 | 0.00% |  |
| Opera 2 | 2 | 0.00% |  |
| IBM-WebExplorer | 2 | 0.00% |  |
| Netscape 2 | 1 | 0.00% |  |
As you can see from the typical webstats above, relatively few visitors use unusual browsers, but they are still stubbornly hanging on out there. In addition new seriously crippled thingy's like WebTV are a source of major new trouble.
An example of how difficult it seems to be to keep up with the state of things can be found at devhead resources Browser Check at ZDNet. This is a great free service that checks out a web page or site for basic problems it might have with six of the most common browsers. You must beware that it does make mistakes, particularly about certain perfectly good stylesheet and WebTV commands
It is quite apparent that at the point of designing your site, you have to resign yourself to a 2 version model, since users of advanced equipment will not be satisfied with the tiny, clumsy and difficult to navigate small screen, plain HTML layouts. See this next table of all browsers...