Google Chrome Browser Stats

On the back of recent news that Google Chrome is the now default browser on Sony vaio laptops, I felt inspired to check our analytics data and see what the take up is amongst Midphase customers.
As anyone who’s been making websites for 5 years or more will testify (remember Netscape & MacOS IE?), creating cross-browser compatible code can sometimes be a real headache. At what % market share should you start testing and debugging your website for a particular browser?
To start the discussion I’ve shared our analytics results below (all data is for August 2009):


Amazingly, 16% of all visits to midphase.com in August used Google Chrome, I’m honestly surprised at how high this number is, especially given that official w3c browser stats are much lower. Perhaps this is due to the tech-savvy nature of our customer-base; or tthat W3C stats are globalized, whereas traffic to midphase.com is predominantly North American.
Digging deeper, I thought I’d compare this data with stats kindly provided by our UK-bassed sister company www.uk2.net.

The Chrome market-share on www.UK2.net is only 4%, which is a huge difference. The adoption of Firefox also seems to be much lower and the prevalence of IE much higher. So perhaps this is a statement that the UK are later adopters
What are your thoughts? Do those of you using reseller hosting see similar trends with your customers?
Tom 🙂