Chrome. Firefox. IE. We all have our preferences. For whatever reason, some of us are drawn to particular browsers when conducting our business online. Albeit a seemingly innocuous choice, the browser we select to accompany us during our online adventures can provide some valuable insights. Attentive and technically-equipped businesses who understand the importance of impeccable customer service are beginning to leverage advanced application intelligence to optimize the user experience from a new perspective: browser selection.
New browser and device analytics in our cloud-based application monitoring solution allow us to tell you what browsers your customers are using to access your application. This information can be incredibly useful if you learn, for example, that a particular browser is more compatible with your application than another. Let’s take a look at real-life application data from an actual OpTier customer and see how browser intelligence can be used to boost application performance.
Understand your application’s browser breakdown
We can clearly see that 7.5% of the overall traffic in the last week came from Mobile Safari. Also, it appears there is a sizable portion of traffic coming from the Blackberry Browser and Internet Explorer mobile. This kind of data can help a business intelligently evaluate whether it wants to invest additional resources in developing a mobile version of its application or whether the mobile device’s browser will suffice.
Are you heavily testing your application with Google Chrome? Nearly half of your application’s users are interacting with it via Chrome. It would likely behoove you to ensure you see exactly what your customers are seeing when they access your application from Chrome. Not all browsers are created equally and understand the differences between them and how they impact your customer can make all the difference.
What about Internet Explorer 6?
After reviewing browser data from OpTier’s application monitoring solution, it appears there is a significant contingent using Internet Explorer 6, even though its market share is approximately 0.1%. Should you eliminate support in this version for your application?
Upon further review, it appears that most of the IE 6 users are come from Iran. Is that a market you care about addressing? Are you willing to invest time and money to ensure that potential customers from Iran can accurately interact with your application in an obsolete browser? These are legitimate questions you have to answers – questions mind you that you’d have never been privy to if it wasn’t for OpTier’s advanced application and browser capabilities.
Interested in learning how much faster your application renders when being accessed by different browsers?
As a matter of fact, a customer using the latest version of IE (10) is able to interact with your application almost 45 times faster than somebody using the antiquated IE 6. Capitalizing on OpTier’s sophisticated browser data, you can see that render time progressively decreases when using a more up-to-date version of IE. OpTier’s powerful application monitoring capabilities allow you to drill down even further into browser usage so you have a complete picture of exactly how your customers are accessing your application.
This is just another way that we’re delivering application monitoring that provides real value for your business. Interested in starting a free trial or test-driving our demo, what are you waiting for!?