When working on this new site I wanted to drop IE 6 support, mainly because I couldn’t be bothered with all the extra work it was going to entail. But before I decided to drop support, I decided I’d have a look at my old sites visitor stats just to be sure that it was a small enough percentage of my visitors that it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Not surprisingly I found that IE 6 users accounted for only around 4% of my sites total page views, also unsurprisingly firefox was the most popular browser for visitors of my site at around 28% of page views. However what did surprise me was that the second most popular browser to my site was Opera mini with over 20% of page views. Now in hindsight this makes sense as most of this sites traffic comes from people downloading uTorrent mobile, a j2me mobile phone application, however I had never really thought about optimizing my site for mobile users, or really even testing that the site looked okay in mobile browsers. So with this knowledge in hand I decided to use the time and effort that I would have had to spend on hacking in support for IE 6, to make some of the pages on my site more mobile friendly. Now if you visit the apps pages on this site using a mobile device, you will see a skin that is more optimized for small screens ;)