Web Techies Use Chrome and Firefox
Last week I put up an experimental job application form for a technical web project manager [for some more explanation, see my post An Unconventional Approach to Recruiting]. So far, I have been getting some great results that I will share in the near future. One preliminary finding that you might consider interesting is what browsers and operating systems people were using. Special thanks to Timothy Davis and Brad Fry for the Google Analytics help.
60% of the successful submissions were from Windows computers. 40% were from Macs. Nobody submitted from a Linux machine. I did get some Linux traffic though. Perhaps, the role was not interesting to these visitors. 14% of the site traffic was from iOS devices but I don't know if it is possible to submit the form from iOS.
For browsers, 75% of the successful submissions used Chrome; 25% used Firefox. I didn't get any submissions from Internet Explorer or Safari users. I am not surprised that most of the submissions were from Chrome and Firefox. The tools that you need to solve the problem are built in. But IE also has this feature. Safari comes with it but you need to enable it.
When you include traffic to the whole site (which includes the form), the breakdown is as follows:
| Browser | % Visits |
|---|---|
| Chrome | 53.16% |
| Firefox | 13.92% |
| Mozilla-compatible agent | 13.92% |
| Internet Explorer | 12.03% |
| Safari | 5.06% |
| Android Browser | 1.90% |
IE and Safari users were hitting the site, they were just not willing or able to complete the form. There are a number of hypotheses that could explain this.
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The profile that would be attracted to solving this puzzle would also be the type to install a browser of his/her choosing rather than use the one that came with the operation system. I will leave it at that and skip the value judgments :).
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Internet Explorer users are surfing from work and wouldn't want to be seen applying for a job. Of the IE users, 58% were on IE8 and lower. That might be a clue that people are at their work computers.
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Internet Explorer users are all happily employed and wouldn't even consider applying for a job.
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The data sample is not big enough to make any conclusions. We are in the early stages of this experiment so I don't have a lot of data. I will keep it running and see if anything changes.
As usual, I am interested in hearing your thoughts here in the comments or on the social web.