Performance of web browsers has advanced rapidly in the last couple of years. The arrival of Chrome with its fast V8 JavaScript engine spurred Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer to up their games.

Chrome has seen rapid adoption and at current growth rates it's predicted to be the most widely used browser by June 2012.

I've been looking through QJumpers' usage statistics in Google Analytics and we're seeing increased adoption of Google Chrome at the expense of Internet Explorer and Firefox.

QJumpers currently sees around 57% using IE, 18% Firefox, 15% Chrome, 8% Safari and less than 1% Opera.  

Of the IE users we currently have 65% using IE8 and 16% using IE7. IE6 usage has dropped off to 3% whilst IE9 adoption has grown to 15%.

It's great to see the newer browsers being increasingly popular with our users, but we still have about half of our users accessing QJumpers on the older versions of Internet Explorer - versions 6, 7 and 8.

Google and Wordpress have already dropped support for IE6 and Google Apps is dropping support for IE7 and older versions of Firefox and Safari as of August. Microsoft itself is doing everything it can to encourage people to upgrade from IE6. 

We encourage our users to upgrade to the latest version of their browser in order to have the best user experience. QJumpers' web based recruitment software makes extensive use of JavaScript, and the newer browsers have optimised for this. Everything still works in the older browsers but it's a lot snappier in the latest versions. Chrome also has an excellent built in pdf viewer which is great for viewing attached resumes.

If you're using QJumpers you will save time and enjoy a safer, faster browsing experience using the latest browsers. We realise that many of our corporate users are not able to choose or upgrade their browsers and we encourage you to apply pressure on your IT departments to upgrade, or maybe you could try installing the Google Frame plugin for Internet Explorer. It doesn't cost anything to upgrade to the latest browsers and you won't regret it.