Earlier this week HubSpot published a brief post on how the demise of Internet Explorer is going to affect ecommerce sites. After reading the post, we went through our analytics to see how the end of IE might affect people within the multifamily industry. 

How popular is Internet Explorer with apartment shoppers?

Here is the data we found:

We looked at over 50,000 individual website visits from dozens of apartment communities within a defined date range. Overall, we saw that Chrome was by some distance the most popular browser with around 46% of all apartment website visits coming on Chrome. 29% of all visits came from Safari, which was the second most popular browser. IE was the third biggest, accounting for 14.28% of all visits. The remaining 10% was divvied up between a number of smaller browsers like Firefox and Opera. So we're seeing IE holding steady in third, comfortably ahead of everything else but well behind Chrome and Safari.

What might change when Internet Explorer goes away?

There are two main possibilities for what might happen:

• IE's users could shift to Chrome or Firefox. (A move to Safari is unlikely because most IE users are on desktop PCs and won't use Safari, which is Apple's browser.)
• IE users could simply adopt the new browser, which is being referred to as "Project Spartan" for the moment.

That said, the biggest change may well be in the work required from web developers. When web developers are building a new website, they have to test all of the things they're doing across multiple browsers to make sure it all works. And in many cases things that work fine on Chrome, Safari, or Firefox do not on Internet Explorer--which is why developers hate it so much. It adds tons of work to their plate and all for a relatively small group of users.

So in one sense the main news here is good news--web development may be about to get a bit easier with the (unique and obnoxious) demands of IE going away.

Will there by any direct impact on apartment marketing itself due to IE's end?

We said above that IE users could shift to Chrome or Firefox or stay with Microsoft's new browser when it is rolled out. That doesn't sound like a big deal at first, but it actually could be quite significant for a simple reason--each of those three browsers uses a different default search engine.

Chrome, which is built by Google, has Google as the default search engine. Firefox uses Yahoo. Microsoft's new browser will use Bing. So when we talk about Bing's overall search share rising, as was mentioned in yesterday's roundup, or about the enormous control Google has over organic search we are indirectly talking about web browsers. If IE users abandon Microsoft entirely for Google, then Bing's growth could come to an abrupt end. On the other hand, if they shifted to Firefox in any meaningful number, Yahoo's share could tick up.

As we've seen in the past, Google's competitors often try to find new ways of competing with them and they usually don't work very well. My guess is that that's what will happen here. Project Spartan will roll out and there will be some initial fanfare with it but when the dust settles and we look at the numbers, Spartan won't be significantly more popular than IE and Bing won't be any closer to chasing down Google. When it comes to search, it's Google's world.