Browser trends/stats - your view?

[clarkin]

Anyone got some good browser usage stats? Here are the best I could find (as you can see results vary a LOT):
W3Schools: IE 86.6%
(

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_war.asp)

Google Zeitgeist: IE 86.9% (estimate)
(estimate in

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2923

zeitgeist at

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html)

OneStat.com: IE 95.4%
(

http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox23.html)

webreference.com: IE 70.47%
(

http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html)

macedition (macs only): IE 11.19%
(

http://macedition.com/cb/cb_20030127.php)

Got some more? Your own site's stats? (Our hosts' stats package is highly suspect - reporting wildly conflicting browser stats on the same page, so I won't bother).

Site note:
Here's a very good article about IE, css support, and how there won't be anymore standalone IE releases (as in, the next one will require an OS upgrade). I think browsers like Firebird (thread608-681568) are going to gain in popularity. Article:

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5088642.html

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[ChrisHunt]

I think you're probably right to say that Firebird etc. will gain popularity, but not to the point that they challenge IE's dominance. If that ever looks like happening, M$ will start issuing stand-alone browsers to regain control.

The reason that they won't need to, however, and that tying IE7 to the next OS release won't hurt them, is that most ordinary people don't upgrade their browsers unless they upgrade their OS (and they probably won't do that unless they buy a new PC).

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[ChrisHunt]

Incidentally, those statistics don't seem all that variable to me (apart from the Mac-only stats, which we would expect). The Webreference stats might look out of line, but the percentages include all the user agents (one to three thousand a day, apparently) so all the browsers' scores are depressed. If you recalculate based on the figures they acually list (for Oct 19) there are only 18,843 visitors - so IE scores 87.53%.

Those Webreference figures look pretty suspect anyway. Apparently most of their Netscape users use Netscape 5. AFAIK there's no such browser.

95% from Onestat looks high, mid/high eighties from everone else looks about right. Maybe gecko-based browsers will chip away at this by a few percentage points, but I don't think it's going to change dramatically. IE6 has more users than all other browsers combined. We might not like it, but we're going to have to live with it for some time yet.


-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[clarkin]

Well spotted ChrisHunt, so it is amended to
webreference.com: IE 87.5%
(

http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html)

Of course, looking carefully I'm not sure their log analyser is too clever as they report 1500 (7%) visitors from NS 5, a version that doesn't exist. (perhaps mozilla/firebird are being piled in here?)

Well it's looking like 87% IE is looking like a slightly more reliable stat - certainly makes building standards-compliant rather than IE-compliant easier to defend.

Anyone else got their site's browser break down?

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[clarkin]

Got some more:
sourceforge.net: IE 77.1 %
(

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?framename=mainright&output=browserdetail

and

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl)

thecounter: IE 94% (again, 700k NS5 hits ?)
(

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/May/browser.php)

tafwebsoftware: IE 92.1%
(

http://www.tafwebsoftware.co.uk/html/statistics.html)

Any others I found pointed back to the main ones i've already found.

Here's some interesting reading from someone trying to test reported IE vs actual IE stats:

http://www.virtuelvis.com/archives/99.html

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