Browser Statistics

[Jojo Yee]

According to this site, Chrome has grown up from 3.9% in January to 7.0% last month, ranking third in popularity.

Not only that, surprisingly Firefox (47.4%) has overtaken IE (39.4% combining IE6 to IE8) as no. 1 broswer as at August 2009.

Safari ranks forth while Opera ranks fifth, leaving others at 0.9% (not shown).

Does anybody disagree to that?

[J_L]

Several other places say otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_s...f_web_browsers

[Jojo Yee]

Yes, I would agree that Wiki's source is more reliable. Likely IE ranks no. 1 (65%), FF ranks no. 2 (26%), whereas three others, i.e., Chrome, Safari and Opera combined to take about 8%. Notably, both Chrome and Safari are on the rising trend.


Source: Wiki

[Terarus]

I dont seem to be able to see why opera cant get anywhere. Their dominance in the mobile arena should had brought notice to their original browser? Perhaps they didnt do quite enough marketing. Hopefully things would improve with Opera 10.

[MidnightCowboy]

Unfortunately, it's still the Opera architecture which hold the browser back. These days users want plugins and extensions they can install with a single click. When I'm working in the site for instance checking links posted by visitors I can verify and rate each one in around two seconds. This just isn't possible with Opera. Certain features can be "hacked" into the ini files but many would not be capable of this and even more wouldn't bother when there's an easier alternative available. I just doubt that widget technology will ever replace the ability to install plugins. What is missing from these statistics is a breakdown for the usage where people have several browsers installed, although I appreciate this is impossible to reproduce accurately.

One thing which would upset everyone though is if Lunascape suddenly start increasing availability of English language plugins

[mr6n8]

The statistics shown at the site Jojoyee referenced are for visitors to that site, not for the general user.

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.

These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users.

Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over a five year period, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.

[Jojo Yee]

Originally Posted by keroffs

The statistics shown at the site Jojoyee referenced are for visitors to that site, not for the general user.

Similarly, I think FF has a higher percentage of share among users visiting TSA, as I remember Gizmo mentioned it somewhere. Probably he has the figures.

[mr6n8]

After I put that post up, I was wondering about browser stats here at TSA.

I don't remember the Gizmo stats, but I am sure your recollection is right. I wonder how the Chrome, etc. stats have changed here at TSA.

[chris.p]

Hey hey, well I was passing by so...

Looking at those Wikipedia figures, Stat Counter has a huge number of hosted sites so their figures will be the best average from anywhere, possibly even better than GA for some purposes.

Here's a zip of the browser stats. This is not a full count number-wise as around 25% of our site pages aren't seen by this particular stats app, but it's mainly the percentages that are of interest anyway.

You can see the outline here, the exact percentages are only seen on hover, but it's 49% Ffx, 36% IE, Safari 10%, Opera 4%.

There are some interesting things here:
- the very high percentage of Ffx users
- the large number of people still using IE6 (aka 'trojan magnet #1')
- the small but significant number of people still on Ffx 1 (eh??)
- the relatively high percentage of Mac users on this site, assuming that most Safari users are on a Mac (which is roughly the case going by other figures although there are a fair number of Safari on XP users)
- the very small numbers of Chrome users (buried in the "others")
- and the way Camino never took off

See the zip attached.

[Sope]

Originally Posted by chris.p

There are some interesting things here:
......
- the large number of people still using IE6 (aka 'trojan magnet #1')
- the small but significant number of people still on Ffx 1 (eh??)
......
See the zip attached.

Would the large number of IE6 users be partly caused by those visiting the site whilst in work i.e. from within a corporate network that has not been upgraded (I know that's the case in my place of work!)

You would think that it wouldn't take long for anyone who visits this site to work out that they should upgrade to the latest version of their chosen browser