Browser Wars: Where are we now?
Just for the heck of it (and to see if I have been making a huge mistake in my “what browsers do I care about supporting on this site” bias) I decided to do a little analysis of exactly what browsers are used for visiting my site, and actually look at the data rather than just speculate about it.
Unfortunately, my web host only has an old version of Urchin (v3.4), and it kind of mushes a bit of info together that the newer version doesn’t. The limitations are that the Gecko-based browsers (Camino, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 6+) and the KHTML-based browsers (Konqueror, OmniWeb 4.5+, Safari) are all lumped into Netscape 6. And Windows XP is identified as Windows 2000. Eh. Not a big deal. I think the numbers are still quite interesting as far as the main classes of browsers being used to view this site.
So, what I did was take a 3 month period (September 15 2005 through January 15 2006), and grab the Urchin stats. Jammed it into Excel and did some pivot table goodness. I also looked at both “visitors” (Urchin supposedly tracks unique visitors to the site – which is a bit of a crock since I don’t use cookie-based tracking, so it must be IP-based tracking which isn’t too accurate these days due to NATs), and the more definitive “page views” (which counts the actual number of pages served).
Visitors by Browser
| Browser | Ver | Ver Total | Total |
| Netscape | 6 | 62.68% | |
| 4 | 5.49% | ||
| 2 | 2.77% | ||
| 3 | 0.15% | ||
| Total | 71.09% | ||
| Explorer | 6 | 27.14% | |
| 5 | 1.57% | ||
| 4 | 0.09% | ||
| 7 | 0.02% | ||
| 3 | 0.02% | ||
| Total | 28.84% | ||
| Opera | 0.07% |
Pages Viewed by Browser
| Browser | Ver | Ver Total | Total |
| Netscape | 6 | 70.77% | |
| 4 | 0.56% | ||
| 2 | 0.35% | ||
| 3 | 0.02% | ||
| Total | 71.70% | ||
| Explorer | 6 | 27.40% | |
| 5 | 0.78% | ||
| 4 | 0.03% | ||
| 7 | 0.01% | ||
| 3 | 0.00% | ||
| Total | 28.84% | ||
| Opera | 0.07% |
As we can see from the browser stats, at least for my site, I’ve targeted the correct browsers. And I was right about Opera. Who cares. Well… to be fair, a lot of Opera users masquerade as IE or Firefox users – of course, they could just run Firefox and be done with it… but then again, I can be so snotty sometimes.
Another interesting comparison is between percentage of visitors vs. pages viewed. These numbers seem to suggest that the site does work across the browsers I care about: if they visit the site, they view multiple pages. I would speculate that, say, if it doesn’t work at all (like IE 3), they bail after the first non-functioning page. And, if I’m reading these numbers right, my code doesn’t work with Netscape 4 browsers – I’m probably really annoying those users.
What’s quite interesting is the percentage of Netscape-class visitors compared to Internet Explorer visitors. A naïve analysis would lead one to believe that IE had really dropped in popularity. Or, of course, that visitors to this site are far more sophisticated than most other sites… However, taking a look at the operating system usage of visitors does suggest a more plausible explanation: a large percentage of my visitors are running Mac OS, and nobody in their right mind uses Explorer anymore on a Mac, which will skew the results enormously.
Visitors by Operating System
| OS | Ver | Ver Total | Total |
| Windows | 2K/XP | 53.47% | |
| 98 | 3.89% | ||
| 95 | 1.17% | ||
| NT | 0.99% | ||
| Total | 59.52% | ||
| Mac | 39.53% | ||
| Unix | 0.95% |
Pages Viewed by Operating System
| OS | Ver | Ver Total | Total |
| Windows | 2K/XP | 53.47% | |
| 98 | 3.89% | ||
| 95 | 1.17% | ||
| NT | 0.99% | ||
| Total | 44.03% | ||
| Mac | 55.48% | ||
| Unix | 0.49% |
And, just for interest’s sake, I also took a look at the operating systems that people are using. Interestingly, the Mac statistics are completely at odds with general consensus (i.e. that Apple has less than 5% market share). However, I’m sure the results are horribly skewed in favour of the Mac due to interest in this site generated by my contributions to Mac-only forums. All the same, it does look rather cool. And if I’m to compare the visitors vs. page views, it certainly appears that more Windows users visit the site, but Mac users view more of the site. And, by definition, that means Mac users must have good taste in sites.
From what I’ve been able to gather from looking at other sites that purport to have accurate browser usage statistics, it seems that my site is definitely not representative of the world at large. From most of the stats I’ve seen, it seems that IE 6 is used by 80% of users, and Netscape-class browsers are the balance of 20%. It’s almost reversed at this site… Weird, eh?