Friday, December 08, 2006

IE 49, Firefox 38

I was looking at my traffic log today and noticed Firefox showing up alot. So I went to my stats:



I wondered if this was skewed toward an international audience, which might be using Firefox more than IE. But not so much:



Now I normally don't get 11 hits from Uganda in a week, much less a couple hours, so its very possible this is a silly sample. (The hits from Uganda were all IE 6, by the way)

However, what I am thinking about is the next applications we will write and how web-based we should make it (answer: very). So I start looking at browser statistics. I know there are a several reputable sites sharing statistics, but I wonder what the blogosphere composite IE/Firefox ratio would look like?

It should track to what the accepted ratio is, but does it? I'd love to know what everyone's 'Last Hundred' browser list looks like.

5 comments:

asadotzler@gmail.com said...

I've been doing some rough estimating based on sitepoint data from the top 100 blogs and what I've found over the last 18 months is that the overall blogosphere tracks really well with the site boingboing.net. They're literally within a percentage point or two every time I compare them to the browser breakdown from top 100 blogs at sitepoint.

Right now that figure is at 50% Firefox (and a few more points for other Gecko-based browsers)

http://boingboing.net/stats/

- A

Lawrence of Arabia said...

just because i was bouncing around, happened onto your blog and you asked....

40% ie6
15% ie7
22% firefox1
19% firefox2

have fun

Unknown said...

i don't want to misunderstand, so maybe some clarification would help: are you suggesting that new online applications should be designed around what browser carries the most users to a site?

Seems a lot counter-intuitive to me. i would think that new online applications would be designed around standardized language specifications. No, we don't live in that ideal world, but developers should strive for it. Browser developers should be pushed by their users and web developers to make language implementations the same, and compete around program features and speed, not proprietary code translators.

Like i said, we're not there, but it doesn't mean we should give up on it by designing around page hit stats.

(Didn't mean to sound burly in that. Sorry.)

Anonymous said...

My stats:

Firefox 54.31%
Internet Explorer 33.79%
Opera 4.22%

My blog is Linux specific

Unknown said...

Thanks for leaving the browser stats, everyone. It most definitely does play a part in designing solutions for customers.

I like open standards as much as the next guy, but I certainly didn't sign a 'Thou shalt only use open standards' oath when I started this business.

The reality is customers will pay for what solves their problem. If it can be done with XHTML, then great. But if it can be done better with a Firefox extension or IE Add In, fine-- I just want the customer to be happy.

What I don't want is great vantage point on an open standards soap box from which I see potential customers paying for extensions or add ins that better solve their problems.