Browser Stats

Boss Ross pointed in Tucows’ internal “Research and Innovation” mailing list to this Jason Kottke article on the stats for browsers used to visit his site in February. Jason reports that the breakdown looks like this:

• Mozilla: 45%
• Internet Explorer: 31%
• Everything else: 24%

In an update, Jason noted that he may have accidentally lumped in

Apple’s Safari browser with the Mozilla ones. For those of you who are

familiar with all that hoo-hah about user-agent strings, he forgot to

note that Safari’s user-agent string has “Apple WebKit” and “KHTML”

while Mozilla -based browser strings have “Gecko”.

Jason points to the stats of Boing Boing, one of the 800-pound gorillas of the blogosphere, which break down as follows:

• Internet Explorer: 36.8%
• Firefox: 36.7%
• Safari: 8.4%
• Unknown: 7.7%
• Mozilla: 4.3%
• Netscape: 1.6%

My gut feeling is that the less technically-oriented sites are visited

by less technically-oriented people, who would tend to use the default

browser on the dominant operatin system: Internet Explorer. I also

suspect that more technically-oriented people would tend to visit more

technically-oriented sites and would tend to use a Mozilla-based

browser like Firefox.

Here’s the browser breakdown for The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century for February 2005. These numbers are based on the first page of results reported by the tool I use to create this blog, Blogware.

The majority of my readers use Internet Explorer, which has an over

2-to-1 lead over the next browser, Firefox. I suspect that these stats

may be reversed in The Farm, the programmer weblog that I write for Tucows.

Browser	Percentage
Microsoft Internet Explorer	57% (678601 hits)
Mozilla Firefox	25% (303033 hits)
Apple Safari	5% (61560 hits)
Yahoo Slurp (The bot that feeds data to Yahoo’s search engine)	5% (58312 hits)
Googlebot (The bot that feeds data to Google)	4% (46665 hits)
Konqueror (Linux browser)	3% (36443 hits)
Pluck (Web aggregation service)	1% (14529 hits)