Looked at web stats for this blog for first time in ages. IE is still top browser in raw hits, but between them Firefox and Mozilla family have 39% above IE at 36%. Is this just that there are more Mac users amongst HCI people and academics, or is Mozilla winning the browser wars?
Hi Alan,
I’ll hopefully be be the first IE 8 entry in your logs (just checking a few pages with the new version of IE, I normally use Firefox or Google Chrome).
The user agent should look something like: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0 …
I am guessing the figures would be slightly skewed for your blog. Certainly in the corporate world, IE is very dominant (most users won’t have sufficient privs to install 3rd party browsers). People I know that use Firefox are usually IT people (though Web developers tend to use both for obvious reasons).
I agree with the comment – when given an informed choice, most people would use Firefox, but in the corporate world the choices tend to be limited.
However, your guess about there being more Mac users in the academic world might also be right, at least it coincides with my observations: I do not own a Mac but most of my peers do.
Yep, it is very audience specific. Checked my wife’s blog, which hits more ‘ordinary’ folk (not academics!); it had much higher IE figure, I think 60% or maybe more, and only about 10% Mac users whereas I get over 20%. Google Chrome hasn’t yet got high enough to hit Top10 browser list, will wait and see!
Just noticed that Wikipedia has up-to-date figures for browser penetration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
IE 66% vs. Mozilla/Firefix 23% and Safari 8%
so my wife’s stats are pretty much general average, it is just my viewers are unusually Firefox heavy – I’d guess combination of HCI and academic does it.