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This is just plain FUD, or some kind of commercial service provider has found a cheap and easy way too get a lot of publicity. Not only is the number so low that it is within the error margin of their results, furthermore, there are other sources which even say that Firefox' market share has risen 2% in the same period.

See also http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2005_08.h tml#a000545

Nothing to see here people, move along!

man do i hate ie

TheCounter shows just 2% usage share for Mac OS, it's hard to believe Mac OS has 16% of the installed base of desktops. Maybe the vast majority of Mac users don't use pre-installed Safari, or haven't upgraded to Mac OS X yet, or just don't browse the web nearly as much as other OS users?

TheCounter shows just 2% usage share for Mac OS. Combined with the 1-2% usage share for Safari reported by OneStat and 1-2% "other" browser usage reported by WebSideStory, it's hard to believe Mac OS has 16% of the installed base of desktops. Maybe the vast majority of Mac users don't use pre-installed Safari, or haven't upgraded to Mac OS X yet, or just don't browse the web nearly as much as other OS users?

(say "security" and watch the firefox crowd blush) I hate to say it, but you have to be a real nerd to appreciate the miniscule differences between browers. All the new features do is detract from the web content. (after all, the web is about content, it's not a fashion show)

I will argue that content is king, and the ability to access that content without a hassle is the only selling point that matters. Look at google. It's a dirt simple interface, you type some keywords and you get what you want, no hassle.

From my preferred stat provider, IE is actually back UP in marketshare to 91%. I think that this reinforces my concept that amount of hassle, not # of features, is what sells.

September 2004 - 2% Mozilla
October 2004 - 2% Mozilla
November 2004 - 3% Mozilla
December 2004 - 3% Mozilla
January 2005 - 5% Mozilla???

September 2004 - 2% Mozilla
October 2004 - 2% Mozilla
November 2004 - 3% Mozilla
December 2004 - 3% Mozilla
January 2005 - 5% Mozilla???

September 2004 - 2% Mozilla
October 2004 - 2% Mozilla
November 2004 - 3% Mozilla
December 2004 - 3% Mozilla
January 2005 - 5% Mozilla???

September 2004 - 2% Mozilla
October 2004 - 2% Mozilla
November 2004 - 3% Mozilla
December 2004 - 3% Mozilla
January 2005 - 5% Mozilla???

September 2004 - 2% Mozilla
October 2004 - 2% Mozilla
November 2004 - 3% Mozilla
December 2004 - 3% Mozilla
January 2005 - 5% Mozilla???

Well, that's 2% among web developers. Opera has closer to a 1% share among the general population.

IE is so often the 'lowest common denominator' when it comes to designing for the web.

yeah 95% of the market is the last thing to design for

im all for designing/promoting for FF and w3c specs but get a grip on reality, FF is a minority browser and is still lacking in corporate rollout and configuration control, maybe in a few years when FF gains some ground but at the moment MSIE is certainly not the 'lowest common denominator' no matter much you want it to be today

I don't know any "average" web sites that show browser statistics. The best I can think of is TheCounter, which lists stats for a bunch of fairly average sites. They show IE usage down from 95% in May to 91% in September.

I don't know any "average" web sites that show browser statistics. The best I can think of is TheCounter, which lists stats for a bunch of fairly average sites. They show IE usage down from 95% in May to 91% in September.

I don't know any "average" web sites that show browser statistics. The best I can think of is TheCounter, which lists stats for a bunch of fairly average sites. They show IE usage down from 95% in May to 91% in September.

Can be found here. "TheCounter" is a site where you can download one of those annoying page counters to put at the bottom of your web page, but at least they do something relevant with the information: they collate all the browser stats they can from the request.

This makes their stats really significant because a) they get millions and millions of requests per month (valid sample) and b) they are collating info across many, many site of all different shapes, sizes and topics (heterogenous sample). Their sample size is 223,437,657 visitors for July (the last month available), which I trust a lot more than the many posts on this thread saying "I see X% on my site".

I build e-commerce sites using full XHTML/CSS standards, and I use these stats to get a sense of which browsers/platforms to test in. If they have a bias, it is probably towards the casual user rather than the power user (after all, the sites that have a little counter on them aren't usually the most professional), but in designing for the general public, I'd rather be biased in that direction than towards the power user.

These stats are free and they've been kept for years, so you can spot trends (no charts, though, just tables).

Incidentally, their latest browser stats show Mozilla at 2%, which, sadly, is probably closer to the "truth" than 14% or 9% or whatever.

Can be found here. "TheCounter" is a site where you can download one of those annoying page counters to put at the bottom of your web page, but at least they do something relevant with the information: they collate all the browser stats they can from the request.

This makes their stats really significant because a) they get millions and millions of requests per month (valid sample) and b) they are collating info across many, many site of all different shapes, sizes and topics (heterogenous sample). Their sample size is 223,437,657 visitors for July (the last month available), which I trust a lot more than the many posts on this thread saying "I see X% on my site".

I build e-commerce sites using full XHTML/CSS standards, and I use these stats to get a sense of which browsers/platforms to test in. If they have a bias, it is probably towards the casual user rather than the power user (after all, the sites that have a little counter on them aren't usually the most professional), but in designing for the general public, I'd rather be biased in that direction than towards the power user.

These stats are free and they've been kept for years, so you can spot trends (no charts, though, just tables).

Incidentally, their latest browser stats show Mozilla at 2%, which, sadly, is probably closer to the "truth" than 14% or 9% or whatever.

I'm not sure I'd rely on that source either. In their domain stats, they've got Chinese (.CN) domains way down at 123 in popularity behind such internet heavyweights as Mauritius and Mozambique. Which makes me wonder if they're only counting Internet traffic to English-language sites.

a webdesigners website is hardly a representative of the world at large

don't get me wrong any gain is good news but until someone like google's zeitgeist or thecounter.com confirms it (ie someone who has a huge userbase across all countries and languages)
this 14% stat is pretty meaningless
lets not go down the MS road of skewing stats in our favour, just keep doing what you are doing and good things will happen to those who wait (politics is exempt;)

--ajs

Just one thing, w3schools.com is a site for people who write websites, so they'd naturally have a much higher percentage of non-IE browsers than the more general browsing population.

Personally, I keep an eye on thecounter.com to see how Mozilla's market share is doing. It's certainly more realistic than the linked article statistics page. Pity Google removed browser stats from the zeitgeist page.

OneStat and TheCounter are two stats sources you can use. However, they track only browsers that hit sites with their counters on them. These tends to be smaller, less professional sites. In particular, if you check out the last 30 referring URLs to TheCounter you'll find that their service seems to be heavily used by gay porn sites. An unbiased sample, this is not!

OneStat and TheCounter are two stats sources you can use. However, they track only browsers that hit sites with their counters on them. These tends to be smaller, less professional sites. In particular, if you check out the last 30 referring URLs to TheCounter you'll find that their service seems to be heavily used by gay porn sites. An unbiased sample, this is not!

Surely your own site stats are the only thing that counts? You can say with 100% certainty what the browsers visiting your site are reporting as and the majority are honest. Everyone else's site is irrelevant other than out of general wonderment.

So an answer could be no there's no reliable browser metric other than watching a range of site stats and checking out the trend.

• Web Development site, likely skewed away from IE.
• Hit Counter Sites Aggregated likely skewed towards IE.

Derive what you will.

Good point, I hadn't considered that. Other stats peg Mozilla at 1% still.

The default setting in IE will be to block popups.

This pretty much means that the popup window will be officially dead in a year's time.

WTF? You must joking, you actually must think that everyone, or even most will update.

Heck, there are still many people who are only using win98.

Have you seen this? Why is there no name on entry 3? If it is unknown, then what is the difference to entry 10? And why do jan through march 2004 contain no info on browser types at all? I would not exactly call these 'good browser stats'.

for some other good browser stats. See the decline of netscape as these stats go back to the year 2000. They represent a more generic class of user (home users who visit websites with crappy counters) than most stats too so I find using these stats useful when evaluating target audiences for generic sites.

Yeah, but check out what browser is in 3rd place!

There's all the MORE hope for standards. standards that will actually be adhered to creating a sea of non-monoculture browsers, all working to a common goal, instead of one megacorp defining in secret what a browser should do.

That would be great if the vast majority of people would use them. The last time I looked, about 95% of people are using IE. Even if those numbers are off, most people use IE. That means that people have to make sure that their pages work in IE.

Standards are good. Standards that people develop to are better. Standards, no matter how good, that don't impact the majority of end-users are useless.

First thing I found was http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6013 So far, so good: Linux has 3.2% of desktop share and passed Apple according to that. Another good read is http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/32706.htm l. No definite answer there. A quote: 'According to The Linux Counter, there are probably somewhere between 2,747,850 and 68,689,500 Linux users worldwide.' Great.

So maybe I can figure Linux %% out from some browser stats... http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm gives some info but its stat sources may produce rather biased results (imo). Since Google is Google is Google I trust it. So here's what I see: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html Can't be Linux is only 1%... lets look for something else.

Next thing I found thecounter.com - a web util which lets you add counter to your pages, they also publish stats from their hits. If you want to take 2 minutes and compare 2004 march results (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/March/browse r.php) and eg 2003 january results (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/January/brow ser.php) then you may see strange things there: linux users went down from some 0.42% to 0.29%.

I give up here. Now before you mark me as flamebait - I know there are some possible explanations like faking UA to prettend windoze. However I wonder what is reality: 3.2%(OSnews estimate) or 1%-0.28%(Google+some webcounter log data). That would be some 3/4 linux users faking UA.

First thing I found was http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6013 So far, so good: Linux has 3.2% of desktop share and passed Apple according to that. Another good read is http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/32706.htm l. No definite answer there. A quote: 'According to The Linux Counter, there are probably somewhere between 2,747,850 and 68,689,500 Linux users worldwide.' Great.

So maybe I can figure Linux %% out from some browser stats... http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm gives some info but its stat sources may produce rather biased results (imo). Since Google is Google is Google I trust it. So here's what I see: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html Can't be Linux is only 1%... lets look for something else.

Next thing I found thecounter.com - a web util which lets you add counter to your pages, they also publish stats from their hits. If you want to take 2 minutes and compare 2004 march results (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/March/browse r.php) and eg 2003 january results (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/January/brow ser.php) then you may see strange things there: linux users went down from some 0.42% to 0.29%.

I give up here. Now before you mark me as flamebait - I know there are some possible explanations like faking UA to prettend windoze. However I wonder what is reality: 3.2%(OSnews estimate) or 1%-0.28%(Google+some webcounter log data). That would be some 3/4 linux users faking UA.

Loads of people are still on Internet Explorer 5 today, that was released over five years ago

Actually, most sites that track this sort of thing show about 75% of all users on IE6, but only around 10% on IE5.

Some examples:
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/January/brows er.php
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html
http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html

References, please.

IE 6.x has about 75% of the browser market; IE 5.x has about 17%.

All these names are quite confusing for noobs. Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird, Thunderbird, Firefox, etc... I think they should focus on developping Firebird. They need more users...
Browser usage stats

Just like you say, please read carefully before posting!

Just like you say, please read carefully before posting!

Just like you say, please read carefully before posting!

While I hate to bring into disrepute TheCounter, may I please draw your attention to This Page .
Notice anything interesting there? Thought so.

...but "winning" seems to be accurate if the stats at thecounter.com and W3Schools are at all trustworthy.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if, in these numbers, "Netscape" includes "Mozilla".

P.S. This HTTP POST request sent by Mozilla.

Also, isn't Netscape 6 and 7 basically Mozilla? If so, wouldn't it be safe to attribute the big drop in Netscape users to the possibility that some (most?) of them might have upgraded to either version 6 or 7 of Netscape?

00.25% - MSIE 4.0
11.85% - MSIE 5.0
06.88% - MSIE 5.5
73.89% - MSIE 6.0
04.33% - Gecko
03.18% - Opera
00.51% - Konqueror
00.51% - Other

Done.

Scary as it is, there is still a sizeable percentage of web users using version 4 browsers.

You mean the 1% using NS4 and 1% using IE4?

I wouldn't call that sizeable. I'd call that miniscule.

That hack is completely unacceptable, since it requires javascript. Around 13% of people have javascript switched off, and clients would scream bloody murder if they thought their pretty logos were getting screwed up for so many people.

Reality.
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/April/os.php

I know there's a fair chance it's either an uneducated guess or simply pulled out of someone's ass.

You are full of FUD. Jupiter is a partner of internet.com sites(millions of visitors a day) and sites like Thecounter.

If you designed for standards rather than browsers, you wouldn't have to differentiate. Also, I fail to see how you're achieving 99% compatibility designing around IE. A quick check at the Global Stats at The Counter shows me you're only reaching 92%-93% using this methodology. Following sound methods such as adherence to web standards set forth by the W3C is the only way you'll ever get to 100% of the browsers out there, and I see many designers doing it each and every day without having to take a significant amount of extra time to accomodate NS6 and Mozilla. Hell, I've done it several times on accelerated deadlines using XHTML/CSS/JS, just as quickly as if I were just coding the site purely for IE. Granted, older technologies (i.e., IE3, NS4) are now by the wayside or are on their way, but if you aren't developing for a "Mozilla, NS6+, IE5+" baseline, your audience is getting the shaft and your employer isn't getting exactly what you're claiming to give them. Just in case I get a few people complaining "What about Netscape 4.x?!" Get a new browser that actually includes standards compliance. I'll develop for it if I need to, but 4.x is so old hat that it's merely a relic from the dot-com boom nowadays and needs desperately to be put down like the dying horse it is.

Popups can be used for other reasons. Maybe I'm blocking pop-ups for a totally different reason than advertising. The fact that Anti-leech.com thinks that blocking pop-ups == blocking advertising, is wrong because many more applications exist for the standard pop-up window (like games, application notices, cool effects, temporary data store, etc. -- whatever the programmer can imagine).

On the flip side, there are other ways to make advertising annoying without popups. For example, some sites now use a DHTML layer that floats across the content to get your attention. Now that's annoying, but it's not a pop-up, which proves pop-ups aren't needed, so why protect pop-up advertising? I don't see a reason, but maybe somebody else (an advertiser) can shed some light on this. I would like to hear perspectives from advertisers on that point. DHTML layers are a good idea from the advertiser's perspective because layers can't easily be suppressed, unless JavaScript is turned off completely, which most people are not likely to do. Sorry about giving out such "evil" pointers but it's nothing new that people don't already know about.

Excluding anti-pop-up browsers will make most potential clients angry. Instead, the advertisers (and Anti-leech.com) should better spend their time creating alternate methods for delivery of advertising (like the DHTML layer) intsead of blocking the defunct pop-up. It's easy to see that protecting pop-up advertising is short-sighted because popups are not the only delivery method available for advertising. These companies must not be technically savvy. Whoever buys into this foolish logic will end up annoying their potential clientel, and therefore alienating them. Are you gonna' buy from someone who calls you a thief and then forces you to see pop-ups that you've already decided you don't want? Notice the accusing intonations of the text that the anti-popup detector displays -- very rude indeed -- any descent advertiser or sales outlet wouldn't use it, unless they are convinced they have to deal out punishment to their potential clients as a parent might to a child. Very demeaning to say the least. We're all grown-ups here.

Why do so many browsers allow you to block pop-ups? Because the people have spoken, and the people do not want pop-up advertising! For any advertiser to now force-feed pop-ups and call clients thieves -- especially at this point in history -- it goes against every ethical and smart business practice.

I don't mind advertising being displayed to me, because I am so accustomed to it. However I do despise it being pushed to me in pop-up windows or any other annoying fashion that blocks the primary purpose of my visit to the website. If they have to yell that loud about their product, then I would say the product most likely sucks. For example, you probably won't see the Segway HT in a pop-up window anytime soon because the product speaks for itself. Quality, value, and purpose.

I got browser stats from TheCounter. Although if you take a look at some of my older stats that have browser grouping, it shows the same thing. 76% IE and 16% mozilla. But my site is somewhat open source oriented and likewise have higher mozilla stats. TheCounter serves up a hell of a lot more stats than you or I though. Somewhere around 372,889,422 pages. Or about what slashdot gets in 6-10 months.

people who adopt IE only standards are stupid because the piss away 25% of potential users.

this is not true: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2002/August/browse r.php