Browser Stats For The BBC Homepage

Lord_Scrumptious writes "An interesting article titled 'The software used to access the BBC homepage' has recently been published on a blog by a BBC employee. It's all about the different browsers and operating systems accessing the BBC's homepage. The analysis is from a week of page requests in September 2005. Not surprisingly, Internet Explorer accounted for 85% of site visits, but Firefox had a very respectable 9.7% share. Even requests from Sony's handheld PSP device were recorded, but interestingly there's no mention of mobile phone devices."

Comments

Respectable

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There's nothing respectable about that [10% market share for firefox].

First, in a free world, you would expect Firefox to get about 33%. Why? Because there's at least two other good browsers out there, and most run on Windoze. If users were informed and were able to chose a browser that they actually liked, you would expect them to move to one or the other of these based on the quirks of each and personal preference. As Microsoft dies and user choice improves the net will move towards a mix of standards based browsers and none will gain more than 33%.

Second, do realize the enormous effort required to break out of the Microsoft vendor lock in? BBC is a work safe site, so it's statistics are dominated by corporate desktop browsing. Big dumb companies buy from other big dumb companies, like Dell. Microsoft makes sure that companies will pay through the nose to have any non M$ approved software on those computers. So, the 80% market share IE shows here is a major step towards user choice. Each one of those browsers is a determined punch in M$'s face.