MSIE still dying, Firefox continues to grow.

[kcredden]

With the new browser user stats for September, it's offical. IE, that slow, old, and virus breeding browser packed into every Windows since 98, is steadly loosing itself to Firefox.

Now in September, it's dropped to 82.10%, Firefox is now at 12.46%. Safari - a Mac browser, accually has increased to 3.53%!

As for the other browsers, Netscape, and Opera are nearly dead at 1% with each other, and Mozilla; Firefox's older cousion, is almost faded from the web, at less than 1%.

more here (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061010-7949.html)

[Chuck]

Really, With 4 million hits last month MS gained ground here at the BBS:
September Browser stasts:
MS Internet Explorer 3929834 95 %
Firefox 169194 4 %

August Browser stasts:
MS Internet Explorer 4018277 93.1 %
Firefox 275413 6.3 %

I use both browsers about 50/50.

Safari and other browsers where at .01%

[kcredden]

Looks to be the same here, Chuck: Of course, ZDnet has their own servers, and probably they have a more diverse lineup than we do. But here is the yearly stats, for the web sites I maintain.

I think a lot of those Firefox ones, is my own testing, but I'm surpised, anyone is STILL using Netscape 4.0.

Redden realty's (http://reddenrealestate.com)
and Mine (http://kevinredden.name)

Kevinredden.name yearly totals

Versions Grabber Hits Percent
MSIE 1800 23.5 %
Msie 7.0 No 33 0.4 %
Msie 6.0 No 1673 21.8 %
Msie 5.5 No 1 0 %
Msie 5.0 No 93 1.2 %
FIREFOX 3306 43.2 %
Firefox 1.5.0.7 No 409 5.3 %
Firefox 1.5.0.6 No 59 0.7 %
Firefox 1.5.0.5 No 16 0.2 %
Firefox 1.5.0.4 No 325 4.2 %
Firefox 1.5.0.3 No 135 1.7 %
Firefox 1.5.0.2 No 289 3.7 %
Firefox 1.5.0.1 No 1667 21.7 %
Firefox 1.5 No 86 1.1 %
Firefox 1.0.7 No 113 1.4 %
Firefox 1.0.6 No 118 1.5 %
Firefox 1.0.4 No 20 0.2 %
Firefox 1.0.3 No 39 0.5 %
Firefox 1.0.1 No 24 0.3 %
Firefox 1.0 No 2 0 %
Firefox 0.10 No 4 0 %
NETSCAPE 139 1.8 %
Netscape 8.1 No 17 0.2 %
Netscape 8.0.4 No 55 0.7 %
Netscape 8.0 No 40 0.5 %
Netscape 7.2 No 20 0.2 %
Netscape 6.0 No 2 0 %
Netscape 5.0 No 3 0 %
Netscape 4.0 No 2 0 %
Others 2407 31.4 %
Mozilla No 1723 22.5 %
Unknown ? 330 4.3 %
Safari No 154 2 %
W3C HTML Validator No 81 1 %
Opera No 74 0.9 %
Konqueror No 32 0.4 %
Camino No 8 0.1 %
W3C CSS Validator No 5 0 %

Reddenrealestate.com - yearly totals

Browsers
Versions Grabber Hits Percent
MSIE 50660 87.6 %
Msie 7.0 No 291 0.5 %
Msie 6.0 No 49214 85.1 %
Msie 5.5 No 621 1 %
Msie 5.17 No 116 0.2 %
Msie 5.16 No 29 0 %
Msie 5.01 No 62 0.1 %
Msie 5.0 No 272 0.4 %
Msie 4.01 No 54 0 %
Msie 3.0 No 1 0 %
FIREFOX 3028 5.2 %
Firefox 1.5.0.7 No 88 0.1 %
Firefox 1.5.0.6 No 120 0.2 %
Firefox 1.5.0.5 No 31 0 %
Firefox 1.5.0.4 No 276 0.4 %
Firefox 1.5.0.3 No 1075 1.8 %
Firefox 1.5.0.1 No 194 0.3 %
Firefox 1.5 No 171 0.2 %
Firefox 1.0.7 No 938 1.6 %
Firefox 1.0.6 No 28 0 %
Firefox 1.0.2 No 49 0 %
Firefox 1.0 No 58 0.1 %
NETSCAPE 389 0.6 %
Netscape 8.1 No 187 0.3 %
Netscape 7.2 No 138 0.2 %
Netscape 7.1 No 21 0 %
Netscape 7.01 No 41 0 %
Netscape 6.0 No 1 0 %
Netscape 5.0 No 1 0 %
Others 3736 6.4 %
Mozilla No 1939 3.3 %
Unknown ? 1594 2.7 %
Safari No 116 0.2 %
Konqueror No 84 0.1 %
LibWWW No 2 0 %
Curl Yes 1 0 %

[Chuck]

ZDnet is more techy oriented so that would explain a portion of that. Plus I use firefox for ZDnet but not other places.

[Jeremy]

Mark Twain once said, "There's lies, ****ed lies, and statistics" or something like that. Stats for web sites are really hard to pin down as completely accurate as there's so many different ways to muck it up. If you have, for example, a company of 100 employees behind a network of one IP address, and 50 people from that company hit your site, it still registers as one unique visitor. You can easily spoof your user-agent to whatever you want, for example Googlebot, then your stats shows visits from Google as a search engine instead of an actual web site visitor. I had one guy visit my site under the user-agent Comodore 64! Now I know that's not real.

A lot of people get confused over the difference between unique visitors and actual eyeballs as well. One of my sites, for example, has roughly 700 actual readers I've determined by studying the stats over about a year. Here's how that can easily be misconstrued: The stats say I'm getting on average 2,000 unique visitors to that site daily. 2,000 uniques at 30 days in a month, equals wow 60,000 people! Woot! But that's not actually true. Everytime someone switches IP addresses, they count as a unique visitor. Someone on dialup visiting your site twice in a day counts as two. A person who visits your site everyday for 30 days is still just one person. And so on. It gets really tricky pinning down how many actual people are checking out your content. Then you have to weed out how many people are actually interested in your content versus the people who arrived by a mistaken search query, never to return again. Like I was saying, on that particular site, what could be construed as 60,000 people is really only 700 actual people visiting on a daily basis. Still it's kind of cool knowing that 700 people are interested in what you have to say.

Bearing that in mind, it also has a lot to do with the audience and the stats reporting system. Techies are more likely to use Firefox. If your site is about programming, then you'll probably get fewer IE visits.

Looking at one of my more popular web sites that services people from a wide range of backgrounds, across the entire world, pretty much a good cross-section of web users in general, I'm getting about 60% IE, 30% Firefox, and the rest are broken out to the other obscure browsers.

As I said, though, it has a lot to do with the stats reporting system. I have two systems watching that site, Awstats and Google Analytics. Awstats says there's 60.3% IE users and 32.8% Firefox users. Google Analytics says it's 57.10% IE users and 37.54% Firefox users. Someone's lying : )

[Chuck]

So true, I like the way you explained that.

4 million hits are over all and are not unique. My favorite stat is the Page Views more so than unique IP's we globally get 2.5 mil page views per month with only 1.4 mil being views beyond the home page.

Unique IP's (After filtering) are about 5500 a month. I filter IP's to user name to compensate for Dial Up but this does not help for guest logins. Guest logins are only about 1% or less on average a day on dial up. I think that is because the site design is built around broadband and is painful on dial up. I do filter user_agents for spider,crawl and bot's but a few still sneak through on those numbers.

The 4 million hits do apply when we talk about browser percentages but does not apply for visitors that stay. It is just overall hits.

Our 2000 hits a day a are not unique hits. They are a total based on sessions lasting more than 2 minute and viewing more than 1 page. This total is a calculation based on ad views per IP and page views per IP on sessions over 2 minutes.

I am not trying to brag or anything I just like chatting about stats collection. Couple of boards I go to do this but my stats are way low for them. They don't understand catering to a small community.

[Jeremy]

I would definitely take 100 actual logins to a niche site like a small town community over 1000 visitors to a generic site. Those boards that look down on your stats don't really understand what stats are about. If a web site caters to selling cars lists dealerships across the country, for example, and gets 1000 visitors per day, that's way less important than a site just about Maysville car dealerships that gets 10 visitors a day. Those 10 visitors to the Maysville car site are infinitely more qualified and likely to purchase a car than the 1000 generics at the other site. To really benefit from stats, you want to whittle them down as far as possible, and if you're still left with something interesting, it's more brow-raising and authentic than big numbers. Tell them if they really think they're all that, go and build a small town community site and get back with you :) They'll learn really quick.

[tkcomer]

Have they figured out a way for Firefox to open videos at MSN’s website? Other than the right click and to open the page in IE? That’s about the only time I use IE. I like to watch some of their news commentator feeds and, ashamed to admit this, the stupid pet tricks.

[Jeremy]

Sure, the way you watch videos at MSN using Firefox is that you go to Google instead : )

Same videos usually show up at all the video sites and Google, YouTube, etc. are all Flash based.

[kcredden]

Jeremy: Thanks for the heads-up on this. I knew that 'hits' was an illusion, but didn't think about dynamic IP addresses too. So... :)

Anyway, still interesting. I can believe pretty much that FF is growing, and IE is dying. But what the percentages is, is another matter.

Mark Twain once said, "There's lies, ****ed lies, and statistics" or something like that. Stats for web sites are really hard to pin down as completely accurate as there's so many different ways to muck it up.

[kcredden]

TK: I may have a solution finally for this for you. I'm testing out a new program called 'Sandboxie' that may help elimate or at least lessen the danger of using IE in Windows. Give me a bit more time, and I'll whip up a review, and HOW-TO on how to install, and set it up. I'm sort of in the same boat. Some of these companies, I do business with, insists that I use IE to access their web sites, even when I tell them I don't even HAVE IE on the system (the main system is Debian-linux based). (Have to get on the laptop to use IE...) it blows their mind, they have clients who don't use Windows religiously. :)

Have they figured out a way for Firefox to open videos at MSN’s website? Other than the right click and to open the page in IE? That’s about the only time I use IE. I like to watch some of their news commentator feeds and, ashamed to admit this, the stupid pet tricks.