Web browser statistics



In the last week or two, I’ve been playing around with a slightly different stat package for the individual sites, North Carolina Genealogy, South Carolina Genealogy and this site. Since it’s a new stat package, I’ve spent a good amount of time checking the stats to see just what browsers visitors are coming from, which ip blocks (local/distant), which search terms they’ve used to get here, etc. etc. One of the things that has surprised me is what a low percentage of visitors seem to be using Internet Explorer.

For starters, time was that IE had around 95% of the web browsing market. There were always other browsers, but IE was dominant. Mozilla Firefox was officially released last year and has been eating into Explorer’s market share gradually. This much has been newsworthy in and of itself. What I find interesting is that, even after filtering out MY OWN usage stats, I see Explorer with a maximum of 60% of the viewership of these three sites. Now, my stats are done individually for each site, I’ve filtered out spiders/bots and other automated scans and I’ve ruled out my browsing and still the highest percentage I’m seeing for ALL versions of Explorer combined is 60%.

I would expect this out of my main site, which you’re reading now. Mainly because the news items here would be of interest to a more technical audience and that audience would be more likely to be “early adopters”. On this site, I’m seeing less than 50% for Explorer. (~45%) I’m not surprised that there are people choosing Firefox over Explorer (and firefox is the MAIN alternative that I’m seeing in the logs, Konqueror is the next). I think Firefox offers several advantages over explorer, better ad blocking, faster page loading, nice search utility built into the taskbar, tabbed browsing, great extensions, and good standards compliance. I guess what surprises me is how many people have dipped a toe into the waters and have tried it out. It’s really encouraging.

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