Phil Wilson from the University of Bath has just published a summary of browser statistics so I thought it might be interesting to do a comparison.
We also use Google Analytics and it covers virtually every page on the site. We don’t distinguish internal visitors so I’ll give figures for external and total.
External visitors:
| Browser |
Visits |
Breakdown |
| Internet Explorer |
79.65% |
IE6: 18.5%; IE7: 68.5%; IE8: 13% |
| Firefox |
14.05% |
|
| Safari |
3.78% |
|
| Chrome |
1.89% |
|
| Opera |
0.25% |
|
All visitors:
| Browser |
Visits |
Breakdown |
| Internet Explorer |
80.30% |
IE6: 17%; IE7: 71%; IE8: 11.8% |
| Firefox |
13.77% |
FX2: 6%; FX3: ~90% |
| Safari |
3.55% |
|
| Chrome |
1.80% |
|
| Opera |
0.23% |
|
Still far too many IE6 users both inside and outside the University. I will be very glad when it stops being a significant problem but browser share is dropping very slowly and none of the various proposals for encouraging people to upgrade seem very attractive to me.
Interestingly, looking at the stats for blogs.edgehill.ac.uk, Firefox usage jumps to 33.5% with IE at 56%.
Apple recently released the latest version of Safari and it’s really impressive. It’s blisteringly fast compared to Firefox 2 and IE (Firefox 3 – currently in testing – is set to be pretty fast as well). In the last couple of days Apple has started pushing this out along side updates to Quicktime and iTunes.
This comes as absolutely no surprise to me, in fact I predicted it when Apple first announced Safari was coming to Windows:
It will be interesting to see how much market share they can get from IE, Firefox and Opera, and I suspect that as soon as it comes out of beta they’ll be pushing it out along side QuickTime and iTunes.
Quite a few people are upset about this. Seriously, get over it. If it reduces the number of people using criminally bad web browsers like IE 6 then that’s a good thing.
Apple made the surprise announcement yesterday that they’re releasing Safari for Windows. First impressions are that it’s fast, with some neat features – check out the article length slider when you view an RSS feed and search as you type – but it’s got the iTunes grey interface which I don’t particularly like.
The browser wars are really hotting up again. It will be interesting to see how much market share they can get from IE, Firefox and Opera, and I suspect that as soon as it comes out of beta they’ll be pushing it out along side QuickTime and iTunes.
As web developers, the major benefit will be if rendering is the same as Safari for Mac OS X which would allow us to more easily test compatibility. If it’s another slight variation then it’ll just be a pain!
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