Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

Ars has a fascinating breakdown of browser use on its site:

But what of the browser wars? Taken as a whole, Internet Explorer is in the #1 spot, with 38%. Mozilla trails at 31%, while Safari gets 8%, and Opera scores a measly 3%. The rest were unknown and rather small, percentage-wise (e.g., Konquerer only has 0.68%). It should be pointed out that users can change their browser agent strings, so part of Opera’s score probably shows up in the IE category, and the same is true for Safari and Konq, as users configure their browsers to tell web servers that they’re instances of IE.

With IE at the top, we wonder what the breakdown is. 93% of those users are on IE 6 or higher, and 4% or on 5.5. The remaining 3% is spread on down from 5.01 and on. You’re all up to date, which is great. Mozilla sees 82% of its users on 1.7.x, and another 12% on 1.6. The remaining 6% trail. The problem with this data is that our stats program (Urchin) does not differentiate between Mozilla and Firefox. Hence, the 1.7.x numbers could be mostly Firefox users after 0.9, when the revision in the User Agent string was reported as rv:1.7, or they could be Mozilla users. What they aren’t are Netscape users. Netscape as a whole accounts for just 1.4% of our traffic, 75% of which are on version 7 or higher. Amazingly, 13% of Netscape users are on 4.0.

Ars is a site frequented by tech savvy geeks…so we should take these results with a grain of salt. The Ars audience is much savvier than most non-geeks so they’re probably a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to adapting new technologies.

But I still think that it’s reasonable to conclude that this is part of a larger trend of movement away from Internet Explorer and toward other browsers. Let’s hope that this continues and that we find ourselves in a true browser war again in the next couple of years. Choice in browsers is one of the best things that can happen to the Web.

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