Browser stats for the past year
With the recent launch of Internet Explorer 8, and many people looking forward to the day when IE6 is a distant nightmare I thought I'd take a quick look at our Apache logs, processed via Sawmill, to see what the current landscape from March 2008 - March 2009 is looking like.
The Apache logs I examined cover a range of public sites that all target different sectors and niches and so gives a fairly broad indication and certainly a fair bit of variation. Below is an overview of my findings.
Generally for 2008 Internet Explorer leads the pack by a huge margin. Between the various sites it usually averages between 60 - 80% of the overall share of visitors. Breaking it down to subversions of IE, we see that IE 5.5 and below are now almost irrelevant with less than 0.4% of visitors using those versions. Internet Explorer 7.0 is now starting to overtake IE6, although generally IE7 and IE6 are split almost 50-50. IE8 is obviously insignificant at this time, but I expect number of visitors will dramatically shoot up now it has been released and will probably halt IE7 from gaining any additional share in the next year. Obviously its going to take years to eliminate IE6 :(
Firefox is the next most popular browser among visitors, although it lags a fair way behind IE, but seems to have been steadily increasing its userbase. It currently seems to average between 10 - 15% share of visitors across the sites checked.
Safari currently seems to have around 2 - 3% share of visitors using it. I expect a lot of Mac owners likely use Firefox on Mac OS X. Webkit doesn't seem to show up, so it is possible it might come under Safari stats with the version of Sawmill we are using (I might update Sawmill at some point soon). It will be interesting to see how WebKit adoption by Google's Chrome, Gnome's switch from Gecko to Webkit with Epiphany and the iPhone affect its share over the next year.
The most surprising find was that Netscape Navigator 4 still seems to be in use. It seems to get around 2% share It boggles the mind why anyone would still be using this browser! Even if there are stubborn people who don't like user interface changes they could upgrade to Mozilla SeaMonkey (a continuation of the old Mozilla suite) with the classic theme and have a modern rendering engine! I'm sure that will still run on Windows 98 too!
I also had a quick glance at operating system usage as well. It seems that Windows XP is the most popular operating system with between 60 - 80% of visitors running it. Windows Vista is in 2nd place with between 10 - 20% share. I expect Vista will never get to the huge user numbers that XP had due to Windows 7 being released in the near future. Tried and true Windows 2000 is still hanging in there and seems to be around 4% of visitors. Windows 2000 leaves its extended support phase on 13th July 2010, which means no more security support for the general populace very soon. I suspect its usage will drop a fair bit over the next year.
Mac OS seems to be around the 3% mark and holding steady. A nice pleasant surprise was Linux showing up this year in the stats! In previous years Linux has been almost non existent but over the last year its usage appears to have shot up to just above 1% on average. Given that ARM is working with Canonical to launch a new range of Cortex 9 based Ubuntu running netbooks in the summer, it will be interesting to see if Linux usage continues to rise! Also Googles Android might well have an impact here too, especially if HP go ahead and launch Android based netbooks!
