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Browser Stats
It's a while since I did the sad web geek thing, so...
Mass-Market Stats
(stats sources that attempt to capture data from very large numbers of users accessing many servers - these are as close to "global" as you're going to get)
TheCounter.com
I've been saying rude things about TheCounter.com for the last 18 months, as their browser-detection and data-publishing routines have gone completely off the rails. Their data from May-December 2003 are complete garbage, as they "forgot" to reset the counting period; those from January-April 2004 are slightly better, but marred by atrocious browser detection - In March 2004, apparently the third most popular browser has no name, and IE1 has more users than IE4. Yeah, right.
With their May 2004 stats, they've FINALLY got their act together and started identifying browsers properly. This means that they are making a vague attempt to accurately detect browsers based on the Gecko (Mozilla, FireFox, Netscape 6 ) and KHTML (Konqueror, Safari) rendering engines. They now join other mass-market stats sources in reporting plausible figures for Gecko-based browsers - about 2.3%. There's no worthwhile history yet, so we can't judge what trends they're seeing. Shame they still don't distinguish Mac IE5, though.
| Browser | May 2004 |
|---|---|
| IE6 | 76.7% |
| IE5 | 18.0% |
| Mozilla | 1.4% |
| Netscape 7 | 1.0% |
| Safari | 0.7% |
| Opera | 0.5% |
| everything else: | 1.7% |
| Browser Family | May 2004 |
|---|---|
| IE4+ | 94.9% |
| Gecko (Mozilla, Netscape 6 ) | 2.4% |
| KHTML (Safari, Konqueror) | 0.8% |
| Opera | 0.5% |
OneStat.com
The for-pay onestat.com have issued another of their irregular press releases, which appears to show a trend I've been seeing in numerous other sources for some time - Internet Explorer losing market share. Only a very small reduction, but it seems to be real, and it's Mozilla, Opera and Safari that are picking up the users.
(dates given are the date the stats were released)
| Browser | 28 May 2004 | 19 January 2004 | 28 July 2003 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE6 | 69.3% | 68.1% | 66.3% |
| IE5.5 | 12.9% | 13.8% | 14.5% |
| IE5 | 10.8% | 11.8% | 12.7% |
| Mozilla | 2.1% | 1.8% | 1.6% |
| Opera 7.x | 1.0% | 0.8% | 0.6%* |
| Safari | 0.7% | 0.5% | 0.3% |
| IE4 | 0.6% | 0.7% | 0.8% |
| everything else: | 2.6% | 2.5% | 3.2% |
*The July 2003 figure is for Opera 6.0
| Browser Family | 28 May 2004 | 19 January 2004 | 28 July 2003 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE4+ | 93.6% | 94.4% | 94.3% |
| everything else: | 6.4% | 5.6% | 5.7% |
ranking.pl
This Polish source has been publishing stats for some time, and generally have excellent browser detection. Their dataset is centered in eastern europe (though only 20% is from Poland) and shows some interesting differences with the more typical US-centric figures often quoted elsewhere, notably the strong showing from Opera. Notice that fall in IE's share again.
| Browser | 31 May 2004 | 19 January 2004 | 28 July 2003 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE6 | 72.4% | 66.1% | 58.0% |
| IE5.x/Win | 19.9% | 27.0% | 36.2% |
| Opera 7.x | 2.7% | 2.0% | 1.2% |
| Mozilla 1.x | 1.6% | 1.3% | 0.9% |
| Firefox 0.x | 0.9% | 0.3% | 0.1% |
| IE4 | 0.9% | 1.2% | 1.4% |
| Netscape 7.x | 0.6% | 0.6% | 0.6% |
| everything else: | 1.0% | 1.5% | 1.6% |
| Browser Family | 31 May 2004 | 19 January 2004 | 28 July 2003 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE4+ | 93.6% | 94.7% | 95.6% |
| Gecko (Mozilla, Netscape 6 ) | 3.1% | 2.4% | 1.8% |
| Opera | 2.8% | 2.2% | 1.5% |
| KHTML (Safari, Konqueror) | 0.1% | 0.2% | 0.1% |
Single-Site Stats
Stats from a single site should always be regarded with some caution, as they can be heavily skewed by demographic effects. For instance, a site offering MacOS-centric articles and support forums is probably going to have relatively few visitors using IE6 for Windows. The effects can also be much more subtle. University department based servers will often show higher levels of unix-based visitors than more general sites, and they also display quite marked changes in demographics as the academic terms/semesters end, and all the students go home.
W3Schools.com
This is a web authoring tutorial site. Visitors are more likely to be people who access the web professionally, and probably spend more time online than casual surfers.
These figures show a fairly dramatic rise in the number of hits from mozilla-based browsers over the last 10 months - even overtaking IE5 into second place overall. It appears that web developers are starting to switch to mozilla.
| Browser | May 2004 | January 2004 | July 2003 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE6 | 72.8% | 71.3% | 66.9% |
| Mozilla | 11.0% | 8.2% | 5.7% |
| IE5 | 8.9% | 12.8% | 20.3% |
| Opera 7.x | 2.2% | 2.1% | 1.7%* |
| Netscape 7.x | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| everything else: | 3.7% | 4.1% | 3.9% |
Conclusions
These are my gut opinions, based on a lot more details than I've included above, so take 'em or leave 'em:- IE's total market share (94-95%) is stagnant, or even falling slightly; but then, there's not really any room for it to rise.
- IE6 (70-75%) continues to eat IE5's users (20%), and there are some signs that IE5 is starting a dive to oblivion
- Safari is stomping all over IE over in MacOS-land
- Mozilla (2-3%) and Opera (~1%) are gaining ground steadily, but slowly
- Mozilla's growth is particularly strong amongst heavy 'net users and web authors (10% and rising fast), where it may be reaching a critical mass.
- Anyone still worried about Netscape 6: give it up, all the users (and there were never many) upgraded to version 7, or Moz
- The version 4 browsers are thoroughly dead (hallelujah!)
Predictions: watch out for the mozilla-based browsers, particularly Firefox.