About two weeks ago I started collecting statistics for this website, something I’ve always planned on doing but never actually cared enough to sit down and do. Two weeks doesn’t make for a great sample period but the results are still interesting.
Almost 25% of visitors use some version of IE and 44% use Firefox. (20% did not identify their browser.) This is rather astounding to me. Apparently either FF gained more market share than I thought or this blog tends to attract the kind of people who use FF (probably the latter). Mozilla, Opera, and Safari are straggling at 5.7%, 3.3%, and 1.4% respectively.
Out of the 25% using IE, the usage is almost exactly split between IE6 and IE7, with IE7 almost a full 1% ahead. Can someone please explain why people are still using IE6? Seriously people, this is 2008.
Firefox >= 3.0 accounts for a little over half of all FF traffic with various versions of 2.0 making up for most of the difference and a negligible amount of 1.0 and pre-1.0 hits making up the rest.
When it comes to operating systems, almost 54% are using Windows, 21% Linux, 3% Mac OS X, and 22% unidentified. Windows XP wins with 40% overall usage and Vista can claim 7%. Most of the Linux hits didn’t identify the distro.
The search robot report is interesting. From the major search engines, Google was the most conservative, making 236 hits for 2.83MB of data. MSN hit 975 times for 9.71MB. The winner is Yahoo: 2057 hits for a whopping 27MB. I’m not quite sure why Yahoo needs so much… Google seems to keep up just fine while consuming only a tenth of what Yahoo does.
Not surprisingly, the most popular blog posts are not about my own projects. The most viewed one by far was a gripe about gnome-terminal. Seems many people have the same irritation that I do.
So yeah. I don’t really have any point to make, except possibly that people should not be using IE6 anymore, and some search engines should really optimize their crawlers better.
Reasons for using IE6:
1) Company policy (I’ve experienced this)
2) I’m a dev. I need to test against IE6. I find the site works 99% in IE7 if I’ve tested with FF & IE6. Instead if I regularly test against IE7 & FF, then I have no chance of getting a site working in IE6.
3) IE7 has an appalling, confusing UI. Toolbar buttons in obscure places. The menu strip used to be hidden until MS realized the error of their ways and brought it back with a patch. I have family members who do not want to upgrade due to the awful UI.
1. Policy is a legitimate reason for using IE6, but I have to wonder about the people who make such policies.
2. I meant to imply that using IE6 to test is perfectly fine, and it is in fact necessary considering the large number of people still using it. That doesn’t explain the number of hits against my site though. (Who else needs to test it?)
3. In that case why not just use FF anyway?
1) Updating IE6 means testing and eventually fixing otherwise perfectly working internal web sites/pages and applications reusing browser components. Mass deployment isn’t free either. Upgrading will cost you a lot of money without gaining anything. Mostly because …
2) … all popular and important sites look perfectly fine when watched with IE6 – so there is no compelling reason to upgrade.
3) See 1) and 2) above + FF is more hyped than good. Most people I’ve talked to like the new IE7 UI – especially after realising that they havn’t used the menu bar for ages and it only eats up valuable screen estate.
Yes, corporate policy is definitely a deciding factor for many companies delayed switch to IE 7. However, I would venture that it’s rarely just a matter of poor judgment or misinformation. Things like employee training, possible incompatibility with existing internal applications and websites, and the process of actually deploying the update are all costs associated with switching versions. Each company’s CTO has to balance those costs with the benefits of upgrading.
As time goes on those benefits outweigh the costs to a far greater degree; however, I think, depending on the size of the organization and other factors, a case could be made for an organization not switching to IE 7 yet.
IE7 is too ugly! It has no menubar,I won’t use it.
IE6 will stay around because of the required WGA upgrade when updating to IE7. If you ask me, Microsoft shot themselves in the face with that decision.