Interesting October Browser Stats

This post has been archived. It's probably out of date or shameful in some other way.

This site passed an interesting milestone last month - the first month that over one million page views were recorded. That's just silly. Broken down, however, it becomes a little more reasonable. Around 370,000 page views were from feeds alone, with RSS page views accounting for two thirds of that figure. Cheat sheets accounted for the next largest chunk, with around 300,000 page views, including both articles and the sheets themselves (which made up around half of that number).

And visitors were, of course, a much lower number than views, at 300,000. What's interesting though is the browser statistics for this site for October. Last month was the first month that visitors with Firefox accounted for more than half of all visitors with 52.2% (up 6.1% from 46.1% in September). IE's percentage was down by an almost identical proportion - from 36.4% to 31.2% (down 5.2%). (Aside: The rest of Firefox's gain was at the expense of Mozilla and niche browsers. Opera was also up 0.5%.)

Another point of interest was that there are people out there using browsers that I would have thought died many years ago. Netscape 0.97? 3 visits. Netscape 1.2? 57. Netscape 4.0 is still clinging on with 1002 in the month. Msie 3.02? 44. Msie 4.0? 1884. And even more surprisingly, there are apparently people still using Firefox 0.1! 566 using Firefox 0.10 and 947 using Firefox 0.10.1! If any of these people using these ancient or early-version browsers are reading, I'd love to know why they choose these particular browsers over more recent alternatives.

So, why post this? With the release of IE7 and Firefox 2 in November, these statistics will be changing, and should give an idea of the rate at which designers and developers are "upgrading" (inverted commas because I'm not convinced that IE7 is actually an upgrade rather than a "sidegrade" yet), and more importantly if IE7 is stealing back share from Firefox. At the moment, it appears to be doing so - mid-month stats indicate IE is regaining ground.

24 November 2006