browser border skirmishes

I’ve just perused my web statistics for this site for the first time in a while. Since I began this site, the traffic here has steadily increased, with a few bumps (notably the Janet’s tit fiasco that I satired heavily here, bringing me thousands of hits after the SuperBowl) along the way. But I’ve consistently had several thousand visitors per month for months now. I have no idea who is reading this, and I wish people who were reading it would feel free to comment more often. Yeah, I know. Wah.

But what intrigues me is the browser identification of people coming to my site. Supposedly, Microsoft Internet Explorer has a 90-something-percent market share. Yet, people using IE come in a distant third in popularity of browsers on my site. The breakdown goes something like this:

Netscape (compatible): 35.8%
Mozilla: 27.5%
Internet Explorer: 21.9%
Opera: 1.8%
Konqueror: 0.68%
Safari: 0.44%
Netscape: 0.25%
Galeon: 0.098%

A few notes: Netscape (compatible) is a smokescreen; it is basically browsers set to identify in a somewhat generic way. Lots of Konqueror users are set this way, as well as Safari (I imagine) and Mozilla users. So it’s impossible to tell which browsers are here, other than they are NOT Internet Explorer. So the largest clearly identified browser visiting this site is Mozilla, many of which are undoubtedly Firefox users. But together, 66.5% — almost exactly 2 out of 3 — of my visitors are not using Internet Explorer. Very interesting indeed.

Note that the above percentages do not add up to 100%; the difference is in search engine spiders and counters.

I knew lots of people were switching away from IE, mostly to Firefox, but I had no idea it was this dramatic. I wonder how many other sites are experiencing statistics like these?

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