It’s been about eight months since the last time I took a careful look at browser stats. So how’s the IE-versus-Firefox slugfest going? If you’re expecting any excitement, prepare to be disappointed, as we’re about to enter year three with stats that are virtually unchanged.
Here’s the latest report from this site, courtesy of SiteMeter:
[The breakdown of Firefox users is in error, although the total is correct. See the updated figures at the end of this post.]
Browser shares are statistically unchanged in the past year. The Firefox/Mozilla share is at 36%, up less than a point from its 35.2% share in April 2006.
IE is still hovering around the same level as it has for the past two years. It’s worth noting, though, that the 59.6% total is the first time that IE’s share on this site has dropped below the 60% level. Statistically, though, it’s hard to make too much of a 0.4% decline in nearly two years.
Opera is still at less than 2% and hasn’t made any inroads. I doubt whether an antitrust complaint is going to do them any good.
Even worse for Opera is the fact that more visitors to this Windows-focused site use Safari, which continues to hover around the 2% level (that’s still less than the previous high of 2.11%, back in August 2005). Wonder how many of those are using iPhones?
Trend-watchers can look at all previous editions by following these links:
Update 5-Jan-2008: I contacted SiteMeter support to ask why so many Firefox 1.x users were being reported. They replied: “We found an issue regarding how different versions of Firefox were being displayed within the browser share report. This issue has now been corrected.” And indeed it has. Here is the current report:
For those keeping score, that’s IE 61%, Firefox/Mozilla 35.1%, with as many people using the FF3 beta as there are using FF 1.x.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
“Even worse for Opera is the fact that more visitors to this Windows-focused site use Safari”
Shocking news: There are Mac-Users, who like your writing 😉
Happy New Year!
I personally like Opera much better than the others (v10 is sounding very promising). But, to each his own. Though I’m not going to go on a browser crusade for them like the FF folks.
Are those numbers right?
Is Firefox 2.x share that low?
All those 1.x users have some serious vulnerabilties in Firefox 1.x as it is unsupported now.
Clearly your site meter is just broken, there is no way that Firefox 1.x has more users than Firefox 2.0
Tell your users to upgrade now because 1.x is already out of support:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9021818&intsrc=hm_list
My last Firefox stats from sitemeter are the same with 1.x having a major portion, whereas 2.x had very little. I see it as a sitemeter error in detecting the Firefox version. Could it be an extension that is hiding the version from sitemeter?
I think the numbers are crap. It is not possible that FF 1 is outnumbering FF2 30 times.
I almost never actually use a browser to read your site, so the stats are skewed for at least me.
Erik, I have a support ticket in with SiteMeter. I believe the total Firefox numbers are probably correct, but I think Ray is correct in his surmise that something is causing the version numbers to be displayed incorrectly. Given the large number, I suspect it’s server-side, not an extension (because most people don’t instal FF extensions).
Jon, most of the traffic to this site via the browser comes from Google searches, and it doesn’t include people like you who read strictly via RSS or e-mail. So by that measure it’s a pretty good indicator of casual traffic.
I have to now agree with you about the server side issue. I ran a test on one of my blogs by resetting the sitemeter to zero and using three different computers at home with different FF settings and extensions.
The figures for my blog show FF 1.x for 2 of the 3 computers and FF 2.0.11 for the other. All 3 computers have FF 2.0.11 on them and all 3 have XP. I did not try my wife’s Vista system.
I think some of those Firefox users are using RSS.
Tomer, RSS hits are not counted by SiteMeter. I heard back from the folks at SiteMeter, who tell me this is a bug in the way their servers were reporting FF versions. See the update to the post.
I wonder who the lone Netscape 4.x holdout is? 🙂