54 Percent Firefox Users
Today I looked at this blog’s usage statistics and as it turns out, a whopping 54 percent of my visitors use Firefox, followed by Internet Explorer, then Safari, Opera, Chrome.
It’s interesting to see how much difference the “clientele” of a page makes for its statistics. The overall market share of Firefox has topped 20% a few months ago, but since this blog has a lot of tech content, a higher number of Firefox users is probably not surprising.
By the way, almost 80% of my Firefox visitors surf with Firefox 3.0.5, followed by only 5% of 2.0.0.20 users and a long tail of various other, outdated, browser versions.
I note that you call out the winner, in this case Firefox, yet if we take a step back isn’t the whole point of the web and indeed the Mozilla mission to have easy interoperability?
I’ve long felt that the worst legacy of the era of Microsoft domination is the “there can be only one” attitude that prevails in the IT industry. Browsers are coming out of this now, but people in general don’t seem to understand how crazy it is that Word documents only work well in Word. I mean I can shoot High-Def video content and have a world of tools, both hardware and software, at my disposal, yet my departmental memos fail to render correctly in OpenOffice or Google docs and don’t even fail in a predictable manner. It’s crazy.
So, the point of this ramble is, how can we get people to start reporting the non-IE percentage, in your case 72.8%, as the headline and the key metric, rather than whichever individual browser comes first in share (which might be IE for ‘normal’ sites, in most western countries, Firefox for geeks, Safari maybe for some very Mac-centric sites, Opera in Eastern Europe, Webkit for mobile-oriented sites etc.).
Maybe it could be the next web badge craze. Instead of “optimised for standards” have “X% of my readers don’t browse with IE”. Just a thought.