Current Browser Usage for Boston.com
One of the advantages of working on a website that gets a fair amount of readership is the visibility of that traffic and what it says about the browser usage of the general population. My day job is with
boston.com, which has a moderately large level of traffic (Alexa rank of 1,591, fwiw). Being a general news site with inbound links from really diverse sources, I'd like to think that we get a good representative cross-section of the web at large. My management was kind enough to allow me to share some numbers, giving a look at what web browsers people are using today, compared with a year ago.
Top line assessments: IE still rules. As of January, 2008, IE7 and IE6 each have a 34% share of our users (with IE7 barely ahead). Add in all other various IE versions in our top 20, and IE usage is still well over 70% (even though it's down from 76% one year ago). Firefox 2.0 jumped from 6.63% in Jan 2007 to 20.21% in Jan 2008. Gecko-based browsers (FF, Mozilla, Netscape) are now used by almost 22% of our audience, compared with 18% last year.
Interestingly, there appears to be some consolidation as well. The top 4 browsers from Jan 2008 (IE7,IE6,FF2,Saf3) combined make up 93% of our audience - In 2007, the top 4 (IE6,IE7,FF1.5,FF2) made up only 87%.
Safari 3, which wasn't even in existence in January 2007, has rocketed into the top 4 in less than a year. Overall Safari usage (all versions) grew a bit, and now is 6.12%, compared with 4.66% last year. Notably, Safari 3 for iPhone (and iPod Touch) is now our 11th most-popular browser.
So, the story for January 2007 - January 2008 is: IE7 is very slowly overtaking IE6 (after a year and a half, 7 has barely overtaken 6). But those leaving IE6 are not all moving on to IE7 - IE overall share is down by 6%, Firefox usage is up by 13% and Safari usage is up by 2%.
What does this mean - especially for those of us building websites daily? Well, using Yahoo's
A-Grade browser support page as a guideline, over 98% of our users are now visiting with A-grade browsers. However, I can't overlook the fact that browser number 20 on our list from Jan 2008 (19,843 visitors) is Netscape navigator 4.0 - a browser that is now over ten(!) years old.
The charts and graphs below are what I used to compile this, enjoy.
| Jan 2008 - 23,883,906 visitors |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 | 8,214,261 | 34.39% |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 | 8,163,282 | 34.18% |
| Mozilla Firefox 2.0 | 4,827,865 | 20.21% |
| Safari 3.0.4 | 1,042,383 | 4.36% |
| Safari 2.0.4 | 236,659 | 0.99% |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 (AOL) | 171,302 | 0.72% |
| None (Scrapers) | 143,027 | 0.60% |
| Microsoft MSN Explorer 9.0 | 127,728 | 0.53% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1 | 113,888 | 0.48% |
| Safari 1.3.2 | 102,797 | 0.43% |
| Safari 3.0 (iPhone) | 94,767 | 0.40% |
| Netscape Navigator 3.0 | 84,651 | 0.35% |
| Mozilla (Gecko) 1.8 | 56,120 | 0.23% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0 | 53,540 | 0.22% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 | 51,420 | 0.22% |
| Mozilla Firefox (unknown version) | 36,204 | 0.15% |
| Netscape Navigator 7.2 | 30,996 | 0.13% |
| Microsoft MSN Explorer | 30,986 | 0.13% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.0 | 28,949 | 0.12% |
| Netscape Navigator 4.0 | 19,843 | 0.08% |
(Chart below shows top 13 browsers rolled up into major versions)
| Jan 2007 - 20,669,104 visitors |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 | 10,824,878 | 52.37% |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 | 4,254,413 | 20.58% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0 | 1,680,501 | 8.13% |
| Mozilla Firefox 2.0 | 1,369,394 | 6.63% |
| Safari 2.0.4 | 722,460 | 3.50% |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 (AOL) | 379,392 | 1.84% |
| Safari 1.3.2 | 190,176 | 0.92% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 | 163,895 | 0.79% |
| Microsoft MSN Explorer | 139,466 | 0.67% |
| Mozilla (Gecko) (unknown version) | 106,286 | 0.51% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.0 | 86,828 | 0.42% |
| None | 81,938 | 0.40% |
| Netscape Navigator 7.2 | 79,476 | 0.38% |
| Netscape Navigator 8.1 | 52,727 | 0.26% |
| Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 | 51,004 | 0.25% |
| Safari 2.0.3 | 49,798 | 0.24% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 | 47,716 | 0.23% |
| America Online Browser 1.1 | 42,427 | 0.21% |
| Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4 | 34,039 | 0.16% |
| Netscape Navigator 7.1 | 31,629 | 0.15% |
(Chart below shows top 13 browsers rolled up into major versions)
4 Comments +
These are unique hits, correct? Not one guy hitting the URL ten times, a second just once, and a third three times.
Thanks for sharing. Genuinely curious what tools you use to compile this data. I speak for at least two other bloggers who might be keen on using this tool. If, of course, available.
Did you get this data from Google analytics or another program
?Wow. Great post! Very nicely detailed stats here. Not only is Netscape 4 on the list but also version 3. LOL that's crazy! Very information thanks. It's nice to know a lot of people are using A-grade browsers.
I wonder why there is no Opera listed. According to several statistics from European Web sites, Opera has between 2 and 5 % of market share. I really believe that Opera is used more than Netscape 4. Is there something wrong with your browser detection? Because Opera ”cloaks“ as other browsers like MSIE or Mozilla.
Thanks for sharing. Genuinely curious what tools you use to compile this data. I speak for at least two other bloggers who might be keen on using this tool. If, of course, available.