Non-Tech Website Statistics

by Steven Garrity

Some semi-anonymous browser statistics from a non-technology-related e-commerce website during a one-week period in early February 2006:

Browser usage from a mid-sized e-commerce site – February 2006
84.1% Internet Explorer (97% of these using IE6)
9.6% Firefox (43% of these using v1.5)
2.5% Safari

A few thoughts:

  • Firefox really does have somewhere around 10% of the market. Most of the other statistics I’ve seen are skewed towards a more tech-aware crowd and lean more in favour of Firefox.
  • Almost everyone uses Internet Explorer is up to version 6. It has been out for a few years now, and upgrading is easy, but I’m still surprised how few people are still on IE 5/5.5. This bodes relatively well for update of IE7 (which is already starting to show up in the statistics in beta form).
  • A few people (literally, just a “few”) use IE5.x for the Mac
  • Not even one visitor during this week used Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4. Not one. I never thought I would live to see such a time.
  • Mac users are around 4%, Linux users below 0.3%. Someone visited using OS/2!

Ah, bullet points – lazy cousin of the paragraph.

 

14 thoughts on “Non-Tech Website Statistics”

  1. “[everybody has 6], this bodes relatively well for update of IE7.”

    Especially as those people are quite likely to have auto-update on, which means they’ll upgrade to IE7 automagically, which in turn means fewer people left on IE6 for unheathly amounts of time (unlike IE5).

    I’m a tad disapointed that Firefox could only push 1.5 to 43% of its users. Probably Firefox 2 (being a big number and all) can help the push.

  2. The main reason for FFX 1.5’s low penetration (hee hee i said penetration) compared to FFX’s total share is probably due to a lack of proper auto-update patch capability. You have to manually (!) download and install the new version in its entirety. After I got FFX 1.5, it upgraded to 1.5.01 quickly and painlessly.

    I am also glad for the death of IE5:mac.

  3. my statistics is a little different….
    MS Internet Explorer 78.2 %
    FireFox 14.5 %
    Safari 2.5 %
    Netscape 1.7 %
    Opera 1.5 %
    Mozilla 0.6 %
    Unknown 0.2 %
    NetShow Player 0.1 %
    Others 0.1 %

  4. Steven, thanks for sharing that data. Of course it would be very interesting to hear exactly what site that data is from.

    yansen, figures for my blog are even more different. But you can hardly compare a blog with any e-commerce site, can you? I guess that blogs see much more firefox and Mac users than the average.

  6. Its sad to see Opera have such a low share of the pie, despite being the fastest and safest browser of the lot (with the exception, perhaps, of Safari). The ad-supported period for Opera really helped Firefox get the head start it has over it. Firefox seems to be delibrately headed for a Microsoft like domination with its tie-up with google.

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