Thursday, September 03, 2009

If you're reading this, you're probably pretty net-savvy.

Perhaps this feature has always been available, but I just noticed the other night that Google Analytics can tell me stats about what kind of web browsers people use to access this page.  Far and away the number one browser used was Firefox (57%), followed by Safari (16%), Internet Explorer (15%), and Chrome (8%).  Interestingly, the breakdown for those accessing my group webpage was quite different, with IE having more like 30% of the total.  Very educational.  No one using lynx, though.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

The breakdown for the ELEC 603 site is Firefox (38%), IE (31%), Chrome (18%), and Safari (12%). As for operating systems, it's dominated by Windows (82%), then Macintosh (12%), and iPhone (4%).

The mix for my personal site shifts a bit: Firefox (43%), IE (28%), Safari (24%), and Chrome (4%). Of those, it's still mostly Windows (64%), then Mac (29%).

Supposedly IE still plays a very dominant role in the browser wars. I find it interesting that the numbers you're seeing, and I'm seeing, are skewed so far away from the reported usage numbers for the web as a whole.

Douglas Natelson said...

I suspect that this is because both of our audiences have a large university population component. Universities, relative to the rest of the world, have an excess of both Macs and more CS-types. This would tend to push things toward Safari and Chrome, respectively.

Joseph Smidt said...

What nobody using lynx or something like w3m? Oh no, what is the world coming to.

Tobias said...

The other thing about universities is that they are usually fairly lenient about what software you can install on "your" computer.
My friends and relatives working for large companies with IT departments are usually lucky if they're allowed to visit arbitrary websites, much less to install a browser of their choice on their workplace machines, so IE it is in many cases - that's where the pre-installed browser with the OS really matters.