blog.s11n.net

Is MSIE dead? It certainly seems so…

i was just processing my web logs and stumbled across a very interesting detail regarding web browsers. It goes a little something like this…

Webalizer reveals that of the top 25 user agents to visit wanderinghorse.net in October, less than 3.3% of the agents were MSIE. Those were about equally divided between MSIE 6.0 and 7.0. However, of those top 25 user agents, a whopping 37.4% of them were Firefox, mostly version 2.0.0.7 with some 2.0.0.6 and 2.0.0.8 thrown in for variety. (Even though 2.0.0.8 is only a week or so old, approx 4% out of that 37.4% are using it, which speaks well of Firefox users’ up-to-datedness.)

That’s 11 TIMES as many Firefox visitors as MSIE visitors.

Interestingly, the vast majority (approximately 30% out of that 37.4%) are Windows users, revealing that MS may own the desktop, but they certainly don’t own the browser market any more.

My guess is that only a few major sites (e.g. microsoft.com) are seeing an opposite trend.

What about the rest of the 100%? No single agent outside the top 25 accounted for more than 0.65% of October’s traffic, so they’re not being counted. They’re scattered amongst all sorts of flavors of all user agents, including bots and OS/X (which we can also safely categorize as bots, since Mac users tend to do whatever Apple says they should).

If we average out the numbers, ignoring those agents not in the top 25, Firefox accounts for nearly 90%(!!!) of the traffic and MSIE accounts for a measly 8% or so.

While i’m not naive enough to say that the browser wars are over, it does indeed seem that MSIE’s dominance is truly a thing of the past.