It's pretty obvious that bloggers are typically more sophisticated than the general Internet population -- they're creating Web content, so it's not surprising to me when I hear so many bloggers are falling in love with Firefox.
But what about blog readers? They're likely to be a bit more savvy than your average surfer. What does that translate to in terms of browser usage? Today I spent some time looking at website stats for popular blogs to try to get an idea.
Here's what I did. I took the top 100 blogs, as listed at The Truth Laid Bear, looked up each one's Site Meter browser stats, and recorded both the Firefox percentage as well as the total Gecko percentage (combined Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape 6 & 7.) The percentages seem to fluctuate quite a bit, so I took three recordings, each batch several hours after the previous, and averaged them.
Linky, Bookmark groups, and tabbed browsing sure did make that easier. It's worth noting that quite a few of the sites didn't have public sitemeter data and my total number of evaluated sites was under 100.
Here's what I found. About 20% of the traffic to the top 100 weblogs comes from Firefox. Another 5% comes from other Gecko browsers, Mozilla or Netscape.
So, less than two months after the release of Firefox 1.0, a full quarter of the traffic hitting the most popular weblogs is using a Gecko browser. I think that's a great start.
I'll try to re-run these numbers in another 6 weeks or so and let you all know what I find. I'm also interested in any other aggregate browser stats for weblogs if you know of other sources.
Posted by asa at December 27, 2004 08:16 PMI'm running about 50%. My stats sw for my blog specifically isn't the best at the moment. The server logs cover more than just my blog. Here's my blog at the moment:
Netscape v6.0 54.39%
Internet Explorer v6.0
AOL's Browser v9.0
Internet Explorer v5.0
Internet Explorer v5.5
Opera v7.54 0.66%
I've seen a steady increase in Gecko usage over the year at my site. More details are in my post Browser statistics and choices from a few weeks ago.
The trend continues. Here's what it looks like for December:
Firefox 46.5%
IE 31.9%
Safari 7.6%
Mozilla 6.8%
Opera 4.0%
Netscape 1.4%
I run a low-traffic non-tech-related site. A lot, but not all, of my traffic is college students and professors. Since mid-September, my stats look like this:
61% - IE6
11% - Firefox
7% - IE5 Windows
7% - IE5 Mac
6% - Netscape 7
The other 8% has trace amounts of Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, IE5.5, AOL 9, and (shudder) IE4 and Netscape 4.
Firefox has been climbing steadily. Traffic usually picks up in January, so it will be interesting to see a change.
Posted by: Greg on December 28, 2004 12:31 PM