more stats

This time, from W3Schools. I'm sure many of you have glanced over the visitor stats over at W3Schools, a Web development site. Of course, this is likely to have a higher than normal percentage of Firefox users, if for no other reason than Web developers testing or looking up solutions for multiple browsers. Still, that's a very valuable group of users. If you're a Web developer and you're using Firefox, then you're probably developing sites that work with Firefox (though, of course, I can imagine exceptions to that).

So, it's probably not news to you that Mozilla visitors (a majority of which are likely to be Firefox users) are sitting at a nice 21.2%. Toss in the Netscape 7 users (another Gecko-based browser) and W3Schools gets 22.4% of its visits from Gecko browsers. Again, this isn't really news, the number has been public for a while.

What I do find interesting, though, is the relationship between the growing Mozilla percentage and the thinning ranks of IE users. I've thrown together this little table of the changes over the last year to highlight what's going on.

+--------+--------+--------+--------+
|   IE   | change | Gecko  | change |
|--------+--------+--------+--------|
| 71.70% | -1.80% | 22.40% | +1.90% |
| 73.50% | -1.70% | 20.50% | +1.70% |
| 75.20% | -0.60% | 18.80% | +0.60% |
| 75.80% | -1.50% | 18.20% | +1.30% |
| 77.30% | -1.40% | 16.90% | +1.70% |
| 78.70% | -2.00% | 15.20% | +2.00% |
| 80.70% | -1.10% | 13.20% | +0.80% |
| 81.80% | -0.70% | 12.40% | +0.70% |
| 82.50% | -0.30% | 11.70% | +0.70% |
| 82.80% | -0.20% | 11.00% | +0.50% |
| 83.00% | -1.10% | 10.50% | +0.80% |
| 84.10% |        |  9.70% |        |
+--------+--------+--------+--------+

As you can see, Mozilla's growth this last year is coming pretty much directly from IE. Opera has held steady the full year at 2.1% while older Netscape versions have lost half a point.

Also interesting (to me, at least) is how closely these numbers match up with my weblog reader breakdown from yesterday.

It's pretty clear that we've made some very strong gains with "web savvy" types this year. We're getting early adopters and content creators at a fairly swift pace. I guess that's pretty obvious, but it's nice to see some damn lies and statistics that support it. Posted by asa at December 28, 2004 07:18 AM