dvorak's readers smarter than average?
A commenter just pointed me to this post over at John C. Dvorak's blog which gives Firefox nearly 60% of the readership in one stats snapshot. Add in Mozilla and Camino, and Gecko is at 62% -- nearly 2/3rds!! Not bad at all.
After the mainstream browsers, Firefox and IE, alternatives Safari and Opera come in third and fourth with 9% and 5% readership respectively.
I've been tracking Firefox stats around the blogs for a while now and after several surveys of the top 100 blogs, I noticed that the average of the top 100 was tracking perfectly with the stats at boingboing.net, which today puts Firefox at 38.9% (43.6% for all of Gecko,) so now I just use that measure as my measure of Firefox's share of the blog reading market.
The alternative browsers, Safari and Opera, are at 10.7% and 1.9% respectively.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
It's amazing how much stats vary from site to site. I've got a site focused on alternative browsers that just launched this month. Traffic so far is showing 66.5% Firefox, 13.8% Opera, and 9.5% IE. Safari gets 3.2%, with even Konqueror getting 1.2%. Mozilla, Camino, and Galeon add another 3.9%, pushing Gecko above 70%.
Now, admittedly most of the traffic so far has been from people clicking on my .sig in comments at Slashdot (and to a lesser extent at Spread Firefox), so that's going to skew the numbers, but traffic is starting to flow in from other sources. I'm curious to see how it shakes down.
Posted by: Kelson | August 23, 2005 5:29 PM
dvorak's readers smarter than average? Naw, I think they're just easier to troll...
Posted by: Axord | August 23, 2005 5:36 PM
How do you collect your stats to know what browser people are using? techniques like cookies? web bugs? beacons? web logs? asking the users what their using?
Posted by: Guest | August 23, 2005 7:34 PM
I just noticed I posted in the wrong thing. ;P
Posted by: Guest | August 23, 2005 7:36 PM
Blogs only stats are, for now, obviously dominated by Firefox since feeds are the way to read'em and Firefox has built-in feed reader whereas IE, the browser of wider spread, doesn't.
Posted by: funtomas | August 24, 2005 11:28 PM
I don't know about the feeds connection. I've found LiveBookmarks to be pretty much useless. Safari, Opera, and Thunderbird have much more useful feed readers. I won't overgeneralize and say that no-one has any use for it, but I get a lot more out of Akregator on Linux and SharpReader on Windows. (The latter bugs me because it uses IE's rendering engine, but it's the best feed reader I've found for Windows -- and at least it'll open links in the default browser instead of sticking with IE.)
I think a more likely explanation is that blogging, with exceptions like LiveJournal and MySpace, is still largely an early-adopter field. That makes bloggers and their audience the type of people who are more likely to try something new and use Firefox over IE. They also post about their experiences and create a snowball effect (or, if you're feeling less charitable, an echo chamber).
Posted by: Kelson | August 25, 2005 9:56 AM