Here is an interesting fact: About 11.5% of web surfers are now using Firefox. I run a site with appeal of general web surfers (not simply weather enthusiasts, which could skew the figure), and that is the stat that I am seeing. So, it is important that we all test our sites with FF as well as IE. Here are the numbers:
On my Display Live web page here are my stats between IE and FF. This is with a page page count of 2726. I know it is a small example but it shows you that the gap is closing slowly.
According to Google Analytics (which i have only had enabled for a lil over a week) here is the Breakdown for JaxWeather.net
Internet Explorer 83.16%
FireFox 11.99%
Safari 2.55%
Netscape, Mozilla 1.79%
Opera 0.26%
Konqueror 0.26%
I also have access to another website’s Analytics, totally unrelated to weather and their breakdown is:
Internet Explorer 75.25%
Netscape 17.82%
FireFox 5.94%
Konqueror 0.99%
So for those that do site design or worry about how their site works in different browsers it is helpful to have a few installed to check.
i currently have FireFox (my main browser), IE6,Two versions of Opera and Netscape 7 installed (I also still have Netscape 4.7x installed but I don’t worry about it any longer) I also know a few folks that run MACs and I usually ask them to take a look when i am working on a site.
I’ve ignored everything with less than 1%. This is on my whole site which has loads more than just weather. I usually just check IE6 and FF to see if they work and then hope for the best. I’ve never seen a large user base for Opera.
This is based on user agents rather than browser types, and the agent includes the OS type and some other details. This means there are a lot (1572 for May) of agent types. The list above is from the top 15 agents. If you assume that the values pro-rata up to 100% (which may not be true of the bots), then you get…
I use IE6 on my WD machine, but have FF to check the site when I make any alterations. I also use a couple of Macs for most things and although Safari is my default browser on one it also has Opera and FF for checking. The older ‘steam driven’ Mac uses IE5 for Mac.
From what I read about IE7, it is almost a clone of FF.
Now that is REALLY cool! I figured somewhere there had to be stats of the general web surfer. Firefox sure has come a long way. Remember when Netscape was the standard?
I agree, the golden rule of website design is test on as many browsers as you can, and as many resolutions as you can. Firefox users do represent a significant number of potential visitors to a website.
So I guess the question to ask out of all this is why the sites that are reporting Firefox much higher than 10% (based on thecounter.com stats for each month of this year), are attracting more Firefox users than other sites?
One possibility might be (and I’m not suggesting that this applies to any specific site listed here) is that if your site only hase three visitors, two of whom use IE and you use FF, then you’ll get a 33% FF user figure. To make the figures statistically valid, you really need to have hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to average across. I suspect that some weather web sites may only be used by the owner and a friend or three, so the results from those won’t be statistically significant.
Chris that is true plus ofcourse the owner is going to hit the site frequently to check out the updastes work OK. My stats allow me to filter out any hit coming from me so I dont skew the results, althought with my hit rate that is unlikely to any significant respect.
