Browser Usage and other Traffic Statistics

Browser Coverage and Other Visitor Statistics

A year ago I wrote an article about Browser Usage, graceful degradation and support levels for different browsers. As I was investigating Operas new browser today Opera 10 I thought it would be good to run a few reports to check out the current state of browser usage on my sites. I have posted the reports here as you may or may not find the data interesting.

The data is from one of my database servers that handles 200+ domains and was collated from 560,000 page loads using server-side logging methods for the date 01-Sep-09.

I have only listed the top 10 or 20 items for each report therefore do not expect the percentages to add up to 100% as the missing numbers will be for items excluded from view.


Top Browsers

IE 7.0 33.29
IE 8.0 21.03
IE 6.0 18.32
Firefox 3.0 8.00
Firefox 3.5 7.61
Chrome 2.0 3.10
Default Browser 2.32 (unknown, or new version not in browscap.ini)
Safari 4.0 1.42
Safari 3.2 0.77
Opera 9.6 0.77
Safari 3.0 0.65
Firefox 2.0 0.65
AOL 7.0 0.65
Safari 3.1 0.39
Mozilla 1.9 0.26
Nokia 0.26
BlackBerry 0.26
iPhone 3.0 0.13
iPhone 3.1 0.13


Top Operating Systems

WinXP 60.03
WinVista 30.21
MacOSX 3.86
unknown 2.57
Win2000 1.03
Win2003 0.77
Linux 0.39
SymbianOS 0.26
iPhone OSX 0.26
Win7 0.26
Win98 0.26
WinNT 0.13


Javascript Enabled / Disabled

Enabled 84.13
Disabled 15.87


Flash Support & Version

10.22 31.74
10.32 29.03
NA 15.61 (could not log due to JS disabled or other reasons)
10.12 7.87
9.124 6.06
9.115 1.94
None 1.94
9.28 1.03
9.47 0.77
9.16 0.65


Top Crawlers and Robots

Google Webmaster Tools 21.96 (googlebot)
Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 18.22
Twiceler 17.76
msnbot 1.1 12.15
MSN 2.0 10.75
Yahoo! Slurp 5.14
Teoma 2.80
Yandex 2.80
Google Toolbar 2.34
Inktomi 1.40 (hackbot)
libwww-perl 1.40
PycURL 0.93
Rippers 0.47 (hackbot)
Wget 0.47
Microsoft URL Control 0.47
Check&Get 0.47
Gigabot 0.47


What does this tell us?

Obviously these stats are from my system and may not be exactly comparable to other systems or the web in general however half a million page loads from 200+ different sites is quite a wide sample and should be enough to see general trends. Some of the key points are:

• Microsoft is still cornering the market with its browsers occupying the top 3 spots.
• IE 6 still has a large market share and will most likely continue to occupy the 3rd spot due to the large number of intranet sites and client systems build for that browser along with Microsoft's decision to support it until 2014.
• Chrome has done very well since coming on the scene early this year,
• Opera continues to do very poorly,
• 15% of visitors have Javascript disabled and this figure will probably continue to rise over time due to security fears of getting XSS hijacked or infected by a virus.
• Its hard to accurately know the number of users who have Flash enabled that also choose to disable Javascript as the only way to accurately log Flash usage and version details is with Javascript. However as most people seem to deliver flash content with script they are missing out on up to 15% of their audience when they don't have to. Delivering flash content server side instead would mean more coverage, better degradation and remove any reliance of another technology having to be enabled.
• Browsing from Mobile Phones and PDAs seems to be much more common and this means developers need to consider how their sites render on small screens as well as how they run on those mobiles that deliver web content through proxies (usually no flash and limited Ajax and scripting).