Stats > Browser Stats
This page presents web browser statistics that may be of interest to website designers.
Caution : stats mislead.
Caching skews raw data;
audiences vary for each site;
methodologies vary for each survey;
surveys lack important details;
surveys mis-identify user agents , often
not updated to identify new user agents;
search spiders may pose as browsers;
small sample sizes magnify fluctuations;
and stats don’t count those who stay away because their browsers are not supported.
[more...]
IE8 is a special problem since it can emulate older versions of IE: stats sources may report it either as IE8 or as an older version.
Caution : the stats may satisfy the curious or help decide when old browsers can be ignored,
but they are truly useful for little else.
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please: facts are stubborn,
but statistics are more pliable” — Mark Twain
~
[more stats quotes...]
The table Usage Stats (see above) lists stats from several sources, showing how much stats can vary:
- Source 1 stats are from EWS. Percentages reported by EWS miscount KHTML- and Gecko-based browsers: but a userAgent list is reported from which I can compute KHTML and Gecko stats. Note also that EWS counts hosts rather than page accesses, which are not strictly comparable.
- Source 2 stats are from Net Applications’ Market Share.
- Source 3 stats are from the Pitt County, North Carolina website.
- Source 4 stats are from a USGS server. Users are mainly from the US, many from government and educational institutions. Note: recent IE5.01 percentages are anomalously very high, suggesting that the IE5 percentage is too high and therefore the other percentages too low.
- Source 5 stats are from sites that use a hit counter.
- Source 6 stats are from this domain. Because of its special audience, its stats apply to a narrow segment of the population.
The best stats for a site are the stats gathered for that particular site: and even these are skewed by caching and faulty browser-detection. For example, consider Kerry Watson’s Browser Statistics page: this page uses three different hit counters whose reports should be comparable; but they are not, in part because of faulty browser detection.
Bottom line: use statistics with extreme caution.