Tech Center Current

Net Applications, a web metrics company, has released a newsletter featuring its March 2007 web browser usage statistics. These attempt to measure what percentages of the Web’s users are using which web browsers.

The February and March usage percentages are as follows:

1. Internet Explorer: 79.09% → 78.57%
2. Firefox: 14.18% → 15.10%
3. Safari: 4.85% → 4.51%
4. Opera: 0.79% → 0.80%
5. Netscape: 0.74% → 0.70%
6. Mozilla Suite/SeaMonkey: 0.18% → 0.18%
7. Other: 0.15% → 0.12%

When reading web browser usage statistics, there are some important things to keep in mind:

• There is no way to know for sure what percentage of the population is actively using which browser. Web metrics companies like Net Applications generally gather data only from sites that use their web analytics products, and they hope that those sites are representative of the Web as a whole. The analytics software applies some amount of guesswork and approximation to determine which webpage hits are from a single unique user, usually by looking at their IP addresses or site navigation patterns. If an Internet user doesn’t visit a site that uses Net Applications software, that user won’t be represented in the statistics. If someone has a frequently-changing IP address, such as with AOL, that user may be counted more than once or may be confused with other users. It isn’t an exact science.

• Many automated agents, such as spam bots, will attempt to tell the website that it’s a legitimate browser. Most often, these agents will pretend to be Internet Explorer (currently the most widely-used browser) in order to minimize risk of being turned away from a website. Because they are often undetectable by the web analytics software, these agents will be counted as the browser they’re pretending to be. By some accounts, spam bots make up a significant chunk of the Web’s traffic.

• There tends to be a lot of month-to-month variation in web browser usage statistics, most prominently around holidays when web browsing patterns are known to change. Internet Explorer usage is known to be lower on weekends and holidays when users tend to be more in control of their own browsing preferences. For this reason, it is usually best to look at long-term changes in browser usage, such as year-by-year averages, rather than month-to-month changes.

• Many people use, for example, Firefox on most sites and Internet Explorer on the few sites that require it. Such a person will often be counted equally for both Firefox and Internet Explorer usage, even though he or she primarily uses Firefox.

Despite the limitations in the level of accuracy these statistics can provide, there are some clear overall trends presented by Net Applications’ data and that of other web metrics companies:

• Internet Explorer usage continues to fall slightly, despite the long-awaited release of version 7 which includes tabbed browsing — one of Firefox’s most popular features — as well as some security improvements. The general perception is still that Internet Explorer 7 is less secure than Firefox, as Secunia’s security reports have suggested.

• Firefox continues to rise in popularity, and most web analytics companies place it somewhere between 10% and 20% usage. Net Applications’ data shows that it has risen by about 5 percentage points over the last year, and most of those users were from people switching away from Internet Explorer.

• Safari remains in third place and its usage seems to be fairly proportional to the overall Mac OS X usage. Safari is the default browser on Mac OS X and is only available on that operating system, so its relative popularity on the Mac doesn’t seem to be changing significantly.

• Opera remains in low usage on the desktop, although it has a very high usage share in the mobile device market. Opera is also the browser used on the Nintendo Wii game console.

• Usage of Firefox and Opera is dramatically higher on websites that attract technology-inclined users. Internet Explorer usage is likewise dramatically lower on those websites. Sites that target web developers and other technology enthusiasts commonly report Firefox usage around 50% and Internet Explorer usage closer to 25%.

Beyond purely tracking web browser usage, Net Applications also conducted an opt-in survey asking for the user’s preferred choice of browser. The survey is only available from the Net Applications website, so it is biased in favor of technical users. Here are the results of the question “Which is the best browser?”:

1. Firefox: 60.73%
2. Safari: 16.26%
3. Internet Explorer: 11.25%
4. Opera: 10.99%
5. Netscape: 0.76%

Net Applications then divided the “best browser” percentages by the overall usage percentages on the Web (not necessarily the usage percentages of the voters) to determine some very rough user satisfaction scores (higher scores = more satisfied):

1. Opera: 13.75
2. Firefox: 4.02
3. Safari: 3.61
4. Netscape: 1.09
5. Internet Explorer: 0.14

Because the denominating figures weren’t necessarily equal to those of the actual voters, these satisfaction scores should be taken with a grain of salt. Rather, I’m inclined to believe that the above scores are more influenced by the level of awareness of browser choice than satisfaction itself.

For more browser usage information, see the Usage Share of Web Browsers article on Wikipedia.