'PC-Welt' Poll Finds Large Usage Share for Mozilla-Based BrowsersWednesday December 18th, 2002The German magazine PC-Welt recently polled its readers to find out the most popular browser. The results are interesting: 33.7% of respondents use a Mozilla-based browser, with half of those choosing Mozilla itself (17.4%) and the rest going with Netscape 6.x (1.8%), Netscape 7.x (9.6%) or Phoenix (4.9%). This shows a large increase in the use of Mozilla-based browsers since the results of a similar poll were published last year. Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser overall with a 41.1% vote share. Though the PC-Welt article is in German, a rough English translation is available courtesy of Google. Thanks to Hanno Boeck for the news. ...on my site. Total moz-based browsers are at about 3% and growing > on my site. Total moz-based browsers are at about 3% and growing It depends on the demographic of your site. Browser usage is skewed by a number of factors. Besides the obvious ones, like the subject matter of the site, there are slight skewings for things like national origin and language and larger ones for things like level of education. (A somewhat more literate site is somewhat more likely to attract users who have experimented with various browsers rather than just using the pre-installed one, for example.) Also, the visual appearance of the site will have a significant impact on which users come back: load it up with blinking, flashing things, and a larger percentage your returning users will be using MSIE. Additionally, taking the number from the logs will skew toward MSIE (because of spoofing); whereas, polling the users and taking them at their word will skew the results away from MSIE (because users who don't know what browser they are using are generally using MSIE). Still 33% seems high, unless the site _content_ is driving it. (Mozillazine probably has numbers much higher than 33%, but that's not fair. Microsoft probably gets their numbers from msn or someplace, so they're not getting accurate numbers either (which is probably no bad thing).) The stats I want are Google's. There are still skewing factors (e.g., geeks are more likely than average to opt for Google over another search engine, but OTOH geeks are more likely to get the right result the first time, remember or bookmark it, and go straight to the site next time; MSIE users are more likely to type a URI into the search box, mistake the error message for a search result, click on the link, count it as a successful experience, and do it again tomorrow with the same URI), but on the whole I would expect Google to have much more ballanced stats than most sites. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-18.12.02-000/ stats from heise.de showing a climb from just under 9% in March to just over 19% in December for gecko based browsers. That's more than a doubling of gecko hits at a very popular German tech site in less than 1 year. It also shows Opera + Netscape (gecko and 4.x I guess) taking share from MicroSoft in that same period. --Asa yes, nice numbers. If you read in there forums, you'll wonder, where the MSIE-Users are, only some trolls there argue (if you can call it this) for MSIE. ROTFL!!! For all Germans reading this: Read the translated version first and try to guess what "talking moon" is... HAHAHA. Besides, from what I can see and hear from the people I know, the figures are correct. There's been a huge incline in people surfing with Mozilla over the last months. One year ago and a lot of my friends even knew the name. Heise (largest German publisher of Comp. magazines) and other magazines certainly did their part with headlines like "Security risk: Internet Explorer" and detailed explanations where to get Mozilla and how to install it and so on. After Klez.H a lot of novice users became aware of potential security flaws and asked for solutions. Furthermore, Germany in general seems to have strong advocates for Open Source Software (e.g. the KDE project). At the university I was part of a small minority using Windows and all explanations always related to Linux, so I finally had to switch. If all those students get a job one day, they most likely will opt for OSS and thus for Mozilla as well. Lol! That's really funny. The problem with these polls lies in their lack of representativity. It's no surprise, that technically informed people don't use IE and switch to more secure browsers. The masses will most likely stick with IE, and these people make the biggest share of the internet community. Moreover this share is still rapidly increasing, as current polls indicate (f.e. news at heise.de). Are there any polls of american tech-magazines? Most of my collegues at university still use Netscape 4.xx (mostly because I tell them little horror-tales of IE every week ;-)) and unfortunately can't decide to switch to Mozilla or Netscape 7.0. Alas, I myself have to use IE, because my machine is really a piece of junk (PI - 133 MHz, 64 MB) and Mozilla doesn't run smoothly. have you tried k-meleon or Phoenix on your P133 ? I've tried both programs. Both operate without problem as far as no other application is used. As soon as f.e. Word is started (StarOffice is another favorite application of mine which can't be run on this machine), the computer runs short of RAM and begins swaping. And this turns the computer almost unusable. I know, that there is no problem with machines with P300 and higher. On these computers, it is really a joy to surf with mozilla. I'm afraid, on low end machines with low ram, there seems to be no alternative to IE (apart from lynx ...). As a result of the technological progress, this problem should vanish by the time. Unfortunately, bureaucratic institutions have a long cycle concerning investment (especialy in times of decreasing wealth) and my machine is about 7 years old. > Most of my collegues at university still use Netscape 4.xx (mostly because I > tell them little horror-tales of IE every week ;-)) and unfortunately can't > decide to switch to Mozilla or Netscape 7.0. Alas, I myself have to use IE, > because my machine is really a piece of junk (PI - 133 MHz, 64 MB) and > Mozilla doesn't run smoothly. I have at home AMD 133 with 32Mb memory and guess what - I can run Phoenix with no trouble whatsoever... I must admit that it starts up bit slower than competition though... The Austrian daily newspaper "Der Standard" has a poll that shows a Mozilla usage share of 19% amoung their readers: http://derstandard.at/?id=779844 As a high-quality newspaper that is not targeted to the masses, but to informed readers and decision makers, the newspaper itself has a relatively small market share. In Germany for some reasons Netscape browsers has always been very popular. In the beginning of last year around 20% still used Netscape 4... Probably (hopefully) most of those users upgraded to a Mozilla browser. the problem is, that this is only based on a vote, so at first all the "Browser? What is that? I click on 'Internet'!" users are missing. Also many of the uninterested MSIE- and Netscape4-Users (this gives also the very low value for MSIE5). If you see real stats based upon the useragent (with a script, that can identify opera with faked UA), Mozilla, Netscape 7 and Opera will fall alltogether below 5% and the arguments against Gecko-Browsers are always the same still true ones since ever: it's slow, it eats RAM and it misses some key-features from Netscape 4. Your first point is correct: the majority doesn't care about what browser they use while people who choose alternative browsers do that (mostly) deliberately. So the latter ones will be proud to show their decision in a poll. But the last part... > arguments against Gecko-Browsers are always the same still true ones since ever: it's slow, it eats RAM > and it misses some key-features from Netscape 4. Did you really mean Gecko or just *some* Gecko-based browsers like Mozilla and Netscape? K-meleon and IE5 use both around 11 MB of memory after visiting 2-3 sites according to Windows taskmanager. I'm not sure if more memory is used by IE because it is so strongly tied with the operating system. Is that so much?? Do you really want to say that K-meleon and Phoenix are slower than IE (or Opera)? And what are the missing key-features compared to Netscape 4? The Gecko rendering engine is sooo much better! E.g. what about CSS? What single thing did NS4 support that Gecko does not? Or did you mean browser features rather than Gecko features? A spellchecker for example??? (Hi, Mangelo!!) Well, Netscape 7 has it. What else? >> Do you really want to say that K-meleon and Phoenix are slower than IE (or Opera)? I'm not sure why so many people seem to have different experiences, but myself have run Moz/K-meleon/Phoenix on K6-2 380, P2 300, and P4 1.8, and they're all less responsive than IE 5/6. I care much less about rendering speeds if the interface crawls and menus take a sec or two to be drawn. So yes, Moz is still so much slower than IE. Even features like tabs actually increase reliance on mouse (eg can't drag link while pressing ctrl-pgdn - i'm not sure if technically possible but both are right-hand operations; i know ctrl-tab doesn't work) so I ditched it. Opera's either costly or ad-ware so I'd rather not use it. MSIE displays every page out there, is the fastest in starting and and uses much less RAM than Mozilla - because of that it's still used by so many people. Nobody out there is interested, why it's faster, it IS just faster. Nobody is interested, why it displays every HTML rubbish, it does DOES it. The missing key features are roaming, possibility to run on a Pentium1 with 32MB RAM and the possibility to get into online-banking on not only 1 or 2 banks. Position|Hits|Percentage|Browser String 1 995048 47.93% MSIE 6.0 2 423717 20.41% MSIE 5.5 3 255626 12.31% MSIE 5.0 4 172145 8.29% Mozilla/5.0 5 104989 5.06% PHP/4.1.1 6 50843 2.45% MSIE 4.0 7 48120 2.32% Mozilla/4.7 8 9318 0.45% Opera 6.0 9 3215 0.15% MSIE 5.2 10 2726 0.13% Opera/6.0 11 1715 0.08% Konqueror/2.2 12 1437 0.07% Opera 5.1 13 466 0.02% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;) 14 459 0.02% Mozilla/4.5 15 405 0.02% Mozilla/4.6 16 335 0.02% Konqueror/3 Very old Browsers :-( and only 4th place. How my webalizer can differ NS 6.0/7.0 from Mozillas?? These are global statistic from the provider of free counter service. Daily browser stats: http://www.rax.ru/stat/ru/browsers.html By month : http://www.rax.ru/stat/ru/browsers.html?period=month And here is table of browser usage extracted from mothly stats Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec IE 5 60,9 59,4 58,7 57,4 54,9 53,5 IE 6 30,2 32,2 33,1 34,6 37,4 38,9 IE 4 3,4 3,2 3,1 2,9 2,6 2,4 Mozilla 0,8 0,8 0,9 1,0 1,1 1,3 NS4 1,4 1,3 1,2 1,2 1,0 0,9 Opera 6 2,3 2,2 2,2 2,2 2,2 2,1 Analyze it.... As much as I'd really love this to be true, any poll run in this fashion--i.e., where people self-select instead of where they're picked out by the poll-takers--is going to be heavily skewed because the people who write in are more likely to be ones who really care. In other words, it's just as likely that the Mozilla users in Germany *care a lot* about people knowing about Mozilla, and therefore had more incentive to write in and share with the world. Granted it is a speciallty site for SVG in Mozilla, but from the 40+ visitors a day the states are as stated in the subject. http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=sm1Mozilly&report=13 See for yourself. Looks like this bug at Mozillazine is still here, i.e. refresh from author creates a double post, sorry. I'm guessing that most of those 14% of IE users are visiting your site from work/school/uni and have no control of the browser they use. The rest of them are likely to have mozilla installed on their computers. Ian There is a large group of folks who are interested in SVG. About a month or so ago I put up some 'IE Friendly' pages using the object tag which enables Mozilla with GDI+ (from Alex Fritz) and IEs with the Adobe plugin to view some SVG images. I would suspect that most of the IE visitors are SVG interested folks with the Adobe plugin. Granted it is a speciallty site for SVG in Mozilla, but from the 40+ visitors a day the states are as stated in the subject. http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=sm1Mozilly&report=13 See for yourself. What the pool shows is that Mozilla is popular among people who cares. Some of this may eventually trickle down to "ordinary users" who take advice from the first group. Which means we should see a steady, but slow growth in the number of Mozilla users who show up in the statistics. . |