Given the total number of internet web users, 1.8% or even anything close to that is a lot of Mozilla users. On most sites I random browse to that have viewable stat trackers the Mozilla/NS pecentage is anywhere from 1 to 5% - and these are just on typical non tech sites. It still boggles my mind that people would design web sites that only work with IE. Turning away even 1% of your customers because of their choice in browser is rock stupid. I can imagine some PHB thinking that viewable by "95%" of the people is good enough without realizing how many people that represents.

(yea, 1.8% of browser hits may not exactly match to 1.8% of everybody but would have to be close and just as meaningful)

BTW, I guess Onestat is including NS 6/7 as Mozilla?

The document is dated January 19 2003, should it say 2004 or is it one year old?

OneStat's percentages do not total 100% and it is not clear that they handle all of the different versions of Gecko properly. Although they report IE versions with some degree of granularity they only report a single "Mozilla" number. It is not clear to me that they report Netscape 6.x, Netscape 7.x, CompuServe 7.x, AOL for Mac OS X, Galeon, Kmeleon, Epiphany, Phoenix/Firebird, Camino or any number of other browsers based upon Gecko. It would be interesting if someone would get one of their "lite" accounts and post the results of the actual web server log vs. their reporting of the browser statistics. We could then visit the page with a variety of user agents and determine if (and how much) they under report total Gecko usage. Personally I believe you can add at least 1% to their so called statistics.

I took a look at the Google Zeitgeist a little while back. This is what I came up with:

http://www.grack.com/news/NewGoogleZeitgeist.html

In short: MSIE: ~90% Mozilla: ~5%

Internet Explorer (all versions) fell from 95.4% (July 2003 http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox23.html ) to 94.8% now.

Slowly, but surely, we are chipping away at IE's share. This is encouraging. :)

Mozilla usage at heise.de was actually up 10.5 percentage *points*, which is an increase of around 50%.

(Ok, that *was* picky.)

--sam

and one could argue that the most popular IE extension is the google toolbar :-)

As eiseli said, the really interesting fact here is that MSIE has decreased in share. The Onestat story makes a big deal about the increase in MSIE 6, but ignores the fact that overall MSIE share decreased for probably the first time since they began cutting off Netscape's "air supply".

The updated stats at http://stats.bclary.com/ show pretty conclusively that Onestat counts Netscape 6.x/7.x as part of Netscape Navigator and not as Mozilla and that Onestat under-reports "other" user agents. Looking at the code of onestat's detection is it clear they will not correctly handle Gecko user agents which are reporting themselves as MSIE, and will not handle Gecko user agents which block images from their domain.

Considering that Netscape 7.x had over 25 million downloads as of July 2003, that international Netscape sites still list Netscape 6.x/7.x and many people do not upgrade as quickly as you might think, I believe you can without a doubt conclude that Onestat's statistics should report over 2% global Gecko usage and perhaps significantly more. I have always considered the "magic number" for Gecko's share to be 5%. Once web sites begin to see 5% of their users using Gecko, they will not be able to ignore Gecko support.

Increasing real and perceived Gecko share however is problematic for several reasons.

One problem is due to the number of different Gecko browsers. Onestat actually does a better job with most Gecko user agents than other reporting tools which fragment Gecko's share amongst the various distributions. Onestat's main fault is in its reporting of Netscape 6/7 as Netscape Navigator rather than Gecko. If you use a web site analytic program and it does not accurately report Gecko usage, complain to the author/vendor and ask them to do a better job.

Another problem area can be found by looking at sites such as the newly redesigned MSNBC (especially after they moved their domain to MSN.com) where you can see many problems in Gecko. It is unfortunate that a so-called #1 News site would neglect non-MSIE browsers, but it is not surprising.

Another problem is due to ad agencies such as DoubleClick which improperly create IFRAME embedded advertisements using Flash without WMODE for Gecko. The resulting degraded experience for Gecko users makes it look like a Gecko problem instead of a problem with DoubleClick's ad code.

If you want to help Mozilla and its entire family of Gecko-based browsers you should encourage everyone you know to use Mozilla or a Gecko-based browser, make sure to not configure Mozilla in such a way as to under report Gecko with these types of browser detection schemes, constructively complain to sites which do not support Mozilla and Gecko. For example, do not simply complain that Flash Ads on MSNBC are broken. Instead figure out the basic problem and explain to them why their code is broken and how to fix it. Although they have not fixed the problem as of yet, they did respond positively to my constructive and detailed analysis of the problem with *their site and their ad supplier*.

Be a good Mozilla Community citizen and get involved in Mozilla Tech Evangelism and contribute to Mozilla's success by effectively communicating with web sites about how to improve their support for Gecko in particular and all standards-compliant browsers in general.

you have to cut off 2,2% from that statistik, since they count Safari as Gecko (i wrote them by mail), this will be fixed in the next version of the stats

I have a small site and I now have almost 15% Gecko share. This is up from 1% last year.

We are growing by leaps and bounds. Gecko is hungry for butterfly.

OneStat does not mention Netscape in their recent statistics. As one can see in older statistics of this strange company, they do not count Netscape branded Gecko browsers as Mozilla, they count them as Netcsape (I can see it in my own Onestat statistics). And what's now the global Netscape market share? Nowhere? Nobody uses Netscape anymore? Or are they just Anti-Netscape?

And more strange: They just recognized 12 months after its release Safari, but they still do not know the existance of Konqueror - they count it as Mozilla. Can a company, which claims to provide accurate and detailed web site statistics, be taken serious, when it obviously does not monitor the relevant market?