Browser stats on a few UW sites
Posted by Jesse Rodgers on March 03, 2005 at 10:08 AM
We have recently just changed how we (CPA) read our log files for various web sites. This is useful for a number of reasons but the one I am most interested in at the moment is browsers. This is just a preliminary look, next week or so I will post a more detailed report on web stats as the sample should be big enough to be sure.
Note: Moz based browsers means all browsers based on the Mozilla Projects work – Netscape 6+, Mozilla, and Firefox. In the table I combined Netscape and Mozilla but not Firefox.
So far (and please excuse the quality of this table, textpattern isn’t great for this it seems):
| Site | Windows | Mac | Linux | Browsers | IE | Firefox | Moz/Netscape |
| Web.uwaterloo | 89% | 6.6% | 1.5% | _ | 75.1% | 13.9% | 5.6% |
| Quest | 96.3% | 2% | 0.7% | _ | 85.7% | 9.2% | 3.4% |
| CPA | 91.3% | 4.6% | 2.4% | _ | 79.2% | 11.7% | 4.6% |
| Bulletin | 90.1% | 5.1% | 1.7% | _ | 72.2% | 14.9% | 8.8% |
| UW home | 97.1% | 1.2% | 0.8% | _ | 89.2% | 6.6% | 2.4% |
At first glance it looks really odd but it does suggest Firefox is making its way into the UW web user groups. The home page has 97.1% windows users but only 89.2% IE (stats folks help me out here – windows users with Firefox is?) with similar trends on all web sites. The surprising one to me is the Daily Bulletin, just over 24% of users of this popular site (3156 unique visits yesterday) are using Moz based browsers even though the DB has issues displaying in Moz based browsers sometimes. Quest too is a bit of surprise with 12.6% of Moz based browsers at least checking out the front end.
To put a little perspective on it, the info server reports this month so far that 86.55% are IE, 11.88% netscape (analyzer that looks at all of info doesn’t know about Moz based browsers so netscape means all Moz based browsers). In April 2004 it reports 91.66% IE, 6.76% netscape. I do believe most staff computers have IE only now as well.
In my more in depth look I will have more detailed user numbers and such with more web sites, just wanted to post a bit now to have something to compare with in a week or so.