Browser usage

I have recently added a small plugin to my blog to do simple web-traffic statistics, nothing very advanced, but it gives me an idea of who is visiting this site. Of course, this tool is very simple, and the sample size quite small (a little more than 1000 hits). In short, this data should not be seen as representative of anything.

The most interesting thing for me was referrer information, most people arrive from search engines. Some of the requests are somehow surrealistic, for instance if you search for the word rösti in japanese pages on yahoo, my blog is the first and only hit. On average, this blog gets around 80 hits a day.

The other thing this tool gives me is some statistics about the different types of browsers people use to look at this web-site. The first chart gives a break-down of the different browser engines.

Browser chart may 2006

It is no real surprise that Firefox has such a large share. Microsoft Internet Explorer comes second, and in the third positon Safari.

Operating system chart May 2006

The share of the different operating system is somehow surprising, the 72% share of Windows is large, but we are far from the 95% share that is often touted, no doubt people who read this blog use different operating systems. The Windows version is either 5.0 or 5.1, aka 2000 and XP respectively.

At 18%, Mac OS X is quite strong, but the funny thing is, there is no trace of Linux, instead, I get 4% of BeOS users. I know that some of my readers use Linux, but my tool only keeps track of the 15 most common user-agent strings, and as every distribution will probably have a different string, none made it into the top 15, at any rate, the Linux share is lower than 6%. And I really wonder who the BeOS user is.

4 thoughts on “Browser usage

  1. hum,

    NT5.0 is windows 2000 not XP, 5.1 is XP. another remarque KHTML could also be KDE browser.

    I also really like to know who is the BeOs user ^^

  2. I corrected the thing about Windows. While indeed KHTML could be Konqueror, this was not the case, there was no Konqueror entry in the top-15 entries. As Konqueror mostly runs on Linux machines and I got no Linux entries, this makes sense.

  3. About the Linux share : I have to admit that my browsers under Linux are configured to look like they are IE6 under Windows XP… This is the best solution I know to the problem of the webmasters who limits access to their site to the only IE browser.

  4. The best solution I know to that problem is the forceful application of a blunt instrument to said webmasters’ kneecaps.

    Unfortunately, in most cases, it’s not that practical.

    And there are consequent administrative issues.

Leave a Reply to ThiasCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.