Posted by cwdjrxyz on 01/07/08 07:33

On Jan 7, 1:10 am, Diogenes <nos...@nospam.net> wrote:
> Several articles I read recently regarding the demise
> of Netscape Navigator stated that Firefox had managed
> to get a 16% market share and that IE still has over 80%
> of the eyeballs.
>
> Yet my statistics and those of others indicate a much
> higher % than that. For example
>
> http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
>
> Comments anyone?

Those who go to w3c sites likely know more about computers(or at least
want to know more) than the average of all computer users. As a result
they more likely will try non-IE browsers even if IE came installed on
their computer. Microsoft sites likely would see more IE browsers than
the average. Opera sites would more likely see far more Opera browsers
than the average. The browsers owners likely have records of the
downloads of their browsers, but I doubt it they would be willing to
share this information. Also some browsers such as Firefox and Opera
can spoof other browsers so they will not be shut out by script when
the site really would work for the browser. Thus browser statistics
should be taken with several grains of salt. I would guess that a
banking or credit card company statistics might be near the average
for browser usage( neglecting spoofed browsers). However even here you
would likely get a percentage of very old browsers below the average,
because such sites usually have high level security that often
requires fairly new browsers. Also, until recently, many such high
security sites were designed to work only on IE and Netscape browsers.
I have not found any business sites that I now use often that reject
Opera or Firefox without setting these browsers to spoof IE, but you
likely could still find some.

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