You use what???

Posted by Neil Crosby on March 9, 2005 05:25 PM

Yesterday I remembered that I hadn’t upgraded my local copy of awstats since v6.2 (the current stable version is 6.4). The upgrade from 6.2 contained a few security bug fixes and things like that, but since I run my copy of awstats locally with no access to the outside world that didn’t really matter too much to me. What I was looking forward to was the ability to more fully analyse the browsers that people are using to visit the site - especially Firefox usage. Before I do talk about the usage for this site, however, it must be remembered that workingwith.me.uk caters very much to the geek crowd - as such, it’s going to have a much higher visitor population of “minority” browsers.

That said, this is the very first month that Internet Explorer usage has dipped below 50% for workingwith.me.uk. To be perfectly honest this surprised me, as I would have expected that as the content of the site grew, so too would the numbers of “random searchers”, and therefore percentage of Internet Explorer users would rise. That doesn’t seem to be happening as yet, which in my mind is a good thing.

Hopefully most of you know that there was a security update for Firefox to take it to 1.0.1. Amusingly to me, the release notes for 1.0.1 talk about an instability in the update, yet the first item in the “what’s new?” section is “improved stability”. That said, the 62% of Firefox users who are using something lower than 1.0.1 of Firefox to visit workingwith.me.uk should probably consider upgrading their browser.

It came as a surprise to me that so many Mac OSX visitors use something other than Safari to visit workingwith.me.uk. If fact, only 60% of OSX based visitors use Safari, with Firefox taking a very strong second place with 32% (Camino gets 0.5%). I’m only a new Mac adopter myself, but in my experience (and via the evangelising of others), Safari is the faster, more standards compliant browser. So why are so many OSX users using something other than Safari?

Which brings me to the question of the day. Why do you use what you do for your day to day browsing? Is it inflicted on you, or do you like to use it? Am I a fool for using Firefox on my Windows box and Safari on my Mac? What’s your opinion?

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