In an effort to not feel so bad that my blog renders poorly on IE, I decided to consult the oracles.
Typically, I’m not a big fan of Google Analytics. It seems to report about 1/10th of the traffic that gets captured by server side analytics. That would be just fine by me (Google has the better charts) if it was proportional, but Google seems to over/under represent some categories, I suspect due to its reliance on JavaScript.
I did turn off the other analytics package, so the only numbers I have to run with now are Google’s. Here’s the operating system break down for June 2008:
Not too surprising, given the developer slant of this blog, that Linux shows 10x to 20x stronger (depends on who you ask) than its overall desktop market share. Sadly, last year’s numbers were in the same ballpark.
OS X, on the other hand, shot up about 50%. I’ll take a wild guess that you’re not going to see the same breakdown on any blog dedicated to .Net, but you’ll get a similar spread if you’re blogging about Ruby, Web 2.0 or anything rising in the last few years.
If my blog stats are any indication — they’re not, but let’s play make believe — then the Windows numbers are bleak. Even Yahoo’s stock out-performs Windows. At 52% it still dominates, but it did fall from last year’s 62%. Keep the average PC lifespan in mind when you calculate the loss.
Number five on the list is my favorite. Is there any doubt the iPhone is making a dent? I think I spend about 10~15 minutes a day checking feeds and following links from the iPhone, which is small in my overall consumption, usually reserved to waiting in line and commuting. But if you had to optimize your site for mobile devices, and if mobile devices sold by how many sites they can readily use … you get the picture.
Incidentally, if you love Optima, this blog will render better for you on the Mac. Everyone else gets Web safe Helvetica.
Next, same time period, but broken down by browsers:
Firefox being ahead, not very surprising, but IE hanging on at 12% is. Given the focus of this blog, I wasn’t expecting IE to linger on that long. It was down to 10% in January.
Since FF 3 just went live a couple of weeks ago, the month’s total favors FF 2 two to one, but in the last week of June, FF 3 jumped to 62%. Internet Explorer 7 is also at 62%, but keep in mind that IE 7 rolled off the assembly line on October 2006. Do bad browsers just die hard?
Mac usage is divided 16% Firefox to 13% Safari. 22% are still using Safari 3.1, but 63% are already on to Safari 3.1.1.
62%, 62% and 63%. I’m starting to see a pattern here, so let’s dig a bit deeper. Mozilla 1.9, at 62%. Opera 9.5, only counting since its release date earlier this month, 63%. And because we all love rules of thumb:
If you can reasonably expect your visitors to be using the latest and greatest, you should reasonably expect that 37% of them won’t.
I wonder what the numbers look like for blogs that don’t cater to the techie crowd.
So combing back full circle, I still feel bad that this blog renders poorly on IE, but making it work for IE requires double the effort for 12% of the readers. So I’ll leave that as a challenge to the readers. If it bothers you, send me the CSS fixes necessary to work for IE, and I’ll find time to add them in.