Firefox 43%: Wow!

Every day or two, I check log statistics for the PALINET Leadership Network–most of them 30-day statistics (with a few 24-hour figures as well).

I’m usually looking at 24-hour pageview counts, referrals, and popular pages (although there’s an oddity with the wiki such that I actually use MediaWiki’s internal counters for tracking page popularity)…but once in a while, I look further down in the FireStats report.

Like today: “Browsers”–where I’d expect maybe 75% IE, 20% Firefox, whatever.

What I see: Internet Explorer 49.3% (sigh: More 6.0 than 7.0) – and Mozilla Firefox 43.0%! (26.6% 3.0.1, 12.8% two subversions of 2.0.0, and then a whole bunch of minor revisions beyond that.)

Wow. Now, some of that is me–but certainly not more than, say, 1% to 3% of total usage. So let’s say 40% of “actual” usage is Firefox. That’s impressive. (“Unknown” is 4.3% and everything else is 3.4%, with all the Safari versions maybe adding up to 1%, maybe the same for Opera.) Chrome doesn’t seem to show up yet.

Operating systems? Also a little surprising… Windows 84.9% (Vista 22.8%, XP 54.6%, various others…), Linux 6.7%, Mac OS 2.6% (OS X 2.5%), Others 0.3% (SuSE Linux, Ubuntu each 0.1%, four other variants even less.)


I’d offer similar numbers for, say, this blog–but Urchin’s numbers don’t make a lot of sense, probably because of aggregator usage. Thus “Platforms” is (unknown) for 70% of sessions, and it claims that no Vista user reached the blog over the last 30 days, which means I never visited my own blog…which strikes me as, oh, improbable.

Incidentally, yes, I did download Chrome. For me, it’s disqualified at this point not just because it lacks FF’s addons–but because it won’t let me see web pages in my choice of typeface. I really and truly get sick of Arial/Helvetica, but most of the time what I see is what I choose, because both FF and IE allow that.

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