Using SiteMeter I've been tracking browser share (and other statistics) since putting up my web site four or five years ago: asiapac.com.au and later its mirror image notestracker.com
A couple of years ago Internet Explorer (IE), in its various versions, consistently represented more than 90 percent of site visits. For many months IE had around 97% to 98% of browser share.
It has been interesting to watch the steady growth of Firefox during the last year or two. It's the only other browser that has ever exceeded one or two percent of site visits.
My web site has a quite constant visit rate, even if not very high one compared with lots of others. I've found that for the last three or four months the Firefox visit share has been fluctuating quite a lot from week to week, ranging between 10% and 20% but tending more towards the latter. To illustrate, here are the figures for 13 March 2006:
And what about two days later? Here is the breakdown for "the ides of March" (bad for Julius Caesar, bad for Firefox):
These seems to correlate fairly well with statistics from sources such as Browser News, as per their report for today:
I wonder what the eventual impact of IE7 will be. It won't be for a year or so that we can assess IE7's popularity. (I've tried out the IE7 Beta2 and it seems quite nice, but with quite a functional and usability issues -- quite limited tailorability, shortcomings in tabbing capabilities, inconsistencies with keystroke binding, and more -- which I sincerely hope Microsoft will address before the final release.)
UPDATE - 22 April 2006:
Today, the Firefox share reached its highest ever, at very close to one quarter of visits to asiapac.com.au -- combined with its mirror at notestracker.com that is.
What with the release of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) still months away -- perhaps late 2006 -- it looks as though Firefox will continue to gain an even healthier share in the renewed "battle of the browsers". Meanwhile Opera 9 Beta has just been announced, introducing Widgets, content blocker and integrated BitTorrent support.
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