jkOnTheRun Browser and OS wars
We do a lot of following up on our visitors to jkOnTheRun to keep our finger on the pulse of what kind of equipment you all are using to access our site. We post about it from time to time so we can all get a feel for how the computing world is shaping up. I was just doing just that and find some of the findings about you guys very interesting. Note that these statistics are pulled from hundreds of thousands of visitors so they are pretty sound in painting a valid picture.
Browser wars
The first thing that surprised me was seeing how Firefox has jumped in popularity recently. While we have typically seen Firefox maintain a 30+% browser share among our visitors this is pretty significant a jump:
I would attribute this large browser share to the recent release of version 3 of Firefox. Version 3 is easily the best version of my favorite browser by far an it looks to me like they have gained quite a few new users. The other surprising statistic here is the number of users running Safari. With over 9% of the vistors using Safari it’s probably safe to assume that some Windows users have picked up Apple’s browser, at least based on the OS numbers I’ll show you next. Opera is still presenting very low numbers even though it is a very nice browser so it’s going to be a hard mountain for them to climb, I’m afraid.
OS Wars
On the OS side is where things get really interesting compared to numbers we’ve seen in the past.
Windows still represents the vast majority of vistor OSes but what I find surprising is the ratio of XP to Vista users. Windows XP represents 54% of our visitors to only 7.5% of Vista, all flavors. That is a very telling ratio and one Microsoft cannot be happy with. Equally surprising, or maybe it really isn’t, is that 15% of you are using Apple’s OS X. That is a 2 to 1 ratio over all versions of Vista which is frankly amazing to me. There are still twice as many Windows NT users as there are Vista users which is just as telling about the poor business Vista adoption rate as anything. Very interesting stuff indeed. It’s also apparent that Linux on these mini-notebooks is not making a dent with only ~3% of the OS share. I wonder if we’ll see that number start to go up soon?
In an aside to browser and OS statistics it is also apparent that the vast majority of our visitors are using monitor resolutions that are 1280 x 768 or larger. This is significant for a mobile tech blog like us because I would think that with the proliferation of mini-notebooks and the like at lesser resolutions that we’d see more of you running lesser screen resolutions, but that’s not the case. It seems that most people who visit here are still using big laptops or desktops to do so. I don’t know what to make of that.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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I am reading from an iPod touch right now. Might that and the iPhone account for the (surprisingly) large number of safari users?
I see FF 1.x at 44% but FF 3.x isn’t even on the list.
Did you post the wrong pie chart?
Very interesting… does your measurement setup fold FF 3 into the results for FF 1.x?
And hey, Linux has 3.5%… not bad! Low expectations, that’s key. (What’s the difference between Linux UNIX and Linux UNKNOWN?)
I suspect that a few of the Safari users are iPhone peeps for sure.
It seems to be lumping FF v.3 users into v.1 stats for some reason.
The Win NT percentage – really, how is that possible? I can see that there might be some servers still operating out there (that shouldn’t be blog surfing), but can anyone still be using NT Workstation? I feel for the employees of those companies. That percentage must be wrong – maybe some of the Win 2000 users being misreported?
I am often one of the visitors using a Nokia, and I have to say the N95 browser is great.
Also, the number of Firefox was is huge – it’s a shame V3 keeps crashing on my TX 2000 :(
Of course, Vista shows up even for those of us who really don’t want Vista on our machines.
AND BTW, F3 keeps crashing on my TX2000 too!!! My other (XP) machines are fine.
Great Info !! A few random thoughts…
We may have to note that rather than “visitors” we should think of “number of visits”.Could be same visitor from different OS/ Browsers in different environemnts(office/home) or different computer.
There may be many like me who work on dual-boot computers[Vista and Ubuntu]. I login randomly depending on the mood to any of these OS’es. On Ubuntu i use Opera or Firefox [once again it is random]. Not sure how many % of your visitors would be dual-boots. May be less. But if they are more then the stats.
OS adoption will drive the browser stats. Given Firefox,Opera,Safari can run on Windows and IE can’t run on other Mac or Linux.
To really see, if IE is losing out becasue of other browsers compared against other OSes, we have to represent the browser share graph per every OS and analyze browser data for the Windows OS to see if a lot of them are firefox /opera.
Overall, very interesting post representing the picture.
Yeah, Firefox 3 looks pretty and has lot of great features, but like others here my firefox 3 constantly crashes on my vista running tx2500. I am thinking about moving back to firefox 2.
The problem is that your stats wont accurately reflect all of your viewers as many will be reading via RSS and other syndicated feeds. I read every day but I visit less than once every few months when I feel like posting a comment.
It is also possible that your more tech savvy readers are reading via RSS- it might explain why OSX has a larger percentage share of visits?
Either way, it might be an interesting experiment to make a post which encourages everyone to follow an arbitrary link to another page on the site to see just how many people are reading the posts off site.