Browser market share–who’s visiting me?

An article on Geekwire today reports on Internet browser usage amongst the various population.  Internet Explorer continues to with 55%, Firefox is second with 22.5%, Chrome is third with 15% with others picking up about 5%. 

The overall trend in browsers is that Internet Explorer has slowly declined over time while Firefox has remained mostly static (or even showing a slight decline).  Chrome has accounted for nearly all of the growth (IE and Firefox users have gone over to Chrome).

I decided to check out who is visiting this blog.  What do the statistics say about you, my readers?  A chart is below:

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My audience is more technical that the rest of the Internet population and that is reflected in the choice of browser.  IE and Firefox are equally used in my visitors with Chrome trailing by a handful of percentage points, whereas in the rest of the Internet, IE still has a very wide lead.  Does this imply that more technical computer users select browsers other than the default?  It does on my blog, although it doesn’t necessary ring true across everyone because I am but a single data point.

What about Microsoft’s quest to retire Internet Explorer 6?  Well, try as they might, the 10-year old browser stubbornly retains 18% usage out of all Internet Explorer deployments (but thankfully only 4.5% out of all Internet users).  The most popular browser is still Internet Explorer 8, more than the other three versions combined.  IE8 comes as the default browser in Windows 7; most users haven’t taken the time to upgrade to the latest one which was released many months ago:

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What about visitors to this site?  What version of Internet Explorer are all of you using? 

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The usage trends show some similarities but there are key differences:

  • Internet Explorer 8 is the same across all users and visitors to this site.
  • Internet Explorer 9 is the second most used browser, nearly 3 times the usage of the general population.
  • Internet Explorer 7 is about the same.
  • Internet Explorer 6 is almost non-existent amongst visitors here.

Thus, visitors to my site are more likely to use up-to-date browsers than Internet users in general, thus demonstrating that they are heeding my advice – make sure you keep your software up-to-date!

Way to go, readers!