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Title: A look at the visitors
Author: Tim Pushman
Date: 20 August 2006 10:52:23 +01:00 or Sun, 20 August 2006 10:52:23 +01:00
Summary: Surveys of browser usage often give widely differing values for site visitors. I take a look at who our visitors are...
Body:
The most surprising thing is the high proportion of ACCU visitors who use Firefox (33%) and the low proportion of Internet Explorer users (45%), despite a robust 75% of users being on Windows. I assume that this shows a higher than normal level of technical competence as well as an understanding of the security issues of using IE. accu.org visitors also tend to visit during weekdays and normally in working hours (UK time) The majority of site visitors come from Europe and the USA, with secondary clusters around India and China. The accu.org site is surprisingly popular in Madrid... On Tuesday, 8th August an article in TheRegister (theregister.co.uk) mentioned the ACCU and tripled the number of visitors for that day, and doubled them for the next.
Browser stats are notoriously meaningless in a statistical sense as there is no definition of what any particular sample is taken from. SpamBots often masquerade as IE, as do various stealth spiders. Also the great mass of workers who are behind a corporate firewall may not have access at all, or only through a proxy that rewrite the HTTP headers, so they don't get accurately sampled.
Anyway, useless or not, I have access to the logs of quite a few sites and a trawled through them to see what people are using. In general musicians, artists and designers tend towards using Macs, office workers get to use Windows/IE and programmers use a wide range of systems and software, which shouldn't be surprising.
So, here is a totally unscientific survey of operating systems and browsers taken from a few sites...
| Site | Windows | Linux | Mac | Unknown | IE | Firefox | Moz | Opera |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| accu.org | 75% | 10% | 2% | 10% | 45% | 33% | 10% | 4% |
| Industry | 95% | 1.4% | 2% | 2.3% | 79% | 14.3% | - | 2.2% |
| Music | 91% | - | 7% | - | 79% | 14% | - | 1% |
| Health | 93% | - | 5% | - | 82% | 12% | - | - |
Notes:
- percentages are rounded, some browsers are missing (i.e. Camino and Safari for Mac users).
- browsers such as Konqueror can be set to masquerade as other browsers, such as IE, this is not detected
Notes:
More fields may be available via dynamicdata ..