GregMS Universe

There are two websites that I manage, this one (GregMS Universe), and Universal Equipment Inc.

The website you are on is very geeky/techie while Universal Equipment, Inc. is a heavy construction equipment rental company. Every so often I look over statistics for the sites to see information about my visitor’s computers such as Screen Resolution, Operating Systems and what Browsers they use and I was surprised by the numbers I saw today. Specifically what surprised me was the trend in browser usage and that is what this article focuses on.

Browser Stats: GregMS Universe

As you can see, Firefox 3.5/3.6 has 37.6%,
Chrome 4.0/5.0 has 34%,
Safari 4.0 has 11%, and
Internet Explorer 8.0 has 5.2%.

What is surprising by these numbers are not IE’s 6, 7 and 8’s low showing (even combined), but how popular Google Chrome is. While Mozilla Firefox is still the most popular browser used to visit my site, the second most popular is Chrome and this is very good news for Google. From what I’ve seen, it appeared that they are taking numbers away from Firefox.

One other thing to note is that considering a large proportion of my traffic comes from people using Mac OS X, it appears they are not using the built-in Safari browser, but installing and using Firefox or Chrome instead.

Browser Stats: Universal Equipment, Inc.

Universal Equipment has completely different statistics from this website.
Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 has a combined 78.0%,
Firefox 3.5/3.6 has 11.4%,
Chrome 3.0/4.0 has 6.0%, and
Safari 4.0 has 0.60%.

What is surprising by these numbers is not how large Internet Explorers numbers are, but how low IE 6.0 numbers are, 11.20%. I’ve been watching IE6 numbers shrink over the past few years and this is a great trend. Internet Explorer 6.0 has needed to be completely phased out for some time and this is very good news for web developers.

It also shows that businesses are updating their browser to the latest version, which is great news for HTML5.0 adoption as Internet Explorer 9.0 should include HTML5. These statistics also indicate that business computers (which are most likely visiting Universal Equipment’s website) for one reason or another are choosing Internet Explorer.

*Browser statistics provided by StatCounter.com.
**Story image provided by: Tai Tran’s Reading Archive