Latest Browser Stats

[David]

The latest browser stats look very interesting. These are from CADTutor.net and it illustrates that Firefox is making good headway in the non-web dev community (W3Schools puts FF at 18% this month). Obviously, most of my visitors are computer savvy so this may exaggerate general usage but I think Firefox supporters would be very happy with 12%. Opera, on the other hand has some way to go and it will be interesting to see how their new free browser impacts on these figures in the future. IE, of course, is still way out in front. The bottom line for me is that I need to design the CADTutor site for both IE and Firefox. Better start brushing up on my CSS hacks :(

http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/watson/postimages/stats09-05.gif

It would be interesting to see what your stats are like this month.

[James]

My numbers are "sessions" rather than "hits":

September 2005
http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/barker/forum/browserstats.gif

Is "Netscape Gecko" actually Firefox?

[francis]

Could be, and as FF doesn't appear by name on your list, I'd assume it is. It's down to the user agent string that the browser identifies itself with - FF, and especially Opera, can switch their UA string so it appears that they're something else (usually IE to get around any moronic "go away, you're not IE" scripts. It's a bit surprising that your stats package hasn't been updated to actually show FF.

I wonder what the Lynx browser was doing on your site, unless it's some weird reporting thing? Lynx is a text only browser...

[David]

The Fasthosts MatrixStats haven't been updated for years now - a shame because it means that browser analysis like this is very difficult. Mine are from AWStats. Last month I moved CADTutor, lock, stock and barrel over to my Clook account. 18 months of excellent service at Clook persuaded me to ditch Fasthosts because the new CADTutor is going to need a number of databases and I didn't fancy shelling out for them all - databases are free at Clook. On the other hand, I am now paying for my bandwidth (Fasthosts is unlimited). Swings and roundabouts but on balance I'm spending slightly less each month and things are a bit neater.

Interestingly, I just checked the browser stats for Bentley School. During September, FF managed just 1.2%, beaten into third place by Safari.

The second busiest site on my account, fabrikuk.com gave FF 2.5% in second place.

I think these sites represent a more "real world" showing for FF but the trend on all domains is "up".

[James]

Originally posted by David@Oct 1 2005, 7:58 pm
The Fasthosts MatrixStats haven't been updated for years now - a shame because it means that browser analysis like this is very difficult.
Agree, Matrix Stats is tired and inflexible.

I have tried downloading the log files to process locally but whatever analyser I use, it just doesn't work. Shame.

I probably will move on from Fasthosts in the future, I want to do server rewrites to give friendly URLs and I don't think Fasthosts allows htaccess files.

At only a tenner a month inc VAT for unlimited bandwidth though I feel I've had VFM so far.

[francis]

Originally posted by James Barker@Oct 1 2005, 11:40 pm
I have tried downloading the log files to process locally but whatever analyser I use, it just doesn't work. Shame.
You might want to have a look at Mint (http://www.haveamint.com/demo), a brand new stats package by Shaun Inman. It's getting quite a lot of good publicity at the moment, but I've not tried it and the demo version is currently disabled. Apparently its reporting is excellent and, as it's open source, people have already started using its extension manager ("Pepper") to build on top of it.

[David]

James, Fasthosts do give very good VFM. My feeling is that they will have to offer mod-rewrite in the near future. If you've visited the user forums, you'll notice that it's one of the most asked for features. It's only about 12 months ago that they started offering folder security using .htaccess although you still don't get access to the file directly.

How much data are you shifting per month at the moment?

Francis, Mint looks really good. My only misgiving is that it requires some JavaScript code on every page in your site. This is a bit of a shame as it means added bandwidth and implementing some form of include. Also, it won't register anything if a user had JS turned off. It also skews other reporting packages that you may run on the same domain. This is all a great shame because functionally and aesthetically is looks great.