Stats > Browser Stats

This page presents web browser statistics that may be of interest to website designers.

Caution, stats mislead: caching skews raw data; audiences vary for each site; survey methods vary; surveys lack vital details; surveys mis-identify browsers; surveys include user agents that aren’t browsers; small sample sizes magnify fluctuations; and stats don’t count those who flee because their browsers aren’t supported. [more...] IE8 is a special problem: its userAgent string mimics those of older IE versions when IE8 emulates older versions, so IE8 may be under-counted, and older versions over-counted.

Caution : such stats may satisfy the curious and help decide when an old browser can be ignored, but are truly useful for little else.

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please: facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable” — Mark Twain
~
[more stats quotes...]

The table Usage Stats lists stats from several sources, showing how much stats can vary:

• Source 1 stats are from the Pitt County, North Carolina website.
• Source 2 stats are from a US Environmental Protection Agency server.
• Source 3 stats are from a USGS server. Users are mainly from the US, many from government and educational institutions. Note: recent IE5.01 percentages are anomalously very high, and may be distorting all the numbers from this source.
• Source 4 stats are from this domain. Because of its special audience, its stats apply to a narrow segment of the population.

The best stats for a site are the stats gathered for that particular site: and even these are skewed by caching and faulty browser-detection. For example, consider Kerry Watson’s Browser Statistics page: this page uses three different hit counters whose reports should be comparable; but they are not, in part because of faulty browser detection.

Bottom line: use statistics with extreme caution.