Browser-Related Statistics

A colleague pointed me to the W3Schools Browser Statistics page recently, which I was completely unaware of.

A quick check shows some fascinating insights into past, present and future adoption of browsers and the operating-systems used to manage them. For instance we can see that Internet Explorer is rapidly losing market-share, with just 39.4% as at July this year, compared with 51.7% in 2008 and 57% in 2007.

Meanwhile both Firefox and Google's Chrome browser appear to making steady inroads, increasing their market share by between 5-7% - indeed, it would appear that Chrome is starting to gain real acceptance.

What did surprise me though, was the operating-system statistics (for those not in the know, browsers typically provide a User-Agent string as part of each HTTP header when connecting to a web-server - this allows the server to respond in the best possible manner to the client).

The operating-system statistics appear to show that Linux still has a very small market-share of only 4.3% (July) and this appears to have increased only slightly over recent years. Conversely, it would appear that Mac operating-systems are making good progress and apparently out-pacing Linux.

Be careful what you read though - I can think of many reasons for this apparent surprise; first it could be spot-on - perhaps Linux isn't making as much progress as its advocates would like to think...

However, it could also be that Linux is still regarded and used primarily as a server operating-system, often providing just a command-prompt for Systems Administrators (consider Ubunut Server Edition for example); as such users will never browse the Internet from a server - a bad practice in any event. Conversely, both Windows and Mac computers predominately host desktop operating-systems and are pre-shipped with browsers.

Another possibility is that Linux browser-implementations set the User-Agent string to some other operating-system in order to minimise compatibility issues. This is easily done and many browsers allow advanced users to change this setting so that servers will think the client is using some other browser.

I will be keeping on eye on these statistics in future - especially the trend towards Chrome. Like many others I tried it, liked it, then went back to the comfort zone (Firefox in my case).

There have been some very innovative approaches to browsers and browsing presented over the last year and it'll be interesting to see what dominates. The Flock browser is also worth a look and both the Cuil and Bing search-engines are gaining in popularity.