Lies, Damn Lies

Monday, 13 January 2003

Without tabbed browsing, Safari is worthless — or at least, so sayeth the masses, right? Give me tabs or give me death. Well, apparently, many of you disagree. Fascinating back-of-the-envelope statistics mined from daringfireball.net’s server logs, from Tuesday through Saturday of last week:

Browser        Platform     Unique Visitors
-----------    ----------   ---------------
Safari         Mac OS X           713
Safari v51                        186

IE 5.x         Mac (all)          318

IE 6.0         Windows            597
IE 5.x         Windows            245

Chimera        Mac OS X           421

Mozilla        (All)              319
               Mac OS X            69
               Mac OS 8-9          19

Phoenix        (All)              128

Netscape 6/7   (All)               54
               Mac (all)           17

OmniWeb        Mac OS X            56
iCab           Mac (all)           18
Opera          (All)               64
               Mac (all)            4

Comments:

• In its first week of existence, as a public beta with numerous shortcomings, Safari has already become the number one web browser for Daring Fireball readers. I expect it to stay there. (Daring Fireball’s Safari numbers are surely further inflated by the fact that I’ve been writing about Safari all week.)
• Chimera, although behind Safari, is more popular than IE Mac. The means the two most popular browsers for Daring Fireball readers on Mac OS X are unique to OS X (and aren’t even available on Mac OS classic), and the factory default browser is in third place. By no means should anyone think that Daring Fireball readers constitute a statistically valid cross section of Mac users in general, but it’s still rather amazing.
• A lot of you are reading Daring Fireball from Windows boxes. Get back to work.
• More of you are using iCab than Netscape 6/7 (on the Mac, at least). Would you have believed this to be possible three years ago?
• Only 4 readers using Opera for Macintosh. Ouch.
• Mac users agree: Mozilla stinks.
• Not many OmniWeb users, but (a) OmniWeb can be set to masquerade as another browser, for the purpose of tricking stupid browser sniffers into letting OmniWeb in; (b) Daring Fireball’s CSS doesn’t render well in OmniWeb, so it’s not surprising there aren’t many readers using it (this goes for iCab as well).