Browser Stats

Friday, 24 October 2003

Twice before — in January and February — I looked at the Daring Fireball server logs to see which browsers you fine readers are using.

Here we go again, for the month of October to date:

Browser	Unique IPs
Safari	9,883
IE Mac	1,165
IE Win	9,353
Camino	598
Firebird Mac	134
Firebird Win	1,544
Firebird Other	194
Mozilla Mac	363
Mozilla Other	1,131
OmniWeb	173
Opera	350
NetNewsWire Lite	12,484
NetNewsWire (Full)	11,545

Something I don’t get: out of the 9,883 unique IPs for Safari, 1,282 are already using Panther’s Safari update. In other words, 13 percent of Daring Fireball readers who use Safari were already using Panther before today. That seems awfully high. It’ll be interesting to see how high that number jumps in the next week.

Note on Methodology: It is not possible to accurately count “unique visitors”. What I do is count each originating IP address once for each browser. This means that if you’re using DHCP and get a new IP address from your ISP, you’ll get counted multiple times. Similarly, multiple visitors coming from behind the same proxy or router (like if you have several machines sharing a cable modem connection at home) will only be counted once, because in the logs they’re sharing a single IP address. The point is not to count readers, but to gauge the popularity of various browsers.