On Blogs and Browsers
I have been writing three different blogs for a while now, two within a niche area (Paper of the Week, POTW, and my Lucene Blog) and a more general one, the one you are reading now. POTW is very focused on me learning and attempting to explain, in real world terms, academic papers in the field of Computer Science. To date it has focused on text processing, machine learning and natural language processing. My Lucene Blog is just that, a blog about Lucene and my work as a committer on the Apache Lucene Java project. This blog, grantingersoll.com, is more just random musings on a variety of my interests, like triathlon, training, eating right, stuff happening on the web, photography, etc. The posts can be all over the map, ranging from tips on shoveling your driveway to learning to swim the Total Immersion way.
So, what does this have to do with browsers? Well, I’m a bit of a Google Analytics addict and check my stats once a day, usually. Besides being awed at what people find interesting compared to what I am most interested in writing (lately, my driveway shoveling tips have been my most popular post, far and away), I have been following closely what browsers people use. Here are the stats for each site (percentages have been rounded, they may not equal 100% exactly):
| grantingersoll.com | Lucene Blog | Paper of the Week | |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE | 56% | 23% | 40% |
| Firefox | 35% | 60% | 44% |
| Safari | 7% | 12.5% | 9% |
| Opera | 1% | 2% | 2% |
| Mozilla | 0.5% | 1.0% | 3.5% |
| Camino | - | 2.0% | - |
| Netscape | - | - | 2% |
Breaking this down, you could make the argument that the general public (readers of grantingersoll.com) is still on the IE browser, although Firefox isn’t far behind. What’s interesting about this, is this site, up until a little while ago, looked terrible in IE 6 and it still isn’t great in IE 7. Not suprisingly, people interested in open source are almost 3 times as likely to use Firefox than IE, as can be evidenced by the 60% to 23% usage on the Lucene blog. Another interesting note is the almost double rate of adoption of Safari users amongst the open source community than the general public. This is something I noticed at ApacheCon and on OS mailing lists in the past: Open Source developers have a much higher adoption rate of Apple computers than the general public. Finally, the POTW audience is most likely a mix of developers and academics and they are split almost evenly between IE and Firefox. For me, personally, Firefox is my browser of choice. I find it does a better job of rendering CSS designed sites. Why is this a big deal? Because CSS design sites download way faster and, as more and more designers become aware of the benefits to their sites, CSS sites are going to become more popular. IE requires a bunch of CSS hacks in order to look good, whereas Firefox pretty much handles the standard without any glitches.
Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Apple, open source, web design, google analytics, CSS, cascading style sheets, HTML, statistics, browsers, triathlon, shoveling a driveway, Total Immersion, photography, programming, Paper of the Week, Lucene, Apache
Technorati Tags: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Apple, open source, web design, google analytics, CSS, cascading style sheets, HTML, statistics, browsers, triathlon, shoveling a driveway, Total Immersion, photography, programming, Paper of the Week, Lucene, Apache
