Global Web Stats.

August 29, 2007

Just how popular is Vista today? How many people have switched from IE6 to IE7? Just what share of the browser market does Firefox have?

For answers to these questions and more it is worth regularly checking W3 Counter’s Global Stats which can be found here:

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

These stats are generated by tracking the last 32 million unique visits to 5,500 websites that represent a broad cross section of internet traffic. From each unique visit, the web browser, operating system, country of origin and screen resolution can all be determined to produce a reasonably good picture of just what general web traffic looks like today.

From looking at the latest stats for 20/08/07 we can see that a person in the USA, running Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6 with a screen resolution of 1024×768 is your average Joe web surfer, this accounts for 6% of web users. Myself I am based in the UK, running Windows XP, Internet Explorer 7 (as my primary browser) and screen resolution of 1280×1024. Only one in a thousand computers run the same combination as I do.

But lets look at the really interesting stats.

Starting with web browsers we can see that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still dominates the market with an approx 66% share. This is not taking into account the stats for IE5, IE4 and earlier, which I am sure some systems in less developed countries are still running. However the real story here is that IE’s lead is slipping due to Firefox’s continuing popularity – Firefox versions 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 now account for approx 25% of all web browsers. Safari still has an approximate 2-3% share, however it is unclear whether Safari or Firefox dominate the browser industry for Macs.

Operating system stats show that it’s been a slow start for the brand new operating system from Microsoft – Windows Vista. Just 3.33% of the OS market in August, but recent trends show that share increasing. In May 2007 it was 2.13% and has increased by 1.2% over the past 3 months. XP still dominates, but I expect to see Vista’s share increase more rapidly over the next few years as more people buy new PCs or upgrade. Mac OS X users still account for just under 4% of all users suggesting that the marketing managers at Apple need to do more than their latest “Mac vs PC” advertising campaign to encourage more people to make the big switch.

The stats for the countries of origin offer no real suprises with the US of A leading. Germany and the UK in 2nd and 3rd place respectively and a suprising Latvia in 4th. The Chinese account for just over 2% of all users who visited the web pages in question, but recent media reports suggest this statistic is far higher (almost as dominant as the US). It is well known that the Chinese government have blocked internet sites, which could include many in these reports, or that it may be that the sites in the report are more westernised, located in the US (may be blocked), or are written in languages that Chinese web users are generally unlikely to understand – you can only speculate.

Screen resolution statistics are largely trivial, but the most common is 1024×768, which I am sure will remain dominant for many years to come. Many IT professionals, gamers and experienced computer users generally opt for higher resolutions such as 1280×1024, or widescreen resolutions such as 1280×800 or 1440×900. If any of these statistics should be taken into consideration its that 8.42% of web users are still using a low resolution of 800×600. This figure is falling slowly, in May 2007 it was 9%. While many of the systems running 800×600 may be in less developed countries, nevertheless it is important for web designers to design websites with this low resolution in mind. An example of how not to do it – http://www.hrodc.com/.

Because of the lack of legacy data, it is difficult to put some of these stats into context over the past few years, but rest assured I will be keeping track of them over time and a review of the stats will come in the shape of another blog article towards the end of the year.