Since friday we have had over 17,000 visitors from Flashkit.com as a result of being Flashkit's Featured Site. http://www.museum-interactive.com (Replacing Tomb Raiders)

I thought that everyone would enjoy seeing the breakdown of browsers.

We have had 0 visitors using Netscape 6. Wow.

1 Microsoft Internet Explorer 465,443 90.94% 16,272

2 Netscape 37,261 7.28% 1,112

3 Other Netscape Compatible 6,833 1.33% 70

4 MSProxy/2.0 657 0.12% 37

5 WebTrends 556 0.1% 15

6 MSFrontPage/4.0 325 0.06% 3

7 Others 133 0.02% 12

8 Opera/5.10 (Windows ME; U) 88 0.01% 2

9 Opera/5.11 (Windows 98; U) 85 0.01% 2

10 Opera/5.10 (Windows 2000; U) 68 0.01% 1

This breaks down as:

1 Netscape 4.x 33,811 90.74% 1,047 2 Netscape 5.x 3,435 9.21% 53 3 Netscape 3.x 15 0.04% 12 Total For Browsers Above 37,261 100% 1,112

And

1 Explorer 5.x 430,947 92.58% 15,191

2 Explorer 6.x 24,680 5.3% 644

3 Explorer 4.x 9,758 2.09% 415

4 Explorer 2.x 30 0% 8

5 Explorer 3.x 28 0% 14

Admitting that my sample is probably not totally representative as the majority of Flashkit.com's people are developers, I think that these are interesting numbers. And must be totally depressing for the people that worked on Netscape 6.0.

For those that are curious.

1 Windows 98 253,154 49.46% 10,102

2 Windows NT 178,086 34.79% 4,807

3 Macintosh PowerPC 53,098 10.37% 1,523

4 Windows 95 13,809 2.69% 564

5 Others 12,393 2.42% 340

6 Linux 1,130 0.22% 236

7 SunOS 54 0.01% 2

8 Hewlett Packard Unix (HP9000) 44 0% 1 9 Windows Win32s 34 0% 15

-- Anonymous, May 16, 2001

Answers

"I hate to disagree (actually, I don't!), but every listing of browser marketplace share that I've ever seen - and I've seen a lot - has IE's market share at a minimum of 80%. Many have IE at 90%. And almost all those IE users are at version 5."

The 40-45% is a rough estimage from some of the site logs that I look at on a regular basis, .. I was not citing any 'public poll'.

MS is still ruding on Win98 popularity right now, so I'm not surprised that the current survey numbers are skewed. The bigger question is - what will people do when MS starts trying to *force* them to use XP? XP will be the biggest marketing nightmare in the world with it's system branding and forced registration. You should have heard them side-stepping the issue in the XP 'pre-release' at ITEC!

I'm sure everyone remembers the big hoopla when Intel released their CPU S/N, which public pressure forced them to withdraw (by allowing it to be turned off). Do you really think MS can prevail with exacly the same sort of antics?

We have some corporate clients that say they will NEVER use XP unless MS announces a way to do site licensing. (Can you imagine the nightmare of trying to track a *specific* CD for each and every machine? I don't THINK so!!) For others, we are even recommending NOT upgrading to Office 2000, .. and many actually considering moving to StarOffice. Later this year, there will also be some better LDAP solutions so there will finally be some decent options for those organizations hooked on Outlook.

>Opera, Konqueror, Mozilla, etc. are all at single-digits.

At the current time, .. but market share is definately NOT increasing for MS. IE's market share has definately peaked, .. and it can go nowhere but down from here.

"Netscape 4 is in double-digits, barely. And frankly, the sooner Netscape 4 is down to a single digit - 0 - the happier I'll be."

I'm actually surprised at that comment. I have seen a LOT of folks make mistakes when creating a site, and when testing with IE the site looks just fine whereas testing with NN or any other standards-compliant browser have shown major problems! Also, as I am sure you know, IE has a LOT of custom, proprietary tags that do not work in any other browser.

I always recommend testing with NN. I have seen very little code that works in NN *not* work in IE, .. but IE code not working in NN due to problems that IE fixes 'automagically' has been a BIG problem in our classes.

Also, if HTML 4.0 *ever* propagates as a standard (i.e. NN 6, Mozilla, ...) IE will be creating more of a problem, not less, with it's departures from the standards.

-- Anonymous, May 25, 2001

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