With Firefox 1 being released, there’s been a rush of sites displaying their browser statistics. However, none of the big South African sites to my knowledge have done this.
I’m hoping to get these stats on the IOL site itself quite soon, but I couldn’t wait. Here’s what IOL readers are using (which is probably as good a figure as any for the ‘typical’ South African reader).
Browsers
Internet Explorer sat at 93.16% in October (though there’s been quite a dramatic drop so far in Nov, to 91.07%, with Firefox 1 making an impressive showing). Last October it was 97.78%, so quite a drop over the year. Mozilla (all flavours) sat at 4.53% in October, up from 2.29% in July. The change has been even quicker between IE versions, with IE 5 dropping to 2.62% from 22.07% last year, and IE 6 moving from 58.04% to 75.99%.
Operating Systems
Linux uptake has been quite slow – clearly the vast majority of Mozilla users are on Windows. Linux was on 0.61% in October – last October it was at 0.29%. What’s disappointing is that it was 0.63% in June, so it’s been relatively stable for the last few months. Obviously the migration of our editorial staff from Windows 98 to Fedora Linux has made little difference to the stats! Most of the movement has been from older versions of Windows to Windows XP, now at 52.23% (Win 2000 has fallen to 28.25%). A year ago, it Windows XP was at 28.58%, and Win 2000 at 36.25%. But it’s not only Linux and Windows – FreeBSD has stood firm at 0.1% the whole year!