Web User Statistics

Posted by Erik

June 26, 2008

From time to time I venture outside of my project’s Google Analytics and look at ‘internet-wide’ statistics. Over the past year or so this has meant going to W3Schools.org and viewing the various statistics. This habit, however, may be change now due to some newly shed light. I was reading on another blog about the statistics from W3Schools being just from their viewers. This puts things in quite a different perspective due to their target audience. A comment in said blog post referred to TheCounter.com as a more reliable source for statistics. I sought out for some ‘realistic’ stats only to stumble upon more confusion…

Break it Down

I decided to review the results from May of 2008 from three sources: W3Schools, TheCounter.com and one of my Analytics reports. Here’s what I learned:

W3Schools

IE7 - 26.5%
IE6 - 27.3%
FF - 39.8 %
WinXP - 74%
Vista - 9.3%
Mac - 4.7%

TheCounter

IE7 - 41%
IE6 - 37%
FF - 16%
WinXP - 76%
Vista - 0% (or too low to consider 1%)
WinNT - 11%
Mac - 4%

My Analytics

IE7 - 18%
IE6 - 6%
FF - 64%
WinXP - 59%
Vista - 15%
Mac - 18%

Hmm

Clearly it depends on the lens you are looking through when retrieving such data. Does anyone know of a good, accurate representation of browser statistics? I would imagine powerhouses like Google and Amazon would be great sources for accurate statistics considering their wide usage. Unfortunately I could not find any reports directly from such sites.