This is a report of a very simple and unscientific effort to determine which browsers are used by tech-savvy power users. Why would anyone care? Idle curiosity, mostly. And because it might be interesting to see if the recent spate of well-publicized security problems with Windows and Internet Explorer have had any effect on browser choice among alpha geeks.
The Goal
I’d be astonished if there hadn’t been some sort of migration away from IE over the last few months, but inertia can be a powerful force: a lot of people are just plain used to IE by now and they may figure that the hassle of changing outweighs the risk of security breaches. We’ll see.
Hasn’t this already been done? Well, sort of. Tech news sites occasionally host polls asking which browsers their readers prefer, but I’m not sure how trustworthy these are. Are people allowed to vote more than once? Do they have philosophical reasons for voting for browsers they don’t actually use? Do they publicly support Browser A while privately thinking Browser B is better in certain ways? I want to know what browsers techies actually use, not what they want other people to think they use.
My goal is not to analyze which browsers are used by computer users in general; plenty of surveys and analyses have been done (here’s a pretty good one), and we all know that IE is currently (and has been for many years) the juggernaut of the browser world. Instead, I want to find out what browsers are used by serious techies who are comfortable installing any browser they want, and who understand what makes some browsers better than others.
While we’re at it, let’s also take a look at which operating systems they use. This takes almost no additional effort and might reveal some surprises. This issue has been controversial lately, with Google removing OS statistics from their zeitgeist page (apparently because they weren’t happy about people using the statistics to derive market share figures). So that’s all the more reason to do our own research.
Methodology
In January 2004 I published an article on OSNews that described a suite of small benchmarks I had designed to test file and I/O performance on nine major languages or variants. This article contained two links to different pages on my personal website: the author’s biography had a link to my homepage, and a link within the text took readers to my benchmark source code. Then in March of 2004 I published a book review on Slashdot (the book was a history of the concept of infinity), which contained a link to my homepage at the end of the article.
I’m arbitrarily but conveniently defining “techie” as someone who would read an article on language performance benchmarks on OSNews or a technical/mathematical book review on Slashdot, and I’m taking the subset of readers who clicked through to my homepage (whether directly or via the source code page) as a proxy for all techies. My website logs the user-agent string, referral page, IP address, and date of each visit. To calculate the percentage of techies who use each browser type, I removed multiple log entries from the same IP address, so each user was recorded only once. Then I eliminated all log entries that were not referred from OSNews, Slashdot, or my own site (the last was intended to capture users who were coming from my source code page). Unfortunately, the MySQL installation on my host’s servers was corrupted in early March, which meant that I lost two months of data. But I was left with a large enough sample size to prove useful: I ended up with 785 log entries with unique IP addresses and appropriate referral strings between 6 March 2004 and 17 August 2004.
Results
Provided below are charts and tables breaking out visits by browser and OS. I’ve provided more granular and less granular versions of each.
| Browser | Percent n=785 |
| Internet Explorer 6 | 47.6% |
| Firefox/Firebird | 17.1% |
| Mozilla | 13.8% |
| Safari | 4.8% |
| Opera 7.x | 4.5% |
| Internet Explorer 5 | 3.6% |
| Netscape 7.x | 2.6% |
| Konqueror | 2.6% |
| AOL 9 | 0.4% |
| Galeon | 0.4% |
| Opera 6.x | 0.4% |
| Camino | 0.1% |
| Epiphany | 0.1% |
| Lynx | 0.1% |
| Netscape 4.7 | 0.1% |
| Opera 5.x | 0.1% |
| Web TV | 0.1% |
| Various Bots | 2.6% |
| Unknown | 0.4% |
| Browser Engine | Percent (n=785) |
Browsers using this Engine |
| Microsoft | 51.5% | Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 5, AOL 9 |
| Gecko | 34.1% | Mozilla, Firebird/Firefox, Netscape 7.x, Galeon, Camino, Epiphany |
| KHTML | 6.0% | Safari, Konqueror |
| Opera | 5.0% | Opera 7.x, Opera 6.x, Opera 5.x |
| Other | 3.3% | Netscape 4.7, Lynx, WebTV, Various Bots, Unknown |
| OS | Percent (n=785) |
| Windows XP | 70.3% |
| Linux | 11.3% |
| Mac | 7.5% |
| Windows 98 | 5.5% |
| Windows NT | 1.5% |
| Windows 95 | 0.4% |
| FreeBSD | 0.4% |
| Sun OS | 0.4% |
| Windows 2000 | 0.3% |
| WebTV | 0.3% |
| Unknown | 2.3% |
| OS Family | Percent (n=785) |
| Windows | 78.0% |
| Linux/BSD/Darwin/Unix | 19.6% |
| Other/Unknown | 2.4% |
Caveats
I see a number of possible problems with these findings. I’m sure readers will alert me to others.
- Opera can change its user-agent string to make look like it’s actually another browser (this is useful for fooling some commercial sites that only allow access from certain browsers). I rarely use this feature when I’m browsing with Opera, but it may be popular with other users. For this reason the Opera pie slice might be artificially small.
- Firefox and Mozilla can do the same thing, with an extension called User Agent Switcher. Again, I don’t know how often this extension is used, so I don’t know what effect this has on the Mozilla/Firefox numbers.
- Opera can turn off referral logging. This breaks certain sites, but I’m sure some percentage of Opera users do use this option because of privacy concerns. Anyone who has this feature turned on will not register in my analysis, which is another reason the Opera figure may be artificially low.
- I’m assuming that user-agent strings that list “Gecko” without any other qualifiers (like “Firefox” or “Netscape”) are really Mozilla, but this may not always be the case. (I’d appreciate hearing from readers more knowledgeable about this than I am.) There’s a chance that this may have inflated Mozilla’s ranking.
- As far as I can tell, AOL 9 is based on the Internet Explorer core rather than Gecko (which is odd, since AOL now owns all of Netscape’s intellectual property, including Gecko). But if I’m wrong about this, the Microsoft browser engine figure will be slightly inflated and the Gecko browser engine figure will be a little low.
- Because some user-agent strings include the term “Windows 2000,” I’m assuming that “Windows NT 5.x” in the user-agent string signifies Windows XP. But my Windows 2000 number feels low, which leads me to think that some of these apparent WinXP hits are really being generated by Win2K (I don’t have access to any Win2K boxes, so I can’t test this hypothesis). For this reason, the “OS Family” table (which lumps all versions of Windows together) may be more accurate than the more granular “OS” table.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I do 95% of my web surfing with Opera, as I have for several years. I’m not wedded to it; if something better comes along I’ll happily defect. But I’m sticking with Norway’s finest for now because of five features:
- It seems to load pages a smidge faster than anything else. No, I haven’t timed it.
- Its “wand” function for storing and autofilling passwords is fantastically useful, and more flexible than the password functions of its rivals.
- The “g” key cycles through showing all images, showing cached images, and showing no images. I’ve been told by a Firefox developer that this behavior is impossible in any Gecko-derived browser for esoteric architectural reasons.
- The “z” key ultra-conveniently backs up one page.
- It’s trivial to turn off plug-ins when you want to save CPU cycles or eliminate hyper-irritating, retina-melting Flash ads. This is a lifesaver on my 1999-era 300MHz Celeron, where every cycle counts.
Conclusion
Remember: this is a quick and dirty analysis of visits to a single low-volume site, so please take these figures with a big grain of salt. There are more detailed, more scientifically rigorous analyses available elsewhere, which I recommend to anyone interested in this topic. Having said that, what conclusions can we draw from my numbers?
The data conform more or less to what I expected, with a few small exceptions. I’m a little surprised that more techies haven’t abandoned Internet Explorer, both because of its security problems and because of the added features available in other, more modern browsers. I’m also surprised at the high percentage of hits coming from Windows machines. I would guess that many of these hits come during working hours, when users are browsing with company-issued Windows boxes. An analysis of hits between 8pm and 8am in the browser’s time zone might reveal very different distributions for both browsers and operating systems. Finally, I’m amazed at the number of bots out there, scanning and scraping information for who-knows-what purposes.
We can certainly conclude that it would be prudent for web developers to make sure their sites work as expected with browsers other than Internet Explorer, especially if they expect a technically sophisticated audience. Based on the “By Browser Engine” data, it seems clear that developers who test only with IE could be losing up to half of their potential visitors (including anyone with a Linux/Unix/Darwin box)! This is of course an obvious point that competent web designers have been aware of for years, but it bears repeating given the number of sites that still don’t look quite right or function correctly outside of IE.
About the author
Chris Cowell-Shah is a Palo Alto-based consultant with Accenture Technology Labs, the research and development office of Accenture. His website is www.cowell-shah.com. He welcomes feedback on this article.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
The statistic for a *tech oriented* website looks pretty horrible for linux
Windows – 78.0%
Linux/BSD/Darwin/Unix – 19.6%
Yes your win2k is low because Windows 2000 is NT5.0 and XP is NT5.1 Wow it was such a change. So numbers are off quite a bit since you assumed 5.x is XP
I really think that most techies really aren’t overly concerned with this trivial assessment except on the grounds of security. Personally I use Firefox, IE, Opera and whatever else displays a web page on my screen.
OSNews’ browser stats are here: http://bilbo.counted.com/2/42699/400/?sub_page=0&date=0
Note: while OSNews is an OS-independant site, we seem to attract mostly Linux users because there are many linux distros and so Linux manages to generate more news daily than other “single entity” OSes.
Also note, about 25% of the osnews daily hits are NOT recorded by Counted.com’s statistics engine at all, however their browser breakdown should be accurate enough for the purposes of this discussion.
Frome the reasons why the author uses Opera:
# The “g” key cycles through showing all images, showing cached images, and showing no images. I’ve been told by a Firefox developer that this behavior is impossible in any Gecko-derived browser for esoteric architectural reasons.
# The “z” key ultra-conveniently backs up one page.
The remarks about why Gecko-based browsers cannot implement this feature is this: Gecko-based browsers now have a quick “search in page” facility that Opera can *never* implement without breaking the above two “features”! Try it it firefox/mozilla: Start typing a word without the cursor being in a text field and it will jump to words on the page that match your type string.
I use Firefox on Win/Linux/Solaris/OSX. I give it to all of my customers as well.
>>The statistic for a *tech oriented* website looks pretty horrible for linux
It could be that the Windows hits are coming from Linux/BSD users at work/school where they have only Win machines.
.. would be that technical savvy users are typically well off (i.e. have money) and are more likely to use their money for online purchases (because they know how to do this). Therefore, especially sites that try to sell stuff online should take note of these figures.
Also sites that depend on on blogs for positive exposure (e.g. news sites) and advertisement revenue, would do well not to scare away the non IE user. The reason is that especially with bloggers, alternative browsers seem to be popular and bloggers don’t blog about what they can’t see in their browsers.
primarily firefox,
opera,
konqueror,
internet explorert.
and iam urging everyone i know _not_ to use msie, but only for windowsupdates. because i stopped cleaning up spyware and such from their pc’s. if its broke or doesnt work well, i might reinstall the os, but nothing extra anymore.
and for windows i highly recommend http://www.proxomitron.info as a webfilter. havent seen an equivalent for linux though.
>>>>The statistic for a *tech oriented* website looks pretty horrible for linux
>>It could be that the Windows hits are coming from Linux/BSD >>users at work/school where they have only Win machines.
This being true for me and most of my friends. – We’re surfing OSnews/Slashdot etc. in the schooltime because of lack of interesting things to do (writing essays isn’t that interesting when you can read interesting stuff instead
). So as you said – I do believe the hits are rather biased.
— As a side note Opera comes with IE identification by default – however, if you search for “Opera” before you search for “MSIE” in the string, Opera will get the vote.
I also use the IE identification on FireFox on Mac, because for some strange reason many sites doesn’t work without it. (Linux FireFox works all nice)
I am part of the 25% that isn’t counted by the Bilbo server. I suspect I have the site blocked via Adblock and my hosts file. If anyone wants to know, my user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040823 Firefox/0.9.3. Sometimes I run: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1), or: Mozilla/4.8 [en] (Windows NT 5.1; U), but it’s all the same browser, Firefox.
As for the Proxomitron, it runs just fine under Linux via WINE. It loads and sits in a KDE task bar just as well as the Windows one. Yes, it’s a superb, powerful filter.
Firefox is showing as Mozilla on Counted. Counted hasn’t updated their database to check new browsers, for 2 years now or so. So, if a browser is Camino or Firefox, it will show up as Mozilla.
I looked at Eugenia’s stats and compared them to the article’s stats and the one thing that jumped out was the difference in the numbers for konqi (konqi is my favourite browser). Eugenia reports that 6% of hits come from konqi, but you have 1.3%. My proposed explanation is that the article contents would be more interesting to a windows user, while konqi can only be used on linux boxes.
I would also support the idea that people surf from work, where there is less choice about what you can install and run. for example, where I work at present will let you install firefox, but linux is against the rules. Also, when at home, I have both my windows box and linux box running, I am normally working on my linux box but it is useful to surf the web from my windows box so I can leave both my browser window and my working window open. once again, I am surfing with firefox when I would prefer konqi.
just a couple of things to keep in mind,
pete
PS konqi isn’t better than firefox, it just fits in my kde desktop better.
it’s all those schools and backward universities which only run windows on their machines. one would think that a tech-uni runs linux instead of windows (at least for their IT dept). is that so?
I found this a rather interesting article– well written, and the author mentioned possible shortcommings in his statistical survey.
I indeed also expected to see more Gecko-based browser in the poll, the fact that people might be surfing while at work cannot explain everything. Interesting!
I prefer to assume that the 2.3% “other” in the breakdown by OS is actually BeOS
Of course that doesn’t make sense, but hey, it’s statistically possible 
Youd be surprised how many people actually dont use Linux all the time. I visit this site mostly from Firefox, here at work, in windows, when im at home im doing other things
lol. Id like to see stats like this from somewhere like forums.gentoo.org, haha i thik that would be very interesting.
I agree that Konqueror works well most of the time, but if you want Firefox to fit in better with KDE, there are a number of themes that do the job. I use Plastikfox, and it blends in well if you use the Plastik style and the Crystal SVG 1.0 icons. I believe there is support for other styles and icons, too.
http://kdelook.org/content/show.php?content=11442
“The remarks about why Gecko-based browsers cannot implement this feature is this: Gecko-based browsers now have a quick “search in page” facility that Opera can *never* implement without breaking the above two “features”!”
I don’t think losing the ability to have keyboard shortcuts (and hence easy access to more functionality) would be worth having the ability to search like that to be honest.
After all Opera allows you it’s own quick search in page facility. Hit the “.” and then type for a quick search text in page or “,” and then type to search for text in links on the page. So for an extra keypress, you get a bit more functionality there plus the ability to have lots of other key combinations that do useful things.
Correcting that misconception aside, the article was a pretty good stab at it. The guy didn’t hide his preference for Opera and highlighted the potential problems with his stats. It was avery small sample but hey, was interesting to see.
I can tell you from a site that I run for the the non-technical general public that the percentages of people using IE and Windows cf non-IE and/or non-Windows is rather more gaping than the article writers stats for his technical oriented site.
Another vaguely on topic addendum. Just today I had a friend IM me telling me he was absolutely pissed off with the amount of viruses and spyware and adware he had to keep on cleaning off his PC. He isn’t a technical computer user and so was surprised when told him he was using IE. I suggested he give both Firefox and Opera a go because browser choice is definitely a personal thing; what suits you best. He’s trying Opera first as I told him that although Firefox was more popular, Opera was my preference and he’s giving it a whirl first.
“Try it it firefox/mozilla: Start typing a word without the cursor being in a text field and it will jump to words on the page that match your type string.”
OK, now where I tried it I can assure you that it doesn’t work at all – it’s horribly broken. I am not impressed. Firefox 093, btw
“if its broke or doesnt work well, i might reinstall the os, but nothing extra anymore.”
What a unique idea – how about reinstalling IE only, instead of killing the entire installation?! Never mind… you got the time, then go for it… 🙂
I try to Not use IE as well. But i found so many website that i revisit don’t render well with Firefox. Therfore i am forced to use IE with Maxthon. ( Myie2 )
As not as i do safe web surfing and update IE regularly, have Av/Firewall i think is more than enough.
One problem I find with trying to pick out browser usage in geeks makes it even hard to oddball it with the method your using. Normally when I check osnews, it’s morning, night, and whenever I’m bored as hell inbetween, now I prefer and do use firefox as my browser, but if I’m on school computers or some other comptuer that doesn’t have firefox installed I’m not about to go downlaod it. So as an example, I probably end up checking osnews more when I’m bored and that would mean I’m probably not at my own computer, which unfortunately means I’m coming off an ie browser about 1/4 of the time. So in what I actually use(and would come up in these statistics), ie is in the mix, but in what I prefer to use, it’s firefox 100%. I have no idea how big of an effect this would have over everyone at osnews, but I generally get the feelings 75% of osnews readers are respectably intelligent, so no more than 25% of readers should be running ie
.
i feel weird today
I use IE. I used to use netscape until IE5.5 or 6.0 and then defected for reasons unknown. the only thing about IE i hate is bookmark management.
last month I tried firefox for two weeks and then promptly deleted that piece of shit. I have opera browser on my handphone which I don’t use either.
I’m primarily windows user simply because its familiar. but I’m techie enough to program C in solaris/bsd/aix in a corporate environment.
I should think anyone who doesn’t know how to work around IE’s security flaws is a total noob anyway.
“while konqi can only be used on linux boxes.”
Konqueror runs on Windows via Cygwin. Its not a popular choice though. It also runs just like Mozilla fine over VNC/X11.
“while konqi can only be used on linux boxes.”
Konqueror runs on Windows via Cygwin. Its not a popular choice though. Konqueror also runs on MacOSX (“Safari”), *BSD, Solaris and most likely various other platforms. It also runs just like Mozilla fine over VNC/X11.
Not really… most will use windows boxes as main environment even if they work with linux servers…
One thing doesn’t relate with other. Actually, it complimentary for linux to have such an high score…
(and i use firefox as main browser… and IE when i need for dev purposes…)
one more thing that needs to be factored in, skewing the statistics, other than opera or firefox posing as IE.
on my home PC I would not touch IE with a 10 foot pole, except for Windows update (got Suse 9.1/Windows XP double boot)
however, in the office IE is the only possibility. my suspicion is, other people are in the same situation.
that a person can’t be multi-platform.
i own an ibook (os x)
i manage a small fleet of slackware servers (linux)
and most of my personal x86 systems dual-boot xp, linux or freebsd.
i have nothing against XP or windows…but if that’s all you do, you better know it _very_ well. or your just another sheep.
I should think anyone who doesn’t know how to work around IE’s security flaws is a total noob anyway.
Yeah, not to mention all those who don’t have to.
(like users of any other browser)
I usually look at my web stats and after I write something on OSNews I get a heap of people having a wonder around my website.
It varies but (from memory) it’s somethng *like* this:
Win XP 25%
Linux 25%
Win 2K 20%
OS X 10%
FreeBSD 6%
Browser wise Mozilla/Firefox is usually 60%+
You can use Javascript Browser Sniffer (http://jsbrwsniff.sf.net) for statistics. It works on client- side and on server-side.
Depending on what I am doing, I use various. For instance, when I am not in X, and doing something like compiling, I use Lynx in other terminals. OSNews is pretty readable on Lynx. Firefox is the one I use mostly in X.
I wonder why more people don’t use Lynx or Links to browse news sites like OSNews. Maybe they enjoy watching the advertisements (and waiting these adwertisements to load). For simple and fast browsing there’s nothing like the GUI mode in Links 2.1. You only need Opera, Moz, or IE for browsing frames and other more interactive stuff. Especially with modem or ISDN connections it would make perfect sense to use two browsers: Lynx/Links/Dillo for fast browsing and reading news, Opera/Moz/IE for interactive browsing.
I should think anyone who doesn’t know how to work around IE’s security flaws is a total noob anyway.
(“I should think”?)
Some references please? What can one do against unpatched flaws which are known. Beg MS for a fix, which they won’t do, for the sole reason there ain’t an exploit in the wild? Cause, that’s reality…
Some of you may know why
Mozilla has a link jump built into the rendering engine.
Open a webpage and cick in the center of the page, not on a link or text input box. The start typing the name on a hyperlink. it will jump right to the first part.
Most useful for sites that are all links. Since I travel a lot, I post my home bookmarks.html file(yea mozilla) to my personal website. I can type my home page in and bring up all my links. I then can start typing the name of the place I want to go, and it comes up.
RE:I should think anyone who doesn’t know how to work around IE’s security flaws is a total noob anyway.
yeah, i agree, my workaround was to abandon Windoze completely and wipe it off my harddrive, and use Linux instead
You assumed that accesses from the same IP address represent the same user. This is flawed for two reasons: (1) proxies and NAT, (2) multiple users on the same box. I have heard it is otherwise in USA, but over here in the Old World, customers of ISPs rarely have fixed IP addresses (it costs extra, or is not possible at all). Effect (2) would tend to penalize unixlike systems: Windows boxes are usually one per person, but it is common in unix world to have several users.
Not sure what would be a better solution. Maybe this kind of survey would be an acceptable use for cookies?
if you access the site from work
or school you are more likely to use IE EVEN if you prefer firefox or something else at home.
fully updated short of service pack 2.
i have ie 6 fully updated
i have mozilla firefox 0.9.3 on this pc
i also have netcaptor 7.5.2 installed
i spend a lot of time on the web and browse a great deal. i try many different browsers looking for the one that is:
1) fastest
2) renders the best
3) is most customizable to fit my exact browsing preferences
my experience and testing shows me that:
ie 6 is the fastest and most reliable and renders the sites i visit the best.
firefox is improving in every area.
opera one moment can be lightning fast and then the next it can hang loading a tiny page. its too erratic. it renders pages very oddly at times as well.
i like tabbed browsing so ie 6 on its own wont do.
so i have tried several tabbed browser wrappers for ie 6 and find:
myie2 is slow and buggy.
avant browser is likewise slow and buggy.
netcaptor 7.5.2 retains ie 6’s speed and reliability…though it is does act just a tiny bit odd at times. enough to deal with.
try out netcaptor if you are on windows:
http://www.netcaptor.com/index.php
i have one suse linux box i use for learning linux and i run firefox on it.
80% of hits on my website are Safari users and would be higher because most of the IE stuff come from viruses on Windows 9x and Windows NT hosts. So beware IE’s share may actually be not be any users at all.
I don’t know in what order you searched for parts of user agent strings, but Konqueror in KDE 3.3 displays:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.3; Linux; en_US) (KHTML, like Gecko)
by default. Konqueror also has built in user agent changing functionality.
I’d recommend having at least one anti-spyware program as well; there is a lot of junk which anti-virus programs do not catch.
[I’ve disinfected -far- too much junk off Windows computers this summer].
> last month I tried firefox for two weeks and then promptly deleted that piece of shit. I have opera browser on my handphone which I don’t use either.
Would you mind mentioning a few of the problems you had with it?
> I should think anyone who doesn’t know how to work around IE’s security flaws is a total noob anyway.
Please tell me you’re kidding. You -cannot- work around most of IE’s security flaws. Sure, some configurations are more vulnerable than others, but there are always a large number of unpatched, public vulnerabilities, often allowing things like arbitrary code execution; a firewall isn’t going to protect you from that.
Anti-virus? It’s reactive. Ditto for anti-adware.
I’m not sure which is more amazing – how people who barely use the Net at all get large numbers of viruses and adware – or how lucky IE users have been, that more websites don’t exploit their browser, and those that do tend to only install relatively innocent malware.
Using IE any more than absolutely necessary [Windows update, corporate policy, whatever] is dangerous.
Unless you’ve thoroughly audited IE yourself, and have a lot of custom binary patches, I suspect your confidence in your configuration is misplaced.
The statistic for a *tech oriented* website looks pretty horrible for linux
19% is not horrible. It’s not a majority, but it’s considerably higher than the 1% – 3% that those sytems get in the normal population.
In response to kwr2k’s “‘g’ and ‘z’ key ‘features’ of Opera” comment, by default, that only searches for links. Of course, you can make it search for all text, or optionally turn it off altogether.
It’s a shame, it seems to break accessibility keys. But then again, it implements a sort of accessibility key in itself that’s easy to use, even on pages with no accesskey attributes coded in.
Try pressing ‘/’ and then typing the text that you want to find. That’s the default behavior (changeable in options). By default, if you just type text, it only searches within hyperlinks.
about the choices they have since IE is shoved down everyones throat….
I’d like to add that NT 5.2 is Windows Server 2003.
My user-agent string is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2) Opera 7.5
a default isnt “shoved” down anyones throat.
is safari shoved?
or is any linux distros default shoved?
aol users choose on a monthly basis to subsribe to aol which uses ie.
many other isps like earthlink likewise use ie. those customers choose their isp.
millions subscribe to magazines like pc world and pc magazine that discuss browser choice. large newspapers all over the usa at least have given a great deal of press of late to ie and svc pk 2 and exposed tens of millions of pc users to options they may not have known about.
a few have chosen things like firefox. ie numbers have gone down a percentage point in recent months.
most dont care. they just use whats there in front of them.
has nothing to do with shoved.
i am informed and test many choices yet continue to choose to use ie, though with a tabbed wrapper with it. same engine though.
a default doesnt preclude choice.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; Linux) (KHTML, like Gecko), since February 2004, I haven’t used any other browser.
i primarily read OSNews usig the Jpluck document toolkit and the XML newsfeed on my Palm Tungsten E. For regular web surfing, Firefox. I’m typing this right now via te lynz text browser from a Linux box.
Althow I think you know perfectly well and are only trying to troll, let me explain what the OP probably meant…
IE is not only the “default” browser. Is the “embedded in the OS so much we don’t let you uninstall it” browser.
Go ahead, uninstall IE, let me know of your progresses.
And before you go down the usual “then don’t use it” road: it it is in the system, you system is NOT secure. A lot of other software use IE as a rendering engine (most notably Outlook, both, and MSN Messenger). Guess what, almost all holes in those programs stem from a bigger hole in IE.
Get a clue, and bring it always with you, please.
Renato hit the nail right on the head…
Way back when win 98 (which we all know is when IE started getting “integrated” into the core os) just came out I did an upgrade from 95 to 98, the funny thing was that after the upgrade was complete, I still my choice to uninstall IE from (initial install of IE was done under 95) the add remove programs, I uninstalled it to see what would happen…it was a disaster to say the least…
BUT the funniest part of the whole thing was that the side image on the start menu reverted back to saying Windows 95!
So the lesson…remove the browser and ruin your os??
And you’re telling me it wasn’t shoved down MY throat?
Who’s trolling who?
I have a personal website where I distribute some ruby software I’ve written as well as a few other program and an article or two on Python and MySQL. I’d mainly describe my “audience” as geeks, and I get about 5,000 hits a month. My useragent info breaks down quite differently.
1 1544 30.76% Mozilla/5.0
2 1290 25.70% MSIE 6.0
3 481 9.58% msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
4 326 6.49% MSIE 5.0
5 130 2.59% Program Shareware 1.0.0
6 119 2.37% Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
7 55 1.10% NaverBot-1.0
8 46 0.92% MSIE 5.5
9 37 0.74% fmII URL validator/1.1
10 32 0.64% Missigua Locator 1.9
11 31 0.62% Tutorial Crawler 1.4 (http://www.tutorgig.com/crawler)
12 31 0.62% ia_archiver
13 29 0.58% Mozilla/4.7
14 26 0.52% Lynx/2.8.3dev.9
15 25 0.50% Konqueror/3.2
>aol users choose on a monthly basis to subsribe to aol which uses ie.
This is flawed, akin to saying that ‘people choose on a monthly basis to live in their apartments’, where that’s simply not the case. People live in their apartments, and the only time they really choose anything is when they get so annoyed they want to move out. Other than that, the fear of uncertainty and effort in moving out of their apartment (or of switching ISP’s) keeps them there. Or they’re happy.
The same is the case with ISP’s, and also with browsers. It took a long time for me to get my parents not to use IE because they were afraid their favorites would get lost.
Personally, I like Konqueror specifically for the split-window browsing feature. I don’t understand why more browsers haven’t implemented this incredibly useful feature (granted, it’s best on a big monitor).
However, since I don’t use linux much anymore, I use Safari on my Mac and Firefox on Windows at work. Also use Firefox as a second choice on the mac if Safari has a problem with a site.
I attempted to use KDE on my mac via fink, and did get it running, but had too many crashes with Konqueror to find it useful. Besides, it’s SO heavyweight for my needs (I’m a programmer and use the browser heavily for reading documentation). Would be nice to have konqi without all of the other kde baggage.
Please, someone (Apple, Firefox are you listening?) …implement split-window browsing.
but now I use khtml-based browsers more. On my main machine, my Mac, I use Safari 100% of the time. In my development system running Linux, I run Konqueror about 95% of the time. The other 5% is for the sites that still break konqueror, which is quickly dwindling. Konqueror has become quite good since KDE 3.2 and especially since KDE 3.3.
All the khtml world needs is a native Windows port. I think a native khtml browser on Windows would have a better chance at converting IE-folks than Firefox because of it’s leaner size. I think you could probably produce a khtml-based browser in less than one meg if you tried hard.
The user string agent can be changed in IE, however I prefer to use Mozilla for various reaons:
1) tab browsing
2) typing to get to links and text. AKA better than average key board navigation usibility.
3) Speed of loading pages. There are some perfomance tips that you can take advantage of in Mozilla and Firefox.
a) network.http.pipelining.firstrequest (true)
b) network.http.pipelining
c) network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
d) network.http.max-connections
e) network.http.max-connections-per-server
These are just a few tweaks that can be done, I have done more myself, but these would be the basics. This would depend on how your connections are set up for their respective values. For a quick way to change most of these settings use “about:config” in the URL and modify to your hearts content. The fastest performance change would be to enable pipleling and that can be dong though your preferences:
Preferences —> Advances —> HTTP Networking
Enable pipleling and keep alive.
FYI: some other posters mention that there are more windows hits using IE because corporations only allow IE and not Mozilla. In my case that would be true.
Sorry about the 2nd post and the type o’s.
http://khtml-win32.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/khtml-win32
There looks to be a port of KHTML to the Windows platform:
I wonder what new kinds of browsers will be spawned off of this code. Gecko has spawned various browsers such as kmeleon or k-meleon. I personally wish that the folks at http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/ would port this over to other platforms. 🙁
I didn’t even read the whole article because I found some pretty unserious points (to say the least). I even noticed that the author isn’t competent enough to do correctly the charts themselves.
785 log entries, IMHO, are far from enough to try to answer the question “Which Browsers Do Techies Use?”
> Opera can change its user-agent string to make look like
> it’s actually another browser (this is useful for fooling
> some commercial sites that only allow access from certain
> browsers). I rarely use this feature when I’m browsing with
> Opera, but it may be popular with other users. For this
> reason the Opera pie slice might be artificially small.
The author doesn’t even know how to detect Opera using the UA string no matter what identification the user has selected. Although this is more than simple.
So I personally find the article pretty unserious. 😕
I KNOW, ActiveX is nothing good secure wise, but many Web site are still using it. Microsoft is heavily using it (doh!). You allways need IE when faced with those site.
I try to only use FireFox, it’s realy good and fast, has a couple of nice feature that IE miss. But still, once a day I find myseld loading IE just to check if the site is showing right in FireFox….
Some things will never change. I guess we will allways need IE around….
Eveyone has their right to there own browser choice. I for one, have not used any other browser other than Safari when I got my first of many Mac computers. I know mozilla’s browsers are doing fantastic in the windows world, especially Firefox. I for one believe that if Apple ported iChat and Safari it would be dominate net tools on windows. Just my two cents.
im currently useing the mozilla suite but im leaning towards useing opera. what i am waiting for tho is for thunderbird to hit the magical 1.0 and then install the firefox/thunderbird combo to see that in action (i may install thunderbird before 1.0 if they can get a nice gui for moveing the mail over from mozilla proper working in one of their betas)…
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=116753
telnet.
Alpha Geeks don’t use Windows.
AOL made a deal with the devil before the Netscape merger, so they’re contract-bound to exclusively bundle Internet Explorer with their online service. It’s re-branded with an AOL logo, but it’s still got the same rotting heart.
I’m sure if they still had a choice, they’d be bundling Mozilla or Firefox.
> I KNOW, ActiveX is nothing good secure wise, but many Web site are still
> using it. Microsoft is heavily using it (doh!). You allways need IE when faced
> with those site.
Personally I take the other option when faced with those sites: I go someplace else. The Web is big, and I don’t know of any site out there that reqires ActiveX that doesn’t have some viable competition someplace else that doesn’t require ActiveX.
AFAIK the current Mac version of AOL is still using Gecko at its heart, not MSIE.
firefox and konqeuror on Linux.
“Personally I take the other option when faced with those sites: I go someplace else. The Web is big, and I don’t know of any site out there that reqires ActiveX that doesn’t have some viable competition someplace else that doesn’t require ActiveX.”
Do you also take this attitude when looking for the best deals on the web?
I really wish e-commerce sites would fix their horridly done systems and use something standard. And if e-commerce can’t be done on the standard, well then well it can so that’s not a problem.
And for Windows users, windowsupdate.com is kind of a needed site…
I’d be astonished if there hadn’t been some sort of migration away from IE over the last few months, but inertia can be a powerful force: a lot of people are just plain used to IE by now and they may figure that the hassle of changing outweighs the risk of security breaches.
How difficult can it possibly be to try a new browser and move your bookmarks over? Come on, for crying out loud.
I would guess, talking about regular and *willing* use of a browser (I still have to use IE sometimes at work, e.g. for the intranet):
1. Mozilla (Regular + FireFox)
2. IE
3. Opera
4. Safari
5. Other…
I use Firefox on Win/Linux/Solaris/OSX. I give it to all of my customers as well.
Once I can figure out how to store a copy of my bookmarks on another computer… Probably bring up the G4 and rsync files over or something.. then I will go with firefox full time. Safari is good but Firefox is DAMN good.
Do you also take this attitude when looking for the best deals on the web?
Would you like to get users be infected when it is well known ActiveX is mostly used by crackers to intrude inside PCs?
I try to Not use IE as well. But i found so many website that i revisit don’t render well with Firefox. Therfore i am forced to use IE with Maxthon. ( Myie2 )
I re-coded the IT department’s page at a company I used to work for about a year ago. The page would render just fine in IE but horribly in any other browser.
It turned out the page was coded badly. It did not comply with standards, but IE rendered it as if it was. So I re-coded the page using Mozilla as my QA test bed. Once the page was coded properly and looked correct in Mozilla I tested it in IE as well. Surprise… well not really.. it looked great.
Point is, IE allows bad code to render correctly. This is why so many sites look good in IE but crappy in other browsers. IE and Microsoft as a whole allow substandard code to pass.
well, my first guess on looking at this is that he didnt get techies, he got script kiddies. script kiddies are interested in techie stuff, but they generally lack the forsight and attention span for something like security, which explains the huge amount of ie users. i dont know any compitant windows user that uses ie with the vulnerabilities that have been comming out lately. even microsoft zealots use firefox.
as for the windows/linux thing, its smaller then i would have though (again, the kiddy factor may be in play again). my guess would be alot higher, 30-40% at least. remember, we are talking techies here which is 100% of the linux desktop market right now.
links -g is what i use
Not sure if it’s been mentioned…
Konqueror -> Tools -> Change Browser Identification
Competence is usually decided from other factors than what WWW browser one chooses to use…
The problems I have encountered while trying other browsers have made me stay with IE and/or systems based on IE. Still there is no problems with pop-ups, viruses etc. at any of my computers, so I’m perhaps ‘compitant’ anyway?
no openwave?
Most people I know are broken down by drugs and/or alcohol.
The only one I know that might qualify as being broken down by OS would be Eugenia.
“it’s all those schools and backward universities which only run windows on their machines. one would think that a tech-uni runs linux instead of windows (at least for their IT dept). is that so?”
Why? Because you dont like Windows, so no one should use it?
I prefer to use IE. I have tried Opera, and found it just too complex and a hassle to use. I also have Firefox installed on my machine and tried that for a while. In the end, I went back to IE. I just love the way that its so tightly integrated into Windows. Being able to just flip to the internet in the same window while browsing files and vica versa is wonderful.
“AOL made a deal with the devil before the Netscape merger, so they’re contract-bound to exclusively bundle Internet Explorer with their online service. It’s re-branded with an AOL logo, but it’s still got the same rotting heart.
I’m sure if they still had a choice, they’d be bundling Mozilla or Firefox.”
That’s just not true. They’ve evaluated there options at least once (possibly twice) since the Netscape acquisition. They chose to renew the contract and continue on with IE. From memory, that occurred fairly recently (approx 2002).
You can easily change the user agent string in Safari as well, if you enable the Debug menu: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030110063041629 . I usually use “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2)” for sites that complain about my browser.
I use Konqueror 3.3 on FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3 and everythings fine, java and flash too. I’m just happy with a simple browser that does everything I want.
I’m not pro-IE, I just wanna be able to buy stuff from newegg without booting into Windows. Last time I did it, it failed to process my order in firefox 0.9.3.
the thing is, IE is about five years behind everyone else functionality wise. it isnt standards compliant, and if the first two arnt enough, has countless vulnerabilities. its more getting to the point where you really have to trust the sites you visit on ie, cause any of them could execute arbitrary code on your computer with very little hassle.
so lets see… nothing to make it better, free alternatives have way more features, and using it can break your pc. this doesnt seem like much of a choice to me.
honestly, this isnt a troll. i would honestly like to hear why ie users stick with ie if they know enough to install something else. i have a windows zealot friend who hated all things netscape with a passion. i had to literally install firefox (or firebird at the time) on his machine when he wasnt looking. now he is alwas raving about it, and installs it on all his clients machines (he is a windows repair guy).
i havent had a problem with a website in firefox for quite a long time now. i know early mozilla was ass, maybe you havnt tried it in awhile? i highly suggest giving it another try, look at the features, look at the extensions, and learn how you can use a browser that actually makes browsing more enjoyable.
I’m posting this from NCSA Mosaic 2.7b5
The formatting is a little screwed up, but the site is
still navigatable.
No comment really, I just wanted to see if I could still use Mosaic to browse the web.
OK, now where I tried it I can assure you that it doesn’t work at all – it’s horribly broken. I am not impressed. Firefox 093, btw
OK, if you’re familiar with firefox, you probably already know this, but find-as-you-type only searches for links in the page. If you want to search for any text in the page prefix phrase your looking for with a /
Oh, and one annoyance I have is when I go from firefox to ie and my find-as-you-type doesn’t work anymore or when I go from linux to windows and my select/middle click to copy paste doesn’t work anymore. It just drives me nuts 😉
Sam
“AOL made a deal with the devil before the Netscape merger…”
That’s just not true. They’ve evaluated there options at least once (possibly twice) since the Netscape acquisition. They chose to renew the contract and continue on with IE….
Of course, the cynics among us KNOW that they got a big pile of money for “choosing” IE. MS won’t let a 20-25% marketshare go down without a fight like that.
As for AOL, they could have a free browser engine, or they could have a better-than-free browser engine AND a free browser engine in their back pocket. They’d have to be fools to turn down MS’s perfectly good money.
Of course, if MS starts tightening the screws, we know AOL can simply call the shots. (AOL version 90.0 or something like that).
My browser is not IE 6, but I have set it to inform the website that it is. I do this because there are too many websites which “don’t work” for the wrong browsers.
In this case, I would help skew your results in favour of IE6. It would be interesting to find out how many others also set their browsers to “Lie mode”
Firefox.
Why use anything else? it’s quick, minimalistic, and not bloatware. Opera can’t say that, Mozilla can’t even say that, and, of course, nor can IE. Safari isn’t bad, but I’m on an i386. I prefer Camino over Safari though.
OS X
Camino
Safari
Linux
Firefox
Konqueror
Your poll apparently records IE-inspired browsers such as Slimbrowser as Internet Explorer browsers. This is misleading. I virtually never use Internet Explorer itself, but use Myie or Slimbrowser or Avant browser when I’m in a Windows environment.
As I sit here reading this on a Mozilla browser on a linux box only a few feet away from my WinXP machine with only IE installed, I remeber back in the late 90’s while woking for “Syracuse Langualge” the exact opposite problem. At that time many pages worked “best” in Netscape 4.x. I long for the day when a site will look correct regardless of browser. But, until then the pendulum will just continue to swing.
I abandoned IE years ago. Used opera, using FF on all my Win/Lin boxes. And the reason? I couldn’t open web link in background tab/page. It’s probably still impossible, but most IE users do not know that anything else exists. Did MS put this simple thing in? Ah well, who cares.