Last week I was browsing the statistics for our web site created by Awstats and noticed something odd. Safari was our second most popular browser! This result was odd since I had read a report saying that Google Chrome had recently passed Internet Explorer as the most popular browser in the world. On our web site the most popular browser was Internet Explorer(51.8%) followed by Safari(18.3%), Firefox(17.6%), and Google Chrome(8.0%). Since 21.3% of our users are using either a Macintosh, an iPad, or an iPhone, the Safari number looks reasonable. Going through the previous months files I found that Safari pulled ahead of Firefox in December of 2011. After a little hacking of the operating_systems.pm using the instructions in the article, Analyze HTTP logs, looking for iOS, a significant chunk of the Safari traffic originates on iPhones and iPads. Since we believe that the group of people visiting our web site customers are older than average, this makes an interesting statement about the acceptance of iPhones, iPads, and Safari. This group seems to have chosen iPads and iPhones over Macintosh computers as their browsing platform and the Safari browser over Google Chrome and Firefox browsers for their Internet browsing.
PC magazine wrote a nice article on the current trends in web browser, Google’s Chrome Tops IE in Global Browser Share. In that article Chloe uses two different sources for browser statistics, StatCounter and NetMarketShareâ„¢ and they come up with different results. Except for the Safari/Google Chrome issues our web site statistics are very similar to NetMarketShareâ„¢. Here are their graphs for market browser share.
Graph generated at StatCounter.
Graph generated at NetMarketShareâ„¢.