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While earlier browsers had been developed, Netscape's Navigator brought the Web into everyday use. As the dominant product of Netscape, the browser was often called "Netscape", obscuring other products of the company.
Close to the time when Time Warner bought AOL, AOL bought Netscape. Shortly thereafter, AOL terminated further development of Navigator, turning all rights over to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.
Navigator continued to be released by AOL's Netscape, but it was then merely a rebranded repackaging of Mozilla products, initially the browser from Mozilla Suite and then Firefox. In 2008, Netscape announced that it was discontinuing further releases of Navigator.
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Contrary to popular belief and publicity from Micro$oft, Internet Explorer (IE) is not the only browser available. While Micro$oft does indeed dominate the market for desktop computer operating systems and other applications, the user base held by IE has steadily dropped since 2003. During the same period, the user base held by Gecko browsers such as Firefox has surged. Some surveys even indicate that Gecko browsers now hold a greater user base than IE.
Besides IE and Firefox (the principal browser product of the Mozilla organization), browsers currently available for various platforms include the following (indicating that Micro$oft was not successful in destroying the competition):
Both users and browser developers would really like to know what user bases are held by different browsers. Since most browsers are distributed as freeware, however, there are no sales figures. Comparing download counts might indicate the size of user bases except for the fact that many downloaded software files are never installed while many other are often downloaded once and then installed on more than one computer.
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While many discuss market share, browsers are generally freeware and are not marketed. Thus, I use the term user base here.*** End Left Sidebar ***
To many, the only measure of user base is how frequent various browsers are used to access Web sites (the statistics presented below). This too is not quite accurate since it is skewed by individuals who are avid Web surfers.
The following is based on surveys done by W3Schools (Refnes Data, Norway):
| Browser Family | User Base | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar '03 | Jul '10 | Change | |
| Internet Explorer | 88.0% | 30.4% | -57.6% |
| Gecko (Mozilla) | 7.6% | 46.4% | +38.8% |
| Chrome | n/a | 16.7% | n/a |
| Opera | 1.2% | 2.3% | +1.1% |
| Safari | 3.2% | 3.4% | +1.0% |
| others | 0.8% | ||
Gecko includes Mozilla browsers SeaMonkey, Firefox, Camino, and others.
Chrome was first released in 2008.
Safari (a Mac-only browser) was not separately reported in 2003 but was instead included in "others".
"Others" includes browsers no one of which has at least 0.5% of the user base.
Note: In that same period, the overall share of the operating systems market held by all Windows versions dropped from 93.2% to 87.8%. Both Mac and Linux gained market shares in that period.
Most of estimates — including the chart above — are derived by logging Web sites to determine which browsers are used to view their pages. These will vary widely (and wildly) depending on the audience for the logged Web sites. The target audience for the W3Schools site consists of Webmasters; thus the statistics in the chart above reflect browser usage by those with high technical interest in browsers.
I did a two-week collection of data during 5-18 April 2010 across 19 of my Web pages that contain visible visitor counters, repeating what I have done before. The audience in this case is far more eclectic than the audience for W3Schools. The "hits" were distributed across pages dealing with gardening, political commentary, encryption, literate writing, cooking, and other topics. ("Hits" from the FreeFind Web crawler were excluded since I subscribe to this for the search tool I installed on this Web site.)
| Type of "Hit" | May '06 | May '07 | Mar '08 | Oct '08 | Mar '09 | Oct '09 | Apr '10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total "Hits" | 3,307 | 2,929 | 2,601 | 2,057 | 1,821 | 1,876 | 1,682 |
| Browsers | 62.0% | 65.8% | 68.2% | 61.9% | 67.7% | 48.8% | 45.5% |
| Search crawlers | 37.2% | 33.5% | 31.5% | 37.4% | 31.8% | 50.8% | 54.2% |
| Page validators and link checkers | 0.7% | 0.6% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.3% | 0.3% | 0.3% |
| Unknown | 0.1% | 0.2% | 0.2% | 0.6% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.0% |
Table 3 details which browsers were involved in the "hits" indicated in the second entry of Table 2.
| Browsers | May '06 | May '07 | Mar '08 | Oct '08 | Mar '09 | Oct '09 | Apr '10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internet Explorer (IE) | 78.2% | 64.4% | 62.1% | 57.0% | 50.4% | 50.5% | 48.2% |
| AOL for PCs (included in IE) | 2.6% | 2.6% | 2.1% | 1.2% | 1.6% | 0.8% | 1.2% |
| Mozilla-based (Gecko engine) | 17.6% | 28.5% | 31.4% | 33.0% | 40.1% | 36.7% | 35.8% |
| Firefox (included in Mozilla) | 15.1% | 26.2% | 28.8% | 29.9% | 38.4% | 34.9% | 34.3% |
| SeaMonkey (included in Mozilla) | n/a | 0.8% | 0.4% | 0.2% | 0.2% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Safari | 3.0% | 4.4% | 4.6% | 6.0% | 6.5% | 7.4% | 8.4% |
| Chrome | n/a | n/a | n/a | 1.4% | 0.9% | 3.1% | 6.4% |
| Opera | 0.8% | 1.5% | 1.4% | 1.7% | 2.0% | 1.7% | 0.9% |
| Others | 0.4% | 1.2% | 0.5% | 0.3% | 0.2% | 0.3% | 0.4% |
In my latest survey, more than 51% of all browser "hits" were from products that were not Internet Explorer. The small user base for Safari (an Apple product installed on all Mac computers) continues to grow slowly. Google's new Chrome browser has gained user base; it is beginning to challenge Safari for third place, well ahead of the Opera browser from Norway and possibly accounting for the decline in both EI and Gecko browsers. For the second time, no SeaMonkey "hits" were logged (a disappointment to me because that is the browser I use). A new version — a major revision — of SeaMonkey was released late last year; this new survey shows a lack of impact by that version on SeaMonkey's user base. In this latest survey, "Others" were all mobile browsers for either BlackBerry or Samsung devices.
While my data do not show the same percentages as the data from W3Schools, both show similar trends. The differences merely affirm my earlier assertion that different Web page topics attract audiences with different computer configurations. In any case, my own surveys clearly confirm the trend seen in the data from W3Schools: IE browsers have leveled off at not more than half the user base.
Note that my statistics for the Safari browser might be inflated because my daughter (frequently visiting my Web site while living about 2,000 miles away) uses a Mac with that browser.
(During the latest two-week survey, my A Shipment to My Daughter received 368 "hits", 21.9% of the total.)
While collecting data for Tables 2 and 3, I also collected statistics about "hits" from search engine crawlers (sometimes called bots). These accounted for slightly more than half the "hits" logged during my most recent survey.
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Some ISPs assert that video and music downloads consume too much band-width and cause Internet congestion. They want to charge users extra for such activities. Perhaps they should instead look at the band-width used by bots and crawlers. They should also look at the band-width used by spam.*** End Right Sidebar ***
Among search engine crawlers, the most frequent visitors to my Web site — accounting for 70% of all crawler "hits" — were:
Visits by 29 different crawlers were logged during the two-week survey. Apparently, a number of individuals and organizations would like to earn the fortunes made by the founders of Yahoo and Google.
Besides analyzing which crawlers visited my Web site, I also was able to analyze from where browser "hits" originated. About 45% of the "hits" by actual browsers left information as to where a link to my own Web page was found. (Because of the growing trend towards anonymous browsing, this is significantly lower than the 80%+ from my previous survey.) While MSN had the most crawler visits to my Web site, Google was by far the most common source of "hits" by browsers.
While visits by Micro$oft's MSN crawler exceeded the sum of the visits by the next eight crawlers, search requests originating in MSN accounted for only 0.9% of the browser "hits" on my site. Yahoo's crawler visited twice as often as Google's crawler, but Google resulted in eleven times more browser "hits" than did Yahoo.
Of course, these statistics reflect upon the popularity of the search services, not upon how well they index my pages. However, it appears that Google is not only more popular than Yahoo and MSN but might also be more efficient. It almost seems that MSN is thrashing around in the dark without any good result (43% of the crawler visits resulting in only 0.9% of the browser visits).
Updated 6 August 2010
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