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Report: 71% of Internet Users Run Latest Version of Their Browsers. Do You?

Frederic Lardinois — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:52:11 -0800

Web apps that rely on features that only modern browsers can offer are becoming a standard feature on the Internet. Sadly, though, the fact that a lot of users don't regularly upgrade their browsers (or that their IT departments don't allow them to upgrade) complicates matters greatly for those developers who want to use the latest and greatest features of modern browser technologies like HTML5. The latest data from Pingdom and StatCounter, however, notes that a surprisingly large number of users (71%) already run the latest official versions of their browser.

]]> Thanks to Chrome's built-in update mechanism, the latest stable version of Google's browser (Chrome 7) now powers 90.6% of all Chrome users' Internet experience. Given Chrome's fast release cycles and the wide availability of beta and developer builds, chances are that a large number of those who don't run Chrome 7 actually run even more up-to-date releases of it.

It doesn't come as a surprise that users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer haven't upgraded to the latest version of their browser yet. Only 60.2% of IE users are running version 8 yet. The total number of IE users has been dropping for a while now and has recently dipped under 50%, but IE remains the most often used browser on the Web (we hesitate to call it the most "popular" browser). The upcoming release of IE9, though, could prove to be a turning point, as it is faster and far more standards compliant than previous versions. For the time being, 14% of Internet users are still running IE6, which was released on August 27, 2001.

Do You Run the Latest Version of Your Browser?

Are you using the latest and greatest version of your browser of choice? Do you use Google Chrome's canary builds and the latest beta version of Firefox 4 to stay on top of things? Or are you still stuck on IE6 at work because your admin locked down your machine and your company's internal Web apps still only run on IE6? Let us know in the comments. ]]> Discuss

A Redd Monday: Reddit Profits from Digg Revolt

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:45:58 -0800

Digg's users are still in the middle of their fifth major revolt on the site and the effect of this current uprising is now starting to become more apparent. According to the latest data from Statcounter, referral traffic from Digg to its network hit its lowest point ever on Monday, while traffic from Digg competitor Reddit increased dramatically. Statcounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen notes that "Abandon Digg Day" on Monday turned out to be a "Redd Monday" for Reddit.

]]> As a caveat, we have to note that this data is based on referral traffic from Digg and Reddit to Statcounter's network of participating sites. By default, traffic from Digg and Reddit to these sites tends to fluctuate widely. While the severity of Monday's swing in favor of Reddit does indeed point towards trouble for Digg, we will have to monitor this trend for a few more days to see if it remains stable.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Digg vs Reddit Market Share

Standoff

What is clear, though, is that Digg's users are not backing down - and neither is Digg's management. User revolts are nothing new for Digg, but this time it looks like Digg's management is not prepared to back down. According to former Digg engineer Ian Eure, Digg may not even have the ability to roll its service back to the old version anyway. Digg's CEO Kevin Rose does promise, however, that many of the old features Digg's users are now clamoring for will come back in one form or another. The question now is if the site's most fervent users will come back once all the issues with Digg v4 have been resolved, or if they will simply move on to another site like Reddit.

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Did Bing's Growth Spurt Come to a Halt in September?

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:30:32 -0800

After months of slow but steady increases in its market share, Bing's share of the search market in the US and globally fell for the first time in September. According to StatCounter's Global Stats, Bing's share of the search market in the US fell from 9.64% in August to 8.51% last month. Globally, Bing didn't fare much better, as it went from 3.58% to 3.25%. Yahoo's share went from 10.5% in August to only 9.4% in September. The combined share of Bing and Yahoo has now fallen to 17.91%.

]]> According to StatCounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen, this downward trend for Bing began in the middle of August. The launch of Bing's visual search feature should have given Bing a nice boost in publicity last month, but if we can trust StatCounter's data, this wasn't enough to counter the downward trend that already began in August.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share

In the long run, these numbers could obviously turn out to be nothing more than a blip on the radar for Bing. After all, even the numbers for Google fluctuate every month. We also haven't seen numbers for September from other analytics firms like Hitwise or Compete yet, though while they often differ, they usually agree with StatCounter when it comes to general trends.

The question, of course, is why Bing stopped growing last month. Did Microsoft scale back its marketing campaign? Or did users, after the novelty wore off, simply go back to Google?

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Bing According to Microsoft: Unique Visits Up 8% in June

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:35:14 -0800

We already knew that Bing, Microsoft's new search engine was doing quite well, but today, Microsoft released its own data about the state of the service. Bing launched just a bit more than one month ago, and since then, we have seen reports from numerous third-party web analytics firms that Bing was indeed doing quite well. According to Microsoft's own data, Bing saw an 8% growth in unique users in June compared to the previous month. The company also noted that the number of users who would be "likely to recommend" Bing to others doubled in June.

]]> Shopping and Travel

In addition, Microsoft also announced that Bing Shopping saw a 300% increase in visits and Bing Travel saw its traffic grow by 90% month to month (though Bing Travel's image is a bit tarnished by a recent controversy about its design).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share

Advertisers

Overall, the numbers Microsoft cites for Bing's traffic compare well with data we have seen from various web analytics firms, so we have little reason to believe that Microsoft doctored them (though the latest data from Compete is slightly less encouraging for Bing). Microsoft, however, also detailed some data about the results advertisers are seeing on Bing, though we will have to withhold judgment here. It is hard to find hard data about this, and while Microsoft announced that TigerDirect saw its sales and order volume triple, and its conversion rates and average order size "increase significantly," we just don't know if this was a special case or something advertisers saw across the board.

Developers

According to Microsoft, developers are also taking a liking to the Bing API. The number of registered developers doubled last month, and incoming API requests are up 50% since launch.

What's Next?

While Microsoft didn't specify any exact numbers, the fact that far more users are likely to recommend Bing than they were likely to recommend Live Search must be an encouraging sign for the company.

Microsoft didn't specify any future plans in today's post, but we know that Microsoft's biggest challenge is to overcome Google's momentum and to keep users on its service and from switching back to Google.

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StatCounter: IE8 is Off to a Slow Start

Frederic Lardinois — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:59:46 -0800

Yesterday, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 finally came out of beta, but according to the latest data from StatCounter's GlobalStats, users are not exactly in a rush to update their browsers to IE8 just yet. Even though IE8 had been in public beta testing for a year, its market share only rose from 1.39% on its launch day to 1.56% today.

]]> In contrast, by the end of its beta testing period, Firefox 3 already had 7.8% market share, which then doubled to 18.9% over the next three days after the launch of the final version (though with the help of quite a bit of hype). Of course, Firefox users are probably a bit more willing to experiment with new browser versions than IE7 users. The numbers for IE8 could change very quickly if Microsoft decides to push it out as an update through the Windows Update service, but Microsoft has not announced whether it plans to do so anytime soon.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share

The fact that as of today almost 23% of all Internet surfers are still using IE6, however, leads us to believe that it will take a while before a larger number of IE7 and IE6 users will switch to IE8. While it's a major update, IE8 does not include a lot of new 'must-have' features for most users who just use their browser to get around on the net, and who probably don't care much about accelerators and web slices.

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StatCounter Launches Global Stats Tool: Tracks OS, Browser, and Search Engine Market Share

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:48:51 -0800

StatCounter, one of the larger free online stats services, just released a new online research tool that monitors the market share of search engines, browsers, and operating systems. StatCounter Global Stats' focus is different from other services like Compete, Alexa, Google Trends, or Quantcast, as it doesn't break out data by specific sites, but only focuses on these high-level statistics. StatCounter's data goes back until the middle of last year and allows you to break the statistics down by continent and country.

]]> According to StatCounter, its data is based on the analysis of four billion pageloads per month among StatCounter's two million members.

Compared to some of its competitors, however, some of StatCounter's data points seemed a bit off to us. StatCounter, for example, saw Google's U.S. market-share in January at over 80% (and down from a high of close to 85% last fall), while Hitwise reported 72% for January. StatCounter also sees Mac OSX as hovering around 4% worldwide, while Net Applications reports it at 9.6%. RWW readers, by the way, skew more heavily towards the Mac than the mainstream, as Google Analytics tells us that about 20% of you use Apple's OS.

For mobile operating systems, StatCounter reports that the iPhone is in a neck-and-neck race with the SymbianOS (about 35% each), while AdMob's global stats (PDF) saw Symbian as leading the race with 44% (32% for the iPhone).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats

One nice feature of StatCounter's tool is that it is updated 5 times a day. However, while this would be great if StatCounter was showing us data from specific sites, these frequent updates almost seem like overkill when it comes to the broad categories that the company currently tracks.

Given that there is no universal standard for how to measure these statistics, any of these numbers from any service have to be taken with a grain of salt. StatCounter gets its data from all the sites that use the service, and chances are that the types of sites where StatCounter is installed on inevitably skew the data in one way or another.

Overall, StatCounter is providing a valuable service with this new tool, but users will still have to compare the information from Global Stats with data from other services and draw their own conclusions about the validity of that data.

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