The EOO staff and I check our traffic logs multiple times per day to see how many people are coming to the site, what they're looking at, etc. etc. It's amazing the depth of information that we get. One set of numbers that really sticks out is browser usage. We've had about 500,000 visitors over the past 3 months, of which 61% use Firefox, 23% use IE, and 11% use Safari. Opera and some browsers I haven't heard about before make up the rest of the traffic.
In talking to other webmasters, it seems that their browser usage stats hover around 65% IE to 30 % Firefox. Those numbers mirror what is reported on the web as the national average. So what's going on here? Is our site an anomaly, or are internet users trending towards Firefox and it's just not being reported yet?
I have to admit, that I'm pleased to see the numbers where they are. From a development perspective, IE has been a travesty for a long time. Firefox is (comparatively) closer to standards than IE, and so our development cycle typically consists of building new applications, like the Veepstakes game for example, getting them working in Firefox, and then hacking them to work in IE.
Who knows, maybe this could serve as a wakeup call to Microsoft to put out a better product. I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. I am curious though, are other websites experiencing the same shift? Or is it just in the political realm – maybe just on liberal / progressive sites?
