I was browsing the Google Analytics reports for my various sites, and I noticed some trends that surprised me. Since the numbers you tend to find aren’t broken out in meaningful ways, I thought I’d share my findings with you.

First, the numbers:

Surprising Conclusions

1. Holy cats! Firefox surpassed combined IE6 & IE7 usage for the first time in the Creative/Technical audience with a 47%/43% split.
2. There is a remarkable disparity between usage patterns between my sites aimed at technical or creative audiences and those aimed at consumers. While I expected there to be some difference, this disparity is much larger than I expected. Only 43% of the Creative/Tech audience use IE6 & IE7, while 81% of the Consumer audience do.
3. A year after its launch, 39% of the Consumer audience still uses IE6. <rant>This represents a complete failure on Microsoft’s part to manage the upgrade transition well, and is nothing less than a nightmare for developers.</rant>
4. Vista is a bomb. 9 months out, and it has only 12% of the Creative/Technical market and 9% of the Consumer market.
5. Mac use on the Creative/Technical sites outnumbers Vista use 2-to-1 (Mac 7,395 visits in the last 30 days vs. 3,521 Vista visits in the same time period).

First, let me disclaim that this is hardly a scientific study. I just found the results interesting, and I thought you might, too.

As I was comparing the numbers between various sites, I noticed a natural grouping in terms of percentage variance between my Creative/Technical-oriented sites and my Consumer-oriented sites. Breaking these out revealed these surprising numbers. The aggregated numbers above are taken from a little over 60,000 visits from 6 sites (3 of each type) in the last 30 days.

I debated whether or not to include the underlying raw data. Since these are client sites, I’d rather not share the actual hard data, so take my findings and conclusions with a grain of salt.

Feel free to comment/react/challenge below.

Tags: browser use, firefox, google analytics, ie6, ie7, internet explorer, mac use, operating system use, os x

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 4:37 am and is filed under News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.