Firefox AND Mozilla growth - odd browser stats

[tedster]

One of my clients - not a tech oriented website at all - show these numbers for July so far:

IE6 -- 68.90%
Firefox -- 10.22%
IE5 -- 6.60%
Mozilla -- 6.18%
Other -- 3.67%
AOL 9 -- 1.66%
NN7 -- 0.91%
Safari -- 0.64%
Opera 7 -- 0.50%
WebTV -- 0.23%
AOL 7 -- 0.15%
AOL 8 -- 0.15%
AOL 5 -- 0.12%
Konqueror -- 0.03%
IE4 -- 0.01%
Avant -- 0.01%
Camino -- 0.01%
Opera 6 -- 0.01%
Lynx 2 -- 0.01%
IE3 -- 0.01%

I'm particularly wondering about those Mozilla stats - does anyone else see something comparable in their logs?

[eskipii]

non-techie site, seeing firefox about 11 %.
=)

[Dijkgraaf]

Possibly it is because of the one Googlebot's that has the UA off
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

[tedster]

I'll look into the Googlebot angle. I have SE spiders omitted from those stats, but just maybe not THAT spider.

Good idea - thanks!

[tedster]

Just checked - those stats did not include the Mozilla Googlebot. Looks like it's time to fire up grep and go into the logfiles bareback. That number just doesn't make sense to me as representing human visitors.

[Hester]

IE, Mozilla and Firefox account for around 95% of our recent stats. At least according to a custom routine I wrote. (Our "official" stats are quite different, but they don't include modern browsers.)

The latest stats I have for July 2005 indicate the following:

IE6 - 65.22%
Firefox - 20.5%
Mozilla/Gecko - 7.64%
Opera 8 - 3.27%
IE5 - 2.67%
Safari - 0.6%
Netscape 4 - 0.07%
Netscape 6 - 0.04%
Opera 7 - 0%
Netscape 7 - 0%

Note: Opera 8 and Firefox are both used in the office, hence the high percentages.

Also, we are seeing much higher stats for Netscape 4 in the "official" stats, but barely any here. The only conclusion I can think of is that I'm not monitoring the very first page of our site (index.html) because I need PHP to do the custom stats. I'm only now thinking that a lot of bots or users are checking that with Netscape 4. I'm hoping to add the stats code to that page as well soon to confirm my ideas.

[DanA]

Most netscape 4 agents (more than 80%) are from link checkers, a few offline browsers and some robots.
Firefox (firebird) was not detected when it represented less than 5% of the market and many of its users sent msie user agents not to be blocked.

[bird]

More than 10% for Mozilla/Firefox is completely normal these days. You'd rather need to worry if you were to see less than that.

[MatthewHSE]

Those numbers look okay to me. My main site is definitely non-tech and is getting around 13% Firefox users.

I have noticed something that smells like a bot crawling around my site lately with a weird UA string with Firefox as part of it. But, since my Firefox stats have been slowly growing since the beginning of this year and this month's are in line with that, I'm pretty sure my statistics software isn't counting this robot (whatever it is) as a legitimate Firefox visit.

[encyclo]

Firefox looks OK, but I agree that those Mozilla numbers are very high. I've never seen Mozilla that high on a non-technical site - the highest I have is 1.5%, with Netscape 7 with an additional 3.2%.

Did you find anything with your grepping, Ted?

[JAB Creations]

Keep in mind there are TWO IE 6s.

You can detect IE 6 SP2 by detecting SV1 in the MSIE 6.0 UA. The remaining MSIE 6 uas are XP sp1, 9x oses, etc.

It's about half and half with msie 6s and half the sp2/6s.

If you take that in to account it really puts IE in to better perspective.

Firefox is technically has the third greatest share, but IE 6 comes in two flavors.

IE 6 sp2 - 37.9%
IE 6 - 25.2%
Firefox - 24.7%