Mac Stats

Most common

[fashezee]

Were setting up a test machine for Macs and I would like know
what is the most popular OS and Browsers used on Macs?

[jimbo_mac]

Safari seems to be vey popular as a browser, it comes standard with all new macs. Wouldn't hurt to have IE installed as well.

Operating Systems - lots of people are still using OS 9 though (the ones with older macs), but as people upgrade OS X would be the best solution.

[bcolflesh]

From my own experience (YMMV), the bulk are <= OS 9.x running IE 5.x

[aaronjf]

Being the head of an all Apple department, I tend to notice the traffic coming in from Macs. Right now the split is about 60% OS X with Safari and 40% OS 9 and IE. This is taken from traffic over 8 sites.

I believe over the course of the next 9 - 12 months this number will start to look more like 75% / 25%.

[R1chard]

Actually, although there are loads of statistics for web surfers in general, I don't see any global usage stats as a function of Mac only.

I'd really love to have a detailed breakdown of browsers (and maybe browser versions) where the Mac total is 100% and Win is discarded.

[andy_boyd]

The most frequently used Mac browser on my sites is IE on Mac OS 9, although Safari on OS X (85.5) seems to be popular too. I get the odd Camino user also, but they are few and far between.

[hartlandcat]

I've often been under the impression that amongst Mac users, it's more or less 30% Safari, 30% IE, 30% Netscape et al, and 10% others, like Opera and iCab etc. As for OS X vs. OS 9, it's more or less 60% OS X and 40% OS 9 and below.

[jamesa]

According to Steve Jobs at MacWorld earlier this month there are 9.3 million active Mac OS X users, which he said accounts for 40% of all Mac users. Apple expects that there will be 10 million active OS X users by the end of this quarter.

Safari is only available on OS X and wasn't always the defualt browser (can't remember when that started). IE 5 was the default browser since, what, OS 8.6? Netscape was the default prior to that.

So my guess would be a close to equal split between IE5 and Safari as the most popular.

[hartlandcat]

Safari became the default browser on Mac OS X only in October, with the release of Panther (v10.3). However, it's been availible for around a year, and many people downloaded it.

[timster]

9.3 million active Mac OS X users, which he said accounts for 40% of all Mac users.

I don't think it's wise to extrapolate from this figure. A newer Mac is more likely to be connected to the Internet. Also, people who use the Internet a lot are more likely to have a new Mac than their casual counterparts.

My general advice to PC-folks setting up a Mac test machine: Make sure your machine can boot into both OS X and OS 9 (some of their new ones don't). Make sure your machine has native USB, so you can plug in your spare mice, etc.

[hartlandcat]

I believe it's only the PowerMac G5 (so far) that can't boot into OS 9, although a PC user wanting a Mac to test their web pages on is unlikely to be getting one of those. They're extremely expensive, and are only really necessary if you want to do advanced video editing.

[madmac]

I think the new AL powerbooks cannot boot OS9 either. My 12" RevB cannot, I know.

I will try to be fair here and use stats from December, only because I surf our site alot while working on things, so this can skew the data dramatically. In most of December I was away on vacation and only browsed our site when necessary to complete admin functions.

I am also attempting to look at only Mac users.

During this period total Mac users accounted for 50.9% of our traffic.

Now we'll just look at that 50.9% as the new base (taking out Windows and all other OSes):

Operating System of Mac users:
OS X: 60.64%
OS 9: 39.36%

Browsers of All Mac Users:
Safari: 51.65%
IE 5.2.3: 6.55%
IE 5.2.2: 10.32%
IE 5.2.1: 2.18%
IE 5.2.0: .09%
(total IE 5.2.x: 19.14%)
IE 5.1.7: 2.57%
IE 5.1.6: 2.29%
IE 5.1.5: .27%
IE 5.1.4: 2.02%
IE 5.1.3: 1%
IE 5.1.2: .37%
(total IE 5.1.x: 8.52%)
Other: 20.69%

Browsers of OS X Users:
Safari: 85.18%
IE 5.2.3: 10.8%
IE 5.2.2: 17.01%
IE 5.2.1: 3.59%
IE 5.2.0: .15%
(total IE 5.2.x: 31.55%)

Browsers of OS 9 Users:
total IE 5.1.x: 21.65%
Other: 78.35%

The OS X browser listing adds to over 116%, so either my thinking that IE 5.2.x is OS X only is incorrect, or there are some non-mac users or agents masking themselves as IE 5.2.x

[hartlandcat]

IE 5.2 is Mac OS X only. It's probably user agent spoofing.

Looking at those stats that you just posted... I can't believe that you've honestly not had any Netscape/Mozilla/Camino/etc. visitors on Mac OS X. I'm wondering if your stats program has accidently grouped them with Safari (it's usually the reverse that happens).

[jonknee]

Depends on the target audience. My Mac oriented site sees 99% OS X users.

[madmac]

Looking at those stats that you just posted... I can't believe that you've honestly not had any Netscape/Mozilla/Camino/etc. visitors on Mac OS X. I'm wondering if your stats program has accidently grouped them with Safari (it's usually the reverse that happens).

Well my stat program groups all netscape together by version, all mozilla together by version, all IE together by version, etc. The only way I was able to separate out the Mac so much was because IE 5.1.x is OS9 and IE 5.2.x is OS X and Safari is OS X. So the "Other" category I listed would be Netscape, Mozilla, Camino, etc. It makes up over 70% of the OS9 users, but unfortunately since my stat program does not separate browsers by OS and since something is throwing the OS X IE 5.2.x way off, I have no way of telling how many OS X users are netscape, mozilla, etc.

[hartlandcat]

IE 5.1 works on both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9.

[madmac]

IE 5.1 works on both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9.

IE 5.1.x will only run in OS 9. It does not run natively in OS X. On OS X, you have to have an OS 9 system installed and run it from classic mode.