Browser usage?

What's the market penetration of Internet Explorer?

[bossmanty]

What's the market penetratin of Internet Explorer?

90% or more?

[rewboss]

It depends who you ask -- statistics vary widely depending on who's doing the counting and how they do it, so it's hard to be accurate. Added to that, Opera can be made to identify itself as MSIE to get past sloppy browser-detection scripts, although that will be a very tiny bias.

All that can safely be said is that MSIE has the lion's share of the market.

[victor]

It's also worth asking which market? if you operate in specific field.

Results reported on WebmasterWorld suggest that these market segments have very different browser usage profiles -- if they are your market, you need to know what they are using:

-- Visually disabled
-- Electrical engineers
-- US lawyers
-- US schools
-- Yahoo editors

And, of course, Imode and WAP phone users, and search-engine spiders.

[brotherhood of LAN]

According to the G Zeiteist, 90% of OS's used to accessed Google are Windows based. To confirm penetration, do all versions of windows contain a copy of IE??

bossmanty, may I also ask why you would like to know how many people own a copy :)

[bossmanty]

My website doesn't work as well in Netscape 4.7, so that's why I was wondering about the penetration.

[pageoneresults]

Bro was pretty dead on with the 90% number...

Internet Explorer 6.x 9% 23% 32%
Internet Explorer 5.x 79% 81% 71% 64% 55%
Internet Explorer 4.x 8% 7% 5% 4% 3%

Netscape 4.x 7% 5% 5% 4% 4%

Above information from the W3Schools. Numbers as of April 2002.

[luma]

Depends on your audience. Also, European users tend to use MSIE less. Mai figures from a big German (more technically oriented) site:

MSIE: 65.7 %, Netscape 21.4 %, Opera 8.4 %

"Die Heise-Server besuchten im Mai 65,7 Prozent der Besucher mit einem Microsoft-Browser. Netscape kam auf weniger als ein Drittel (21,4 Prozent); mit dem Shareware-Browser Opera surften nur 8,2 Prozent."
[heise.de...]

On the other hand, at least they might get their numbers right. I seriously doubt other statistics.

There's so much that can skew statistics, e.g., some browser not opening pop-ups :) some sites/pages unaccessible :( JavaScript browser detection w/ JavaScript off, ... So they count all the "brainless" MSIE surfers all right but miss out on the professional surfers.

Anyway, doesn't really matter what browser your audience uses, since your website should be "best viewed with any browser [anybrowser.org]". Right?

[rewboss]

European users tend to use MSIE less.

I don't think that's true. The figures you quote are from a more technically-oriented site, which might explain the relatively high percentage of Netscape users -- technically-minded people are aware of MSIE security issues.