new earth online

If you're a long time reader of this blog you'll know that every now and then I like to report on the changes in browser usage for visitors to this site. When I commented on these statistics back in August 2008 it was obvious that Firefox was the clear winner with almost 59% of the hits, and IE was in second place with a meagre 32% of the hits. This time I'm looking at statistics for the year of 2009 (so far) and how this has changed.

During the course of 2009 I have reduced the number of posts and have increased the number of reviews whilst still trying to get a development article once every month. On top of this there have been new releases of all the major browsers. In theory this should mean that the majority of visitors will still be development orientated and so should mean Firefox will be the clear winner again. So let us now see how each browser fared.

So as you can see it's not that different to what we had previously though Firefox and IE have both lost some ground to Safari and Opera, and of course the addition of Google's Chrome browser has also had some effect by taking further visitors away from the top two. What this seems to suggest is that alternative browsers are becoming increasingly popular and not everyone wants to use the top two just because they are well known. Great releases of Webkit based browsers and Opera have shown that they can do better and with their improved feature sets and performance they are now in with a chance of catching up with Internet Explorer. I am also very impressed with Google Chrome having overtaken Opera already despite it not being available for the full year.

Now, I always like to look specifically at the usage statistics for Internet Explorer to see how many people are upgrading their browser to a newer version in hope that the number of IE6 users visiting my blog will eventually hit zero as the rest upgrade.

The number of visitors using Internet Explorer prior to version 6 to visit New Earth Online are now so extremely low that rounding to the nearest whole percentage is now zero (most prior to 6.0 are around 0.01%). It's a shame that the numbers of IE8 and IE6 are so close, but at least 77% of Internet Explorers are using a half decent version of the browser.

It is amazing to see that only 1% of visitors to New Earth Online are restricted to 800x600 and that most are now at a screen resolution which is wider than 1024 pixels.