Watching Browser Share »
Asa talks about the browser share he's seeing in the top 100 blogs. Interesting numbers, with Firefox assuming 20% or so of traffic and Gecko-based browsers picking up another 5%. I thought those numbers sounded low for my blog, so off I went to find the answer. Turns out I was wrong.
For December, the Firefox traffic rang in at 18.7%, with other Gecko-based browsers showing at a clip of right at 5%. These numbers are only off slightly from last month, but in reality, Firefox has gone down slighty in that time (from 19.2%), while the Gecko numbers stayed fairly steady.
The really interesting thing was that those statistics are for my blog - not for the root domain itself. The root domain (cxliv.org) is really only used for downloads and images and things like that. Any blog-specific data, such as pages or stylesheets or feeds, comes from the subdomain (jayseae.cxliv.org).
What I found when I checked those numbers was startling. There, Firefox traffic amounts to 57.3% of the hits, while other Gecko browsers accounted for about 3%. Part of the reason for this is the RDF document used for auto-updating the Bloglines Toolkit. Naturally this shouldn't be served to any other browsers in any regular situations.
But it also accounts for downloads - which includes Movable Type plugins. I find that fascinating. Does it mean that those using Firefox are more likely to download stuff and install it? While I personally find Firefox much more secure than other browsers, theoretically that could spell trouble if someone decided to take advantage of that sort of statistic, because it (apparently) indicates that those users are more likely to trust what they find on the web - they are certainly more likely to download it than their counterparts with IE!
