Metropol

Our speedy but inept host claims that our browser usage is thus....

15.51% IE7
12.5% Googlebot (you'd think they'd ignore this, but no)
11.15% Firefox 2


and then lists minute percentages of IE6 with slight patches, IE7 on vista and other useless junk before abruptly stopping.


Suffice to say, although IE7 and Firefox are without a doubt the top browsers, I cannot gain any useful information about what people actualy use.

What I would like to know is simple.
Do any of you still use IE6 these days or is that stat old?
How many use Safari or Opera?
Does anyone use IE before version 6?
Does anyone use anything else?

I need this for a school project on upgrading Metropol in the very near future and wanting it to work for everyone.

I also need BBC News themes but I have met a nice chap called Craig Adams who can help me track down lots of theme tunes You should add him on W.L./M

You'll find quite a lot of IE6 still being used, Pete.

As an example, most of the "spine" applications in the NHS, such as "Choose & Book" won't yet work with IE7, so hardly any computers in the NHS have been allowed to be updated to IE7.

This may be of interest. It's the latest figures from SiteMeter, which I have no reason to doubt, for a well-known web site which I wouldn't dream of posting a link to in such a serious thread as this.



And here are some figures for another, fairly typical, web site, for the period 1st June to the present.

Robot with 807 sessions (40.1% of all sessions)
MSIE 7.x with 419 sessions (20.8% of all sessions)
MSIE 6.x with 415 sessions (20.6% of all sessions)
Unknown with 171 sessions (8.5% of all sessions)
Mozilla Compatible 4.x with 82 sessions (4.1% of all sessions)
Firefox 2.x with 51 sessions (2.5% of all sessions)
Mozilla Compatible 5.x with 31 sessions (1.5% of all sessions)
MSIE 5.x with 18 sessions (0.9% of all sessions)
Netscape Gecko with 9 sessions (0.4% of all sessions)
Firefox 1.x with 7 sessions (0.3% of all sessions)

An interesting graph. I'm certainly envisaging that we'll be getting a higher rate of IE7 visitors just because we tend to have a more geeky readership, however I'm mainly using this to judge which browsers need everything to work flawlessly in when the new software kicks in.

If I can avoid having to test with Opera for a few months whilst the teething troubles are ironed out then it'll certainly mean that this place will get new software much quicker.

IE6 is still used a lot - on quite a few of the computers I use I haven't bothered to upgrade IE6 to IE7, since the former remains supported by Microsoft and I primarily use Firefox.

But for the sake of getting it out quickly, I think if it works in Firefox and IE, you'll be supporting the vast majority of the visitors to this forum: after all, users browsing with Safari etc. will probably only have to make do with minor graphical imperfections.

I use Safari on one of my computers, an old Mac, and Firefox on this one.

Incidentally, does that Mac browser "Camino" (which I am secretly very jealous of since Windows users should get a nice custom port of firefox with swanky features and using Windows styles like pretty glass etc) use the same rendering engine as Firefox?

cdd wrote:Incidentally, does that Mac browser "Camino" (which I am secretly very jealous of since Windows users should get a nice custom port of firefox with swanky features and using Windows styles like pretty glass etc) use the same rendering engine as Firefox?

yes its identical

Looks like it's just me who uses Opera then...

Jake wrote:Looks like it's just me who uses Opera then...

Meh. It looks like just me who uses Netscape then...
Effectively Netscape is based upon Firefox. Though Firefox was a fork of Mozilla Suite Navigator, and the Mozilla Suite is related to the original Netscape Communicator ... so all in all I'm anything Mozilla.

Opera doesn't like me

marbles333 wrote:

Jake wrote:Looks like it's just me who uses Opera then...

Meh. It looks like just me who uses Netscape then...
Effectively Netscape is based upon Firefox. Though Firefox was a fork of Mozilla Suite Navigator, and the Mozilla Suite is related to the original Netscape Communicator ... so all in all I'm anything Mozilla.

Firefox was originally based on Netscape, only with all the broken bits taken out otherwise known as a full-blown bloody re-write. Firefox is effectively what would have been Netscape 5 after the disaster that was "Netscape Navigator 4.x", possibly the worst browser one could ever wish to work with.

More recent versions of Netscape Browser are indeed based on Firefox.

With regards to the graph, IE6 will remain around for a while because of people who aren't running XP SP2 or Vista, people who aren't running XP at all (Win2k is still supported but IE7 doesn't run on it) and people who forge the user agent headings. Some people have never taken their computer to Windows Update and insist on surfing the Internet with Internet Explorer 4, 5 or 5.5.

The main issue with Opera I've found is it insists on altering the size of the text compared to IE6, IE7 and Firefox. It always comes out smaller on Opera no matter what site I take it to. Its a nice browser, Opera, with a really quick load but I don't like its download manger, insists on taking an entire tab up for it.

Does IE4 even WORK anymore?

I remember trying to use IE3 in 2000 and it wouldn't have a bar of any modern site.