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I just realized something about browser stats and market shares...
Just like the US unemployment figures, and periodic government data,The stats/market shares numbers for browsers are bogus.
There's a conspiracy behind the market researchers...
Probably IE/Firefox paid them all to cook the numbers to
make other browsers look bad and unattractive to prospective
users...
The browser stats and figures do have some truth. Nearly every pc has IE as a built in browser so yes IE is shown to be highest. With the new browser option those stats and figures should soon change significantly
The Museatlantis Corporation.
Although some stats are a bit unrealistic, in general they are not that far from the truth. Here are the stats of my own site for the month of March, as from the server stats, analysed by me using AWStats:
IE 50.3 %
Firefox 33.8 %
Safari 5.8 %
Chrome 5 %
Opera 2.7 %
Smallish site with a mixed bunch of visitors, but not that different from the official browser usage figures.
Dave
IE 50.3 %
Firefox 33.8 %
Safari 5.8 %
Chrome 5 %
Opera 2.7 %
Smallish site with a mixed bunch of visitors, but not that different from the official browser usage figures.
Dave
Web statistics are not an exact science. The various organizations that measure these things rarely come up with identical numbers.
One of the problems for Opera is that if the browser is "masking" as IE or Firefox, obviously that activity goes in to the IE or Firefox statistics. Some of those cases are not known to the typical user, since Opera has to constantly keep updating its ua.ini file to mask as some other browser by default for stupid sites that refuse to load if the user is running Opera. (My personal bank - one of the largest in the world - is one of those sites.)
Then you have perhaps some other cases where people are using a proxy for security/privacy reasons, or because their company requires it - and this may be masking the user-agent string as well.
Opera's market share may be low, but it's growing by leaps and bounds. Opera Mobile 10 and Mini have just been accepted by Qualcomm to embed in all phones (and there are a LOT of them) that use Qualcomm's "BREW" operating environment. Vodafone just made an agreement w/ Opera to deploy Opera Mini all over the world in less-developed countries where most people don't have expensive smartphones and 3G service. Opera's efforts to get Microsoft to give equal play to other web browsers has paid off in the recent release of the "browser selection menu" in Windows 7 in Europe, resulting in record-high download traffic for Opera/Windows. And lastly, Opera Mini was just accepted yesterday by Apple in its app store, for use on the iPhone as an alternative to Safari.
I would say that Opera Software A/S is doing better now than ever before in their history.
One of the problems for Opera is that if the browser is "masking" as IE or Firefox, obviously that activity goes in to the IE or Firefox statistics. Some of those cases are not known to the typical user, since Opera has to constantly keep updating its ua.ini file to mask as some other browser by default for stupid sites that refuse to load if the user is running Opera. (My personal bank - one of the largest in the world - is one of those sites.)
Then you have perhaps some other cases where people are using a proxy for security/privacy reasons, or because their company requires it - and this may be masking the user-agent string as well.
Opera's market share may be low, but it's growing by leaps and bounds. Opera Mobile 10 and Mini have just been accepted by Qualcomm to embed in all phones (and there are a LOT of them) that use Qualcomm's "BREW" operating environment. Vodafone just made an agreement w/ Opera to deploy Opera Mini all over the world in less-developed countries where most people don't have expensive smartphones and 3G service. Opera's efforts to get Microsoft to give equal play to other web browsers has paid off in the recent release of the "browser selection menu" in Windows 7 in Europe, resulting in record-high download traffic for Opera/Windows. And lastly, Opera Mini was just accepted yesterday by Apple in its app store, for use on the iPhone as an alternative to Safari.
I would say that Opera Software A/S is doing better now than ever before in their history.