Visits By Browser
Comments: 8
Inspired by John Gruber’s discovery that Safari had become the most popular browser visiting DaringFireball.net, I was interested to see how it was faring here. With his help I was able to winnow out the following browser stats for the first two weeks of the year.
| Browser | OS | Visitors | |
| Safari (48) | Mac | 269 |
|
| Safari (51) | Mac | 157 |
|
| IE6 | Windows | 3651 |
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| IE5 | Mac | 1186 |
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| Windows | 1736 |
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| Chimera | Mac | 638 |
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| Mozilla | Mac | 99 |
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| Windows | 315 |
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| Linux | 70 |
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| Netscape 7 | Mac | 44 |
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| Windows | 95 |
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| Linux | 2 |
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| Netscape 6 | Mac | 4 |
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| Windows | 28 |
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| Linux | 2 |
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| Netscape 4 | Mac | 38 |
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| Windows | 486 |
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| Linux | 8 |
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| Phoenix | Windows | 95 |
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| Linux | 16 |
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| OmniWeb | Mac | 39 |
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| iCab | Mac | 15 |
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| Opera | Mac | 2 |
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| Windows | 49 |
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| Linux | 8 |
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| NetNewsWire | Mac | 791 |
|
| Radio UserLand | all | 95 |
|
| AmphetaDesk | all | 43 |
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| Aggie | all | 29 |
|
Safari makes a respectable appearance, but nowhere near the results that DaringFireball.net is seeing (understandable given the nature of the sites). What surprised me is how many unsuspecting people tried to visit in Netscape 4. Sorry, folks! Antipixel is not just unaccommodating, it’s downright hostile to NN4 so my apologies but there’s nothing I’m going to do about.
The site was BoingBoing‘ed, dangerousmeta‘ed, and Kottke‘d in the first week of the year (the iPod handbag story) which certainly helped traffic. A nod from any of these sites usually does. ;-)
Less surprising is NetNewsWire’s dominance in the RSS-reader category.
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Posted to MetaStuff • 2003.01.17 (Fri) • 16:54
Comments
Posted by victor 2003.01.17, 19:35
Ummm… I don’t see any appearance of the Aggie RSS-reader, which I certainly use to fetch both the posts and the comments feeds. Of course, Aggie only fetches when instructed to do so (instead of periodically) to save bandwidth, but I thought it would appear nonetheless.
Jeremy, do you have data about this aggregator?
Posted by ed 2003.01.17, 19:59
No Feedreader (pc o/s app) either (which is what i’m using on your rss feed)
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2003.01.17, 23:39
I used to visit via Omniweb, but now it’s Safari all the way. It’s the first application I’ve used in a long time where I immediately took to it. I was initially impressed by the look and the speed. But it’s the bookmark/history management that is amazing me in the long run.
When I switched to OS X, it took me a long time to change my work habits. I liked some thing in the interface better, but missed other things. I don’t know if I’ve ever learned to love it, but I’ve learned to live with it. And when I use OS 9 (FrameMaker), it seems clunky.
Not so with Safari. It was love at first site and the honeymoon’s not over yet.
Posted by Scott 2003.01.18, 12:40
I was the same as the last commenter, I loved Safari and acutally switched all my bookmarks over and was ready to make it my preferred browser.
Now the honeymoon is really over, I missed Chimera. I missed the tabs mostly. And the bookmarks in Safari are really a glorfied version of what Chimera has. I also like the white look and the brushed metal look of Safari detracts way too much from what your reading.
Safari is still way too buggy for me (yes I know it’s still beta) but I prefer something a little more developed.
For me, the jury is still out.
Posted by jh 2003.01.18, 14:42
Victor — Sorry! The table wasn’t supposed to be an exhaustive list of user agents, but I got carried away and threw Netscape 4 in there (for shock value) and then it began to look exhaustive and, well … anyway.
29 vists via Aggie, to answer your question. I even updated the table. ;-)
Ed — Any idea of the user agent string I should be looking for to identify Feedreader? I’m not sure what it is (nothing obvious jumps out at me). Is it using curl to grab the feeds (or were the two vists from curl just someone whacking the site)?
M, Scott — I had lunch yesterday with the Project Manager for OS X of Apple Japan. We talked about Safari a lot, although she’s naturally tight-lipped about any future development. I did make sure she understood what a big deal tabs are to many people (myself included).
As for brushed metal, yuck! The first thing I did was to kill it. If you’ve got the Dev Tools installed you can use Interface Builder to do this, but an easier way (that can remove the horror from many apps that use it) is to go grab the wonderful Metallifizer from Unsanity.com.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2003.01.19, 00:12
No wonder it’s hard “to please all the people all the time”. Unlike you, I love the brushed metal look. Generally, Aqua is just too bright, light and cutesy for me. I did read (maybe it was you who posted it) that it violates Apple’s own UI standards. I would hate it if they “fixed” it though. Maybe you’ll post a screenshot showing us the changes you made with Interface Builder.
Posted by jh 2003.01.19, 00:43
Oh, don’t get me started on Aqua! I’m using the Graphite appearance (System Prefs: General) which is a bit easier on the eyes.
Michael Tsai, may the gods bless him, was first to post how to turn off brushed metal in Safari (as far as I know). That’s all I used Interface Builder for — although you could easily start going crazy with it by the look of things. Think of it as the ResEdit of OS X, sort of.
Michael posted a shot of aquafied Safari on the page I linked to above. Here’s another one from me (11K GIF).
Posted by Scott 2003.01.20, 07:58
Thanks for the tips Jeremey, looks a bit more pleasing.
Aqua looks a whole lot more clean to me. The brushed metal is ok, but like I said before, it totally detracts from what your reading. Rather than sitting in the background like a good browser should, it’s in your face with the brushed metal appearance (if you get what I mean).
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