IE + Moz/Firefox use tied among BoingBoing readers

By Xeni Jardin at 10:28 am Friday, Dec 17

BoingBoing's sysadmin extraordinare Ken Snider says, "IE has only a 1.6% lead on Moz/Firefox for BB readers now on BoingBoing.net. Check out the stats: Link. Add up Moz and Firefox. And if you include the 1.6% from netscape, which also uses the Gecko rendering engine (so is the same as Moz/FF really), they're exactly tied."

November: IE 38%, FF 30.6%, Moz 5%, Netscape 1.8%
October: IE 38.2%, FF 28.6%, Moz 5.6%, Netscape, 1.9%
Going back 6 months (June): IE: 41%, FF 12.7%, Moz: 7.4%, Netscape: 2.2%

Reader Frank Hecker says,

Two points re your post regarding Mozilla/Firefox use by BoingBoing readers. First, "Netscape" in your statistics may include Netscape Navigator 4.x (or earlier). If so, then it's not strictly speaking correct to count all of the 1.6% Netscape share toward the total percentage share for Gecko-based browser; you should count only the Netscape 6 and 7 share.

Second, note that Camino is also a Gecko-based browser, so its 0.2% share should be added to the figures for Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape 6/7.

With these corrections, the Gecko-based browser share based on the current statistics (Link) is something between 35.9% and 37.5% depending on the relative breakdown of Netscape Navigator 4.x or earlier vs. Netscape 6 and 7. (31.1% Firefox + 4.6% Mozilla + 0.2% Camino + 0-1.6% Netscape.) Given that MSIE is at 36.9% I think it's fair to call this a virtual tie.

BB Sysadmin Ken sez: "This page shows the full breakdown, by browser version: Link."