A Year of Browsing Stats

I always like looking at stats to see where we've been and where we are going and the beginning of a new year is a great time to do that. Since I work in web development, I've pulled a bunch of stats for the last year from Market Share and The Counter. These represent numbers seen at a wide variety of web sites across the world in 2007.

Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2007 was all about the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 for most PC users. The rate rose quickly at first and then leveled off and then as Microsoft added it to the critical upgrade list the rate of growth has increased again. 2008 should see IE6 virtually disappear as a mainstream browser.

At the same time both Firefox and Safari continued their slow climb in market share with 2.6% and 1.4% increases respectively. These gains came at the cost of Microsoft, which lost 3.6% for all versions of Internet Explorer during the year.

For web development one of the most exciting trends is the dramatic rise of web standards compliant browsers. This very loosely defined term means the browsers follow a generally accepted HTML and CSS standards that allow developers to develop sites in a standard way without a lot of hacks and browser specific CSS. I include Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category. While IE7's support is not perfect it is dramatically better than IE6 and the adoption of IE7 has accounted for most of the growth in the standard compliant browsers category.

Browser	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
Internet Explorer (all versions)	79.6%	76.0%	-3.6%
Internet Explorer 7.0	18.3%	40.6%	+22.3%
Internet Explorer 6.0	60.7%	35.2%	-25.5%
Internet Explorer 5.0 & 5.5	0.8%	0.2%	-0.6%
Firefox (all versions)	14.2%	16.8%	+2.6%
Safari (all versions)	4.2%	5.6%	+1.4%
Netscape (all versions)	0.9%	0.7%	-0.2%
Opera (all versions)	0.9%	0.6%	-0.3%
Standards Compliant Browsers	38.4%	64.3%	+25.9%

Operating Systems
Operating Systems are always a mater of intense, and often near religious, debate and the numbers are interesting to see. Old versions of Windows continue their slow decline into obscurity. And despite all of the talk of Vista users "downgrading" to XP, we've see Windows Vista grow to over 10% of the web audience since its release in January. That growth came at the expense of Windows XP, however, and Windows as a whole dropped 2.1% over the the year as more people bought Macintoshes.

Apple's OS X had a good year, increasing their market share 1.6% over the year and they are now up to 7.3%. What is particularly interesting is that most of that growth happened in the late in the year. Whether this trend continues into early 2008 or tappers off until the next Christmas buying season will be interesting to see.

Linux still struggles to make much impact on the desktop and only had a 0.2% increase to 0.6% for the year.

While the numbers are still very low at 0.1% its interesting to see the iPhone has grown from nothing to the 4th most popular operating system since the end of June, surpassing all other smart cell operating systems for web browsing.

Operating System	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
Windows (all versions)	93.8%	91.7%	-2.1%
Windows Vista	0.2%	10.5%	+10.3%
Windows XP	85.3%	76.9%	-8.4%
Windows 2000	5.0%	2.7%	-2.3%
Windows NT	0.7%	0.6%	-0.1%
Windows 95/98/ME	2.7%	1.1%	-1.6%
Mac OS X (all versions)	5.7%	7.3%	+1.6%
Linux (all versions)	0.4%	0.6%	+0.2%
iPhone	-	0.1%	+0.1%

Screen Resolution
It's virtually impossible to buy a new computer today that doesn't have a resolution of at least 1024x768 and that is born out in the numbers for the year. Now almost 91% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2008.

Resolution	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
800x600 or better	99.8%	99.9%	+0.1%
1024x768 or better	85.6%	90.8%	+5.2%