Friday, February 27, 2015

What My Users Are Using

Since I got a request to show some of Amphibian.com's user agent stats after Monday's post, I decided to put some information together and share it today. There are a few surprises.

These numbers are based on the agent strings for the last week. I had a pretty good week for traffic, due no doubt to my guest-authorship of Tavern Wenches on Monday.

First, let's look at the coarse-grain browser usage.
  • Firefox: 24.61%
  • Chrome: 29.78%
  • Internet Explorer: 15.38%
  • Safari: 1.97%
  • Other: 28.25%
What is "Other"?  Mostly just spiders and bots. There sure are a lot of them though. But over half of the traffic is people using Firefox or Chrome, which is great to see.

Now to break it down some more. What versions of the browsers are being used? I'll start with Firefox.
  • version 35: 36.64%
  • version 3: 30.31%
  • version 6: 15.99%
  • version 31: 7.66%
  • version 28: 2.41%
  • version 26: 1.08%
All other versions were less than 1% each of all Firefox traffic. It's no surprise that 35 is the most common, since up until 3 days ago it was the current version. What's really shocking is that version 3 is the next most common! It dates back to June of 2008. But it was also before the automatic upgrade process, which is why so many people are stuck on it. Leaks memory like mad though. Version 6 was also popular and came out before the forced updates, back in August of 2011. It didn't make the cutoff since it was less than one percent, but there was one comic accessed with Firefox 2. Whoever you are, please upgrade. The good news: Firefox has always had pretty good SVG support, so almost all of these people are seeing the frog comics more-or-less correctly. Even CSS3 Transforms, which I use relatively often, were supported the whole way back to 3.5.

Chrome is next.
  • version 40: 78.65%
  • version 39: 7.30%
  • version 38: 7.16%
  • version 36: 1.90%
  • version 35: 1.12%
  • version 30: 1.90%
All other Chrome versions were used less than 1% each. Thanks to Chrome's excellent automated update process, the vast majority of users are on the current version, released on 21 January 2015. There were 2 comics accessed from Chrome 41, which is currently in the beta channel. You are awesome, whoever you are. The oldest version of Chrome used was 10, released in March of 2011. Even that person got to see the frog comics almost perfectly. Chrome is my browser of choice and has always supported SVG graphics and CSS3 transforms.

Now how about those IE users?
  • version 6: 11.74% (fail!)
  • version 7: 1.66% (fail!)
  • version 8: 69.48% (fail!)
  • version 9: 1.66%
  • version 10: 9.53%
  • version 11: 5.94%
Booooo! That's right, IE 8 is still the most common IE used to visit Amphibian.com. Those folks are leaving disappointed. As are all those people using 7 and 6. Come on, people! IE 6?!?! Really? That browser's older than dirt! That browser nearly killed the web! Ugh. Anyway, the 17% of IE users who come with 9, 10, or 11 will be fine. The site looks presentable in 9 and should be perfect in 10 and 11. Internet Explorer's SVG support started in 9, but not all of the things I do with CSS3 are supported until 10. It degrades rather well though.

Safari doesn't show up enough to be significant, but almost everyone using it is on version 8.

The one other thing I like to look at is operating system. Since I went to the trouble of optimizing Amphibian.com for mobile devices, I'd like to see more mobile browsing of it. So far, though, I'm not doing so well in that area.
  • Windows: 58.98%
  • Mac: 4.48%
  • iOS: 3.25%
  • Android: 6.21%
  • Linux: 3.41%
  • Other: 23.67%
Again, "Other" shows up in a large number. It's the spiders and bots. Which is fine, I guess. One of the other design concerns with my site is how the frog's words are just P tags and can therefore be indexed by the search engines. But back to the real people - there are relatively few viewing the comics on mobile devices. Windows is by far the most popular. I am pleasantly surprised to see over 3% on Linux though.

Enough of the statistics now, back to the comics!

Amphibian.com comic for 27 February 2015

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