Start of a new month, which means that the browser stats are out for September. Given that September is the first month of the new academic year, I thought it would be interesting to compare the browser stats for the Library’s web site against the worldwide numbers to see what the differences are.
Here are the results:
| September 2012 | ||
| Browser | Worldwide Market Share [source] | Percentage of visits at mcgill.ca/library |
| Internet Explorer | 54% | 44% |
| Firefox | 20% | 22% |
| Chrome | 19% | 16% |
| Safari | 5% | 16% |
| Opera | 2% | 0.2% |
The biggest difference is (remains, since this isn’t new) the much higher percentage of visitors to the Library’s site using Safari, equal to Chrome.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a good amount of the visits registered to the Library’s web site (I would conservatively put the number at 50%) come from students firing up a browser from a Library workstation, where the Library’s site is the default home page. These workstations are almost entirely Windows machines with IE and FF icons on the desktop. If we were able to remove this traffic from the above numbers, I am certain we would see that Safari has an even higher percentage than the basic report shows.
Luckily, we do already test on Safari! 🙂
How does this compare with the browser stats for your library?
Not to be undeterred by the lack of outside commenters here on our blogging system (working on it!) Stephen Francoeur started a friendfeed asking folks to chime in with their stat breakdown:
https://friendfeed.com/lsw/99a0c6f3/is-use-of-safari-browser-also-going-up-at-your