I came across a tweet this morning from a librarian who noted that 40% of their users are on Google Chrome. That number struck me as quite high, so I thought I would take a quick look at the usage statistics for the Library’s web site and see where we were at.

I also thought I’d compare it to last years numbers to get a sense of how things had shifted, if at all.

While we are no where near a 40% share for Chrome, Chrome has made the largest gain in our user base, to the point where it is now the second-most-used browser, usurping the long-held order of IE-Firefox-Chrome-Safari!

Again, this isn’t altogether surprising, although I would have expected Firefox to have gained a part of the share lost to IE. Still, it is interesting to note, if only to firmly establish Chrome as browser ascendant.

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:

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?