Browser Stats

[Mandi]

How should I expect Safari to show up in browser stats? I shared the highlights of the first couple weeks' worth of stats with a community site I just moved to FQ, including browser stats. It was interesting, because we're running 2:1 in favor of Mozilla over IE. The Safari people wondered how they ranked, and I can't make out which listing is there, even on the detailed Agents listings.

[sheila]

When I examine my raw logs, this is the full User Agent string for Safari (the version I'm using):

"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/523.12.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.12.2"

It looks like the only part of that reported in the http-analyze processed stats is this much:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en)

hth...

[sheila]

P.S. although not widely used, there is also a version of Safari for Windows...
I'd be surprised if it's much of a blip in your stats, though...

[Jeff]

The windows version of safari isn't out of beta test status yet, is it?

[Randall]

I'm looking at the Google Analytics report for my non-FQ site on Feb. 6, our busiest day in the past month. We had 20 Safari visitors -- 19 Macs and one iPhone. We actually had twice as many Mozilla Linux users that day. And Firefox/Mac was way ahead (though the data is skewed by the work I was doing on the site that day. Need to filter our office out of it).

edit: Looking at the stats going back to Jan. 1, Safari actually beats Firefox on the Mac (and Linux is well behind both of them). Guess that day was a peculiar one.

The real surprise is that someone out there is still using IE on the Mac.

Meanwhile, IE 6 and 7 are still neck and neck...

Randall

[Mandi]

I got a kick out of seeing Palm browser hits too . . . although I know they are all mine LOL!

[Buck]

Originally Posted by Randall

The real surprise is that someone out there is still using IE on the Mac. Randall

There are still a couple of times I have no choice but to use IE on my Macs, but it just kills me every time I do. Firefox is my browser of choice on my PC's or Mac's, but I also use Safari on the Mac on occasion.

[Randall]

Originally Posted by Buck

There are still a couple of times I have no choice but to use IE on my Macs, but it just kills me every time I do.

Huh. Does it work with some of the IE-only sites out these? I always figured those were tied down to Windows.

(Hmm ... I haven't tried any of them with my WINE-powered copy of IE 6 yet. Might be interesting to see what happens.)

Originally Posted by Mandi

I got a kick out of seeing Palm browser hits too . . . although I know they are all mine LOL!

I've noticed a few of those in our stats too. So you're not the only one.

If our traffic is any indication of the general population around here, XP outnumbers Vista by 10 to 1. And Vista has been out for over a year?

PC World reports that adoption of Windows Vista is going at a much slower rate compared to the adoption of Windows XP. Within the first year of its release, the percentage of XP users visiting PC World's website reached 36%; in the same time frame, however, Windows Vista adoption reached only 14%, with 71% of users still running XP.

Randall

[Mandi]

Does this mean Safari is a Mozilla fork, since it reports under that category? Or am I mixing metaphors again?

[Randall]

Originally Posted by Mandi

Does this mean Safari is a Mozilla fork, since it reports under that category? Or am I mixing metaphors again?

No, Safari is a distinct entity, but its user agent string reads like a web browser genealogy chart.

Almost every browser calls itself "Mozilla" (including IE), a practice that dates back to the early days when Netscape was the 800-pound gorilla of the internet. But Safari is actually a fork of KHTML, the Konqueror browser engine. Konqueror carried the Mozilla-kinship thing into the modern era by identifying itself as Mozilla/5.0, which specifically refers to the Mozilla Project. This distingiushes it from IE, which even today is frozen in time as "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible ..."

Then they double-underlined the similarity to Mozilla with the "like Gecko" reference, as Gecko is the Mozilla layout engine. I'm not sure if that was started by the KHTML people or Apple, since it seems to have been in Safari from the beginning.

The operative word in Safari's case is "AppleWebKit." That is what makes it unique, and any other application that uses WebKit will behave like Safari.

Randall