browsers and browsing

[Prentiss Riddle]

> Date: Wed, 20 Dec 1995 15:47:42 -0800
> From: gshultz at post.cis.smu.edu (Gary Shultz)
> Subject: browsers and browsing
> 
> I have been asked to cite magazine articles or other sources on what
> percentage of Net surfers use Netscape, NCSA Mosaic, and other browsers.
> Also what percentage of surfers are using private companies (such as
> America On Line, CompuServe or one of the many local and regional
> companies) to access the Net.
> Can you point me to any sources???

Several sets of comparative browser statistics are available at:

   http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Browsers/Browser_Usage_Statistics/

These statistics are probably subject to some serious and not-so-serious
biases.  They will barely reflect actual end-user usage of servers which
are hidden behind proxy servers, both those on corporate firewalls and
those on commercial services like AOL (where one hit seen by an HTTP
server could reflect many thousands of visits by AOL users).  Less
strikingly, they may be biased by the choice of server sites at which
the staistics are collected (for example, the Random Yahoo Link, which
may arguably be visited more often by students with time on their hands
than, say, corporate or professional web users).

As for stats on how many users are subscribers at commercial online
services, that's an area of more contention.  For starters, see:

   http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Statistics_and_Demographics/
   http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Statistics_and_Demographics/

My personal opinion: anyone who buys too heavily into HTML features
tied to a particular browser (e.g. Netscape) will cut off a not
insignificant audience today and may end up stuck with "legacy HTML"
tomorrow.  If you want to be safe, stick with standard HTML 2.0
augmented by a carefully selected subset of extensions, and be sure to
test your pages using a variety of browsers.  When you publish
information in a less-than-universal format (Mozilla-specific HTML,
Java, PDF, etc.), consider publishing a redundant version in a more
widespread format as well.

[No doubt this last paragraph is well-trodden ground.  Please send your
flames to me, not the whole list.  Thanks.]

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- RiceInfo Administrator, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle
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