I track the statistics of my blog using NedStatBasic. You might have noticed the small graph icon below the blog roll on my right-hand side menu.

I was looking at the user statistics of which browser and operating system people are using to access the blog and here are the stats:

I remember a period of life when the above statistic was very, very useful. I was working in a web development firm and we had tough times convincing clients to go for an Internet Explorer-only website having fancy DHTML UIs, just because the customer knew that people would visit it using Netscape.

Of course, it made sense then because Netscape had quite a large market share which was far from negligible. I remember Internet Explorer 5.0 setting the trend for customers to begin feeling Netscape was now negligible and agreeing to an IE-only website with a small browser detect script to redirect any particular user who might be visiting using the god-forsaken browsers.

Yes, I hated Netscape with a vengenance - because it simply was too difficult to write fancy UI script in it. All it supported was one LAYER tag (I'm talking about Netscape 4.x) and a few, very few scripting support for it. I have still worked wonders with the limited support, but believe me scripting in IE was heaven.

Today, Netscape has a DOM that is comparable with the IE DOM. Mozilla also has interesting concepts like XUL - which people say the evil-empire has hijacked into XAML. 

I am convinced that the negligible 3.3% contribution of Mozilla in the above statistics are due to the following reasons:

• When I worked at my previous organization, IE ran through a proxy which we could not change the settings of - with the help of a Windows network policy. We did manage to crack the registry key required to show the hidden connection tab, but then each time the system restarted it was a pain to go through the entire process again. So I used Netscape 7.0 with its independent proxy setting (we had a lot of secret proxies in the massive network). This is one scenario.
• The second reason (which is the reason of the particular person who has contributed the 3.3%) is people visiting the blog through Linux desktops - which obviously can't have IE running on them. So they use Mozilla.

To all the people who fall in the first case, my sympathies. To all those who fall in the second case, GET A LIFE! :)

The next interesting statistic is the Operating Systems:

It amuses me to see a lot of people using Windows 2000. Windows 2000 and Windows XP put together covers more than 90% of the entire users. There are people still using Windows NT, but with Microsoft stopping support from December 2004, they should be migrating to Win2K soon.

The Windows 2003 contribution seems to be from Rosh and myself - we have one Win2K3 system we use for research purposes in the office.

The Linux users - are the same ones who did the Mozilla contribution. To name them, they are Sid and probably Rajendran (who has just gone on a complete ethical drive and knocked off every commercial/pirated software from his home computer).  They're both friends in their own way too :)

Once again, get a life, the two of you!

Among other statistics, I realize that most people browse the website with 1024x768 resolution or higher - which is quite a relief because I know the site doesn't look that good in 800x600.

Any additional feedback about the design/technical difficulties can be comments to this entry.