Browser and Aggregator Usage Statistics
15 December, 2004So, a quick twelve-monthly roundup for usage of philwilson.org is in order I think.
For these stats I only looked at the fifty most frequent visitng user-agents
Overall, hits were pretty 50-50 between browsers and aggregators. I don’t have last years’ logs, but if I did I bet I’d have seen a massive surge in the number of aggregators being used.
Browsers
| Browser | % |
|---|---|
| [Mozilla-based](http://www.mozilla.org) | 58.13 |
| [Internet Explorer](http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx) | 36.57 |
| [Safari](http://www.apple.com/safari/) | 2.58 |
| [Opera](http://www.opera.com) | 1.59 |
| [Netscape 4.x](http://sillydog.org/narchive/#nc45) | 1.13 |
A pretty massive win for Mozilla-based browser there, I’d say.
Aggregators
| Aggregator | % |
|---|---|
| [SharpReader](http://www.sharpreader.net/) | 29.6 |
| [Bloglines](http://www.bloglines.com) | 28.3 |
| [FeedThing](http://feedthing.sourceforge.net) | 9.2 |
| [FeedDemon](http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp) | 6.7 |
| [FeedOnFeeds](http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/) | 6.5 |
| [Thunderbird](http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/) | 4.9 |
| [NewsGatorOnline](http://www.newsgator.com/) | 4.6 |
| [PubSub.com RSS Reader](http://www.pubsub.com/) | 3.3 |
| [NetNewsWire](http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/) | 2.9 |
| [RssReader](http://www.rssreader.com/) | 2.8 |
| [Pluck](http://www.pluck.com/product/rssreader.aspx) | 1.3 |
I’m not entirely sure what to read into the dominance of SharpReader and Bloglines in this list. From looking at my logs, SharpReader is clearly in use by a much larger number of IPs than any of the other aggregators (although I know the issue isn’t quite that simple due to people whose IP changes when they connect etc.), but does Bloglines’ high showing just mean that it’s hitting my feed too hard? Or does it reflect growing usage? Or what?
The list of lower-scoring aggregators is actually much more interesting, revealing diverse, closely-fought aggregator usage (hardly any macs, and no SauceReader). It’ll be interesting to see what happens to this market in the next twelve months and whether some die off to be replaced by others or we just end up with two or three dominant aggregators which do everything.
Finally, in news just in from the Syndication Wars, my Atom feed (available since May sometime) finally got more subscribers than my RSS feed at the beginning of December with a lot of people subscribing after reading my post about making a bigger back button in Firefox.