What is the best source for usage share among web browsers?

Question

It would also be nice to see data that breaks down IE usage by version (5,6,7, etc.).

Thanks!

Answer 1

it varies by the site and the site's audience, in my opinion. i run a bunch of different websites, and depending on the audience, my stats will show greatly differing values. for instance, my ecommerce site is nearly 90% IE (probably 65% IE7, 30% IE6, 5% IEx), 8% all versions of FF, and 2% other, but on my few blogs, the FF numbers are a lot greater.

sure you can get "overall internet stats", but would they really help you? you should check for stats on whatever your audience will be.

this, of course, is assuming you're trying to build a site. if not, err, ignore this.

Answer 2

If you trust Wikipedia, it has a decent breakout of usage of all browsers here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

The article gets most of it's information from here:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0&qpmr=15&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qpcal=1&qptimeframe=Q&qpsp=39

Answer 3

Net Applications publish global web stats broken down by browser version here

W3Counter also publishes some stats (although, their filtering options are not as good)

If you have an existing site, it is much more useful to make your decisions off of stats from it. If you don't have access to a good "server-side" engine, then Google Analytics is good, and there are lots of other client side (JS-based) analytics services. Depending on the target audience you'll get hugely different results.