Browser stats

So, vmunix.com is still visited by Windows users 76% of the time, but there’s no doubt the IE market share is rapidly erroding:

That’s October’s stats. Now, I’ve obviously got a decidely geek audience since most of the traffic is to the vi reference and my FreeBSD and blog pages, but it’s an interesting set of stats nonetheless. Just a year ago 85% of my traffic was coming from Windows computers, and just over 80% was coming from Internet Explorer - which of course means that 95% of the Windows users were using IE. Just a year later and Windows has lost 10%, and IE has lost 30%!

My bet is that Microsoft will respond by releasing an IE 7 ahead of Longhorn. They’re not stupid, and they will recognize that they need to do something to keep their user base on IE. I’m not convinced the strategy will work, this time, however, since it’s clear Microsoft does not want the browser to become as rich as the Win32 API. Which, of course, means there’s still plenty of opportunity for Mozilla to continue to improve the capability of the browser as a platform, and I have to believe that the Mozilla code will continue to be safer than the notoriously insecure IE.