Re: Let's talk strategy (was: Re: Web Reliability)
James Gosling (jag@scndprsn.eng.sun.com)
Mon, 31 Jul 1995 09:19:08 +0800
> > (*) Anneli was absolutely fuming at NetScape, with comments on "making
> > fortunes helping millions of clueless people do the wrong thing." A
> > magazine she likes had recently bragged about their web pages. Turns
> > out they aren't navigable in anything but NetScape because of
> > NetScapes broken attribute parsing. The response from the magazine was
> > that 25% (their estimate) of their market wasn't worth spending a few
> > minutes fixing the problem, or even doing it right next time.
>
> Aside:
> I have my doubts about this statistic ("75% of all browsers are Netscape").
> Where did this figure come from ? Did it come from Netscape, I wonder ?
There's more than a little strangeness in the calculation of some of
these figures. For example, the way I've seen some folks do it they make
the assumption that one IP address == one user, which fails on proxy
caches and fails *bigtime* on aggregators like AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy
which each appear as as one IP address. I find it hard to believe that
all AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy users, along with the folks who get
Spyglass's enhanced Mosaic with Win95 add up to less than 25% of the
users on the web, let alone counting all the other users of other
browsers.