>> 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 ?
>
>
>IMHO, these types of figures are garbage. There are lots of studies that
>are based on determining the number of hits at specific sites.
>Consistently, these studies indicate that most of the accesses to those
>sites are from Netscape.
>
>But, there is a fundamental flaw here -- the assumption that accesses to
>specific sites by Netscape browsers imply something about the percentages of
>overall users using Netscape. That assumption does not take into account
>the patterns of browsing behavior actually used on the Web.
Maybe you're right. But what difference does it make if a lot of these
"non-techies" use another browser than Netscape if they can't navigate
it? In that case, they will never see your site anyway. From what I've
read and heard, most webmasters (including me) register a 70-75% usage of
Netscape, based on agent log statistics. So, that's the reality for me
and a lot of others. If we can see in our statistics that some other
browser is gaining popularity, we will update our reality.
>Let's take the case of Yahoo. I believe I have seen a study that reports
>the number of accesses to Yahoo to be strongly biased in favor of
>Netscape, with a substantial number from lynx. But, up until recently,
>yahoo (particularly in its previous URL of akebono.stanford.edu) was known
>mostly to a techie and academic population. The MicroSoft Network
>provides a very prominent link to Yahoo. My guess is that as soon as MSN
>is out, a large percentage of Yahoo users will -- surprise, surprise -- be
>using the Microsoft browser!
So Yahoo is a bad example. Why bring it up?