Douglas Bowman at StopDesign recently shared how his site visitors break down in terms of browser use. As a hero of the web standards movement (sort of like our Hercules or Michael Jordan,) Douglas admits that his stats are skewed toward tech-savvy folks. I decided it would be interesting to look into stats from a more general audience. I develop a lot of real estate websites at work, so that seemed like a natural place to look. I surveyed several of our more heavily-trafficked sites and I’ve made the following observations (which I have also posted at Douglas’ site:)

• Internet Explorer users account for between 65% and 85% of all visits
• Firefox and Safari account for almost all the rest of the traffic, and Firefox tends to have 2-3 times the share of Safari.
• 70% of IE users are browsing these sites with IE7. There was very little variation here, even though the percentage of IE users in general varied by 20% across sites.

(Observations are based on the last month of data, across a sampling of sites based around the United States. Visitors were primarily from the US.)

It’s unfortunate to see how dominant Internet Explorer is sector, but progress is evident. It’s a relief to see that IE7–a fairly capable browser in its own right–has seen increased adoption recently.