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Subject:RE: Actual Site Stats - Firefox 2 versus IE 7 From:Kevin McLauchlan <kmclauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Tue, 3 Apr 2007 13:17:45 -0400
>
> Just stating the facts for those who may not run stats on
> their sites - or for those who wonder what years of stats show.
If I had visited your site any time up to two years ago, I would have been
using Opera or another browser, but it would have presented as IE. So your
stats would have said I was yet another IE user.
This was a (selectable) band-aid solution provided by the browser makers, so
that their users could get into sites run by conformadroids that actually
put up "This site REQUIRES Internet Explorer" and bounced you out if you
didn't arrive displaying a good little conformist IE nametag.
The good part of the band-aid is that it got us past the stupid and
unnecessary barriers on sites (like my bank for several years) where the
non-IE browser actually worked just fine... or maybe worked fine for what
the _user_ wanted, but didn't display some of the intrusive pop-up ads that
IE would have displayed. True, there were sometimes features that didn't
work for us, but mostly we could deal, by not dealing with vendors that
treated us like dirt.
The bad part of the band-aid is that it delayed by several years the
recognition that non-IE browsers were actually much more plentiful on the
ground than website visitor stats would have shown, so it delayed action on
the part of webmasters to accommodate far more people than they thought they
were screwing.
But still, my point about your stats is that they are not as accurate as you
would like to believe.
Kevin (who has used Linux exclusively at home since year 2000... so no IE)
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