16 replies to this topic

[qwerty]

I was just checking out the fancy, newly-redesigned pages that were done for a client of mine. They're gorgeous in IE, FireFox, Mozilla, and (at least according to the emulator) Safari.

However, opening one of the pages in Opera 7, I saw big trouble. There's a small Flash file on the left side of the page which, when clicked, expands and covers some of the text. At least that's what's supposed to happen. In Opera, the space where the large version of the animation would be if one clicked is blank. The text is hidden even though the animation isn't visible.

So, I see two options: send the designer back to the drawing board, or find some reliable statistics that will show me that Opera users make up such a tiny minority that we can feel ok about ignoring them. Does anyone know of any global data on something like that? I can check my own logs and see that I get less than 1% of my own traffic from Opera, but that's not exactly definitive information.

[Rob]

This may be of some use to you qwerty

http://www.upsdell.c...erNews/stat.htm

Rob

[OldWelshGuy]

IE6 - 68.1
IE5.5 - 13.8
IE5 - 11.8
Mozilla - 1.8
Opera 0.8
IE4 0.7
Safari - 0.48


Info supplied by onestat.com

OWG

[Jill]

My site (including this forum) which probably has more than the usual number of Opera users, has the following stats for 2004 so far:

MS Internet Explorer No 358436 89.7 %
Unknown ? 10754 2.6 %
Mozilla No 10258 2.5 %
Opera No 7209 1.8 %
Safari No 6042 1.5 %
Netscape No 5097 1.2 %
Firebird No 890 0.2 %
LibWWW No 427 0.1 %
Konqueror No 207 0 %
NetNewsWire No 122 0 %
Others 64 0 %

[Rob]

(firebird now = firefox)

[Jill]

Ooops, sorry, those were for this month so far. Here's the whole year:

MS Internet Explorer No 18441011 91.3 %
Mozilla No 514718 2.5 %
Netscape No 294667 1.4 %
Opera No 293995 1.4 %
Unknown ? 289085 1.4 %
Safari No 234409 1.1 %
Firebird No 82174 0.4 %
LibWWW No 15271 0 %
Konqueror No 9649 0 %
Lynx No 6034 0 %
Others 11956 0 %

[qwerty]

I hope your results are skewed like you suggested, Jill. Anything over 1% is a deal breaker for me. I doubt very much that my client's potential clients are big Opera users, but I wouldn't want to take a chance. Their service is expensive enough that if they lose one potential client over something like this, it's a huge loss.

I haven't heard back from the client yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they decided we'll need to do a modification to the design, even if it's for the sake of less than 1% of the users out there.

[Randy]

I just checked a three of my sites (B2B and B2C) to see what they said for the year Bob. The 1st and 3rd are B2C, the middle one is a B2B site. They run like this:

IE (all) 97.7% - 97.36% - 97.80%
Netscape (all) 1.25% - 1.54% - 1.36%
Mozilla 0.50% - 0.53% - 0.42%
Safari 0.32% - 0.41% - 0.29%
Opera 0.13% - 0.12% - 0.09%
Unknown 0.01% - 0.02% - 0.02%

Everything else is less than 0.01% each

[davidbrett]

I use W3schools for any browser stats i'm looking for.

They show that Opera is used 2.1% of surfers.

http://www.w3schools...wsers_stats.asp

[Jill]

Qwerty, it looks like (from my numbers above) that the Opera users might be increasing. The % for the year was less than the number for this month. It does seem to be steadily increasing for the most part each month.

[Kev]

Here's the breakdown from DDN (the bottom site in my sig). This is over a typical month and is worth bearning in mind that the majority of visitors will be designers or have an interest in web related matters:

Msie 6.0 78.2 %
Msie 5.5 3.4 %
Msie 5.23 0 %
Msie 5.17 0 %
Msie 5.15 0 %
Msie 5.14 0 %
Msie 5.01 0.1 %
Msie 5.00 0 %
Msie 5.0 0.4 %

Mozilla 12.5 %
Firebird 3 %
Opera 1.2 %
Safari 0.2 %
Konqueror 0.2 %
Unknown 0.2 %
Galeon 0 %

[qwerty]

I like Randy's B2B numbers. If we're talking about 12 out of 1000 visitors, I'm not terribly worried, because this is a B2B site. Of course, his are the only numbers that are that low...

Those W3Schools numbers show a growth in Opera use, but I imagine those are their own numbers, which would mean it's very heavily skewed toward designers.

I still haven't heard back from the client on this.

[csjavi]

For the past month or so we've had about 5 % Opera users. For the past year we've had about 2 - 4 %. The amount of Opera users has been increasing little by little. The site is aimed at normals users, not web designers. To get some idea about the sample size: I'm estimating about 35 000 visits and 250 000 page requests for this month.

[torka]

Doesn't Opera identify itself as IE 6.0 by default? I know that my download of Opera was set up that way -- and that it also offers me the alternative of identifying itself as various versions of Mozilla.

Is it possible that some of the apparent IE6 users are actually Opera users who never changed the default setting?

--Torka

[csjavi]

Doesn't Opera identify itself as IE 6.0 by default? I know that my download of Opera was set up that way -- and that it also offers me the alternative of identifying itself as various versions of Mozilla.

Yes.

Is it possible that some of the apparent IE6 users are actually Opera users who never changed the default setting?

It's possible, even probable. Depends on the intelligence of the log analysis software.