Reviewing the Latest Web Stats

This is in regards to this:

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats/

To my surprise, it says here that 55% of the Internet is now running at 1024x768 screen resolution. Only about 11% still use 800x600. I was surprised to see that low number! For most of the stuff I do, I was still trying to make it work in 800x600. Perhaps in about 2 years I can start designing only in 1024x768.

Also to be learned:

• Firefox has an amazing marketshare, coming up close and fast on IE 6. Just another few more months of delay on IE 7 and Firefox might have, who knows, perhaps 50% of the marketshare? There's even talk of a SuperBowl commercial promoting Firefox, which might be a big boost.


• People really are upgrading their Firefox properly.


• More people run Windows 98 than they run Linux when they surf the web. (But we can fix that, can't we? ; ) )


• It's funny that most web servers and mail servers on the Internet are Linux-based according to the stats, but as far as people surfing the web with Linux workstations, we're only talking 1% of the users out there. Why is that?


• Many people have upgraded rapidly from W2K to XP.


• People are so concerned about getting eyeballs in China on their websites to drive up dollars, but China only accounts for 2% of all Internet users. Instead, Germany, the UK, Canada, Poland, and Turkey are the leading contenders (in that order) with the most eyeballs on the Internet behind the USA.


• The USA still has the most eyeballs on the Internet. It's gotten so bad that it's hurting television advertising sales and newspaper sales in the USA. Luckily car radio advertising is unavoidable and is now blown away to see their advertising hits rise almost to the point of television.


• Brazil, with all its efforts for Linux and open source across its country, and its emphasis on technology, still didn't even make it into the top 10 as far as eyeballs on the Internet. Even Turkey beat it out. The same remarkable story could be said of India, which also didn't make it into the top 10. That doesn't seem to compute. I'm wondering if the study was somewhat flawed or if we would see completely different results next month.


• Turkey has more users on the Internet than even Japan. One has to wonder what's going on over there. What are they up to? Is the Turkish government really emphasizing technology so dramatically?


• Japan, France, and Australia still have a remarkably low amount of users on the Internet.


• Almost no one (<1%) runs the Opera web browser. They might as well not even make it since Firefox is so well-designed and has absorbed all of Opera's wonderful innovations.


• Mac users appear to be using Firefox and/or IE 6 over Safari -- and by a long shot.


• Fewer than 1% use IE 5.5 anymore.


• It says that 936,833 website visits were used in the survey, and that only 1% of the users visiting their sites were Linux workstations. That comes to perhaps 93,683 Linux workstation visits. If we can take a guess that perhaps they clicked on average about 5 clicks and left the site, that comes to approx. 18,000 workstations. If you're trying to target a product on the Internet that only works on Linux, your customer base might be as few as 18,000 workstations. However, for Windows with these same stats, you might have a target market of perhaps 172,000 workstations.


• There are almost as many Mac users as Linux users surfing the Internet. It's not exactly that number, but fairly close.