Checking my blog stats today I see some interesting trends. Since the beginning of this year I have had the following number of hits from various browsers:

3954 Mozilla Firefox
2814 Internet Explorer 6
462 Apple Safari
439 Mozilla
59 Netscape 4
47 Netscape 3
41 Internet Explorer 5.5
32 Internet Explorer 5
15 Opera 5
11 Opera 8
10 Opera
6 Konqueror
3 Mozilla Firefox 1
2 Opera 7
2 Internet Explorer 4
1 Internet Explorer 3
1 Opera 6

Some interesting things pop from these numbers. I’m glad to see that the number of readers using Firefox outnumbers IE by a pretty wide margin. This is ahead of general internet share numbers which currently have Firefox at about 12% of the total market and IE at somewhere between 80-85%. But I have a question for those of you using IE. Why? If you are checking from work, I know some employers are still stuck on using IE and won’t allow alternative browsers. But if you are not locked in to IE why are you still using it? The chances of getting your computer infected by spy-ware and viruses without any intervention on your part is remarkably high if you use IE. Unless you go into the IE settings and disable a lot of the features you will almost inevitably get infected if you use IE. If you are using IE I highly recommend that you try out firefox. When you first install it, it will ask if you want to import your IE settings. There are tons of extensions that add extra functionality to firefox. Try it, you’ll like it.

The other more curious thing is the number of hits from really old browsers. There are over 100 hits from Netscape 3 and 4. These browsers were released almost ten years ago. There are even a few hits from IE 3 and 4 which are also of the same vintage. Netscape and IE 3 were both released in August 1996. All of this of course is irrelevant to anything and I welcome any and all visitors here regardless of what browser you chose to use. I just thought it was curious.