[thelist] Browser Stats

Ray Hill lists at prydain.com
Wed Aug 28 15:01:01 CDT 2002


Rick [Kitty5] wrote:
>> Netscape 3.39%
>
> Looks like a good enough reason to stop supporting ns4.x to me!

I couldn't disagree more.

The misleading thing about percentages is that they are based on a number
out of 100 (and even when you extend it two decimal places like this you're
still only getting representation of a number out of 10,000).  And when you
consider that there are something like 280,000,000 people in the US alone,
that tiny-sounding 3.39% translates to nearly a million people!  Much less
when you expand your net to the world.

Percentages are misleading because they don't clearly tell you what the
percentage is *of*.  If, for example, these same results reflected the usage
by just your user base, then 3.39% would indeed be a relatively small number
of people and therefore not worth your time.  But when you're taking a
percentage of total population (or total browser usage by the population, in
this case) or any other huge number, the importance of the smaller
percentages goes up considerably.

It's all relative.

--ray





More information about the thelist mailing list