[thelist] Netscape 4/5/6 - who's on first or who's down for the count?

[CodeBitch]

"Sharon F. Malone" <sfmalo at 24caratdesign.com> wrote:

>
> So could I "safely" count Netscape 5 results in with the results for Netscape
> 6?

Yes. It might be Mozilla, or Netscape 7 or Galeon, but it will be a
Gecko-based browser, or someone pretending to have one.

>
> Presently TheCounter.com reports 0% of visitors are using Netscape 6 (ah, the
> time I've spent making sure web pages look good in Netscape 6 and we end up
> with 0%!).

Well, that's about 0.6% incorrectly rounded down the way TheCounter.com is
wont to do.  Anyway, 0.6% of their visitors may not be the same as the share
of YOUR visitors. On MacEdition, we average just under 10% of
Mozilla+N6+N7+Chimera.

> But I keep thinking that if AOL comes out soon with N7 as the
> default browser (rather than IE),

Which WILL happen.

>all the time and effort will have paid off.

Yes, it will have done.

>
> I'm approaching this from the viewpoint of explaining these stats a little
> better to a client who uses TheCounter.com's stats reporting.
>

Here's the simple response to them:
"TheCounter.com publishes dubious statistics. They provide no comfort that
browser tags like "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC) Opera 5.0
[en]" are correctly identified as Opera and not MSIE. They include browsers
that stopped working post Y2K (MSIE 1.0), don't identify new browsers for
months (IE6), don't round their percentages properly, and publish no
information on whether and how they exclude search engine spiders and other
robots.  If you don't think excluding bots from your published traffic
claims is important, prepared to be sued:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4205249,00.html
The best statistics for your site are those based on the logs of your own
website. TheCounter.com's are skewed, and likely quite misleading."

Hope that helps.

Regards,
CodeBitch
http://www.macedition.com/cb/