Browsers are a very personal choice for those of us who know there is a choice and have the option to choose. Personally, I’m pretty much full-time on Google Chrome now, although it’s only a short time since I was a dedicated Firefox user (Chrome is just so much faster to startup and display pages, no choice really). I’m still using Microsoft Internet Explorer (latest public version), and occasionally (very occasionally drop in on Opera) for specific tasks that don’t run on Chrome.

But, it makes rather interesting reading to look at one’s web stats to see what other people are using to visit the site, averaging over my various blogs, I can see that MSIE is losing ground to Firefox and Chrome as you might expect:

Bizarrely, though when you drill down into version numbers I can see a handful of people still using version 2.0 of MSIE (that’s a 15-year old piece of software and we’re fast approaching a release for version 9!).

Similarly, about a dozen people are using version 2 or lower of Firefox. Come on people you chose Firefox for a reason, one of the advantages of Firefox over other browsers is improved security, but not if you stick with buggy and compromised early versions. It may be that a tech savvy member of the family installed Firefox and hasn’t visited to update it recently, of course. At least Chrome background updates without intervention.

Incredibly, there are still several dozen Netscape users! Couldn’t see anyone on Mosaic though. But, there was one text-only Lynx user. I remember those days VT terminals with bright, nasty, headache-inducing green text on a black screen with a blinking cursor.

One of the most telling changes is that Chrome now represents about 10% of my visitors. Of course, techy sites attract techy people and techy people, funnily enough, tend to like techy things and are often the early adopters of new browsers. James Wiseman reminded me I’d written about this before and he displayed similar stats recently on his programming notebook site, with an even higher percentage using Chrome to visit him.

Obviously, many people really do have no choice as to which browser they’re using. They presumably have legacy equipment that is never updated. They operate in a locked-down IT environment where the IT staff are not keen to upgrade for various reasons. Reasons such as ignorance, lack of support from the boss, or perhaps more commonly because other legacy and proprietary software they use needs particular versions.

Either way, surely there is no excuse for being on version 2.0 of any program when the rest of the world is using version 8 and looking forward to version 9. I ask again, who on earth uses MSIE 2.0?