A lot is made of web internet browser market - share figure . They ’re a fashion to trail the penetration of Mac OS X , via the appearance of Safari in server log . And of course they also track the maturation of the Firefox Web web internet browser , as it gradually eats into the market - portion trail of Microsoft ’s Internet Explorer .

For a while now I ’ve been meaning to search at our own statistic : the combine Web stats for Macworld , Playlist , and Mac OS disco biscuit Hints . Now , Playlist ( our iPod and iTunes internet site ) is technically of cross - platform appeal , and as a result it adds a good portion of Windows substance abuser into the mix . But in reality , even Macworld readers lean to be of a cross - platform bent : so far this year , 34 percent of Macworld ’s Web traffic has come from Windows PCs . But more than half of the Playlist World Wide Web traffic issue forth from Windows PCs .

In any event , in March this was the state of liaison in the browser app wars : IE had a 79 percent market share , Firefox had a 15 pct ploughshare , and Safari had a 5 pct percentage .

Browser Chart

As you might carry , the bit on our sites are unlike : So far this month Safari makes up 39 percent of our traffic , with Firefox at 33 percentage and Internet Explorer at rough 21 percent . What ’s more interesting is if you look at the month - by - month numbers for Mac Publishing sites dating back to February 2005 :

For the entire retiring two - plus years , Safari has been kicking around the 45 percent mark on Macworld and 30 to 40 percent on all our sites . Meanwhile , Internet Explorer has been on a long , tedious decline since the proclamation of the Intel Macs in former 2006 . ( In 2005 there was a very small percentage of our readership that was browsing the site on the mothballed IE 5 for Mac , but that dealings has fundamentally disappeared in the past twelvemonth . ) And then there ’s Firefox , which just keeps on advance .

I would opine that Firefox is take a certain percentage from both Safari and Internet Explorer . It ’s not surprising that Macworld buff might test to stave off using cyberspace Explorer when they ’re on a personal computer — I screw that ’s whatIdo . But it definitely seems that Firefox is also progress to a dent on Safari on the Mac side . Not a huge dent , but a noticeable one .

“ But what about the other browsers ? ” I learn some of you asking . Well , the truth is that the other browser app do n’t make much of a dent at all . web web browser that identify themselves simply as a Mozilla variant enumeration for somewhere between four and five percent of our traffic . A portion of mass tested out Opera in the first one-half of 2006 ( numbers peaked at just over three pct of dealings ) , but these days just one percent of our readers use Opera . And the Omni Group ’s well - review OmniWeb web web browser , while tardily ticking up in share percentage , does n’t account for even one - one-half of one percent of our traffic .