Browsers

Visitors to an Australian, academic, Computer Science web site. Not much change at the top from 1998.

Visitors to an Australian commercial web site (about 1.5 million hits/month) show 66% Microsoft Explorer, 30% Netscape - a complete turn-around from 1997 (below).

Amongst versions of Explorer only, 4.x are most common on 58%, then 5.x on 32%, and 3.x on 9%.

Amongst versions of Netscape only, 4.x lead on 85%, then 3.x on 14%, and 2.x on less than 1%.

General

If you are reading this on-line, you must have mastered the basics of at least one world wide web browser. Below is a captured screen image for Netscape 3 running under Unix and X-windows.

Whatever browser you are using, experiment with its settings to change the window appearance, fonts, image loading behaviour, and to turn Java and JavaScript on and off, etc.

Not much change in 1998, Netscape still way ahead as most used browser. Note the search-engine robots (crawlers, spiders, ...) in the top 10.

Visitors to a Computer Science web site might be expected to be biased towards Unix and hence towards Netscape browsers (97%). Microsoft Explorer is a rare visitor; Mosaic and Lynx (text based) are more common. Scooter is the spider for the Altavista search engine.

Vistors to a major Australian commercial web site show 63% Netscape, 30% Explorer and 7% "other".

Left, from Siegel 1996, who quotes Meeker & DePuy The Internet Report (Harper 1996) as his source. It looks like Microsoft got left behind, for a while?