CMU SCSWWW Browser Study

WHAT WEB BROWSERS ARE PEOPLE USING?

July 1995

Given the proliferation of web browsers on the Internet, it is of interest to know which browsers are most popular among users. The following study involved monitoring the browsers used by people who accessed a popular, busy commercial website. This study is not based on an user survey, the data was collected by an automated monitoring program that logs the browser.

The following data was collected over 39,300 individual IPs that accessed a popular commercial website over a one-week period. We recongize that this data is not an Internet-wide study, but it helps to shed some light on general patterns of browser usage.

The top three webservers are Netscape (65%), Mosaic and its derivatives (20%) and Netcom's Netcruiser (5%).

Top Browsers (greater than 1 %)

1. Netscape                        66%
2. MOSAIC & all its derivatives    20%
     AIR Mosaic (10%)
     NCSA (8%)
     All others (2%)
3. NetCruiser                       5%
4. Lynx                             3%
5. IWENG                            2%
6. IBM                              2%
7. The rest (see breakdown below)   2%

Less than 1%

Of all the other web-browsers, the following had a following of less than 1%. 
CERN   			
Charlotte
Delphi
DosLynx
EI
InternetWorks
LII
MacWeb
Microsoft
Netsurfer
OmniWeb
PRODIGY
PipeWeb
PipeWinWeb
Proxy
TCP
TCPConnectII
aolbrowser
internetMCI
There were three other browsers that we could not recognize by name.

More on Mosaic and its derivatives.

As Mosaic has many flavors, the following is a breakdown of the overall (20%) usage level of all Mosaic flavors. Only two versions of Mosaic seem to lead the pack now. 
	AIR  		10%
	NCSA 		8%
	WinMosaic  	1%
	MacMosaic  	< 1%
	MacMosaicB6   	< 1%
	Enhanced 	< 1%
	Ventana		< 1%
	NetManage	< 1%
	NOV*IX		< 1%
	O'Reilly	< 1%
	PATHWORKS	< 1%
	Quarterdeck	< 1%
	SPRY		< 1%
	Spyglass	< 1%
	WebWatch	< 1%
Prepared by D. Navin-Chandra dchandra@cs.cmu.edu