Urgent Message to Webmaster - Site Display Problem

[dmpotter]

[quote="djbrianuk";p="684799"]IE6 is still the default for over HALF of your viewers, and will probably remain at a high level of use for some time to come.[/quote]
Out of curriosity - WHERE on earth did you pull those statistics from?

[Mae Dean]

[quote="djbrianuk";p="684799"]Current Browser Use Statistics :

September 2006

IE7 2.5%
IE6 55.6%
IE5 4.0%
Fx 27.3%
Moz 2.3%
N7/8 0.4%

IE6 is still the default for over HALF of your viewers, and will probably remain at a high level of use for some time to come.[/quote]

Okay, thats great... you are aware that IE7 was released in full in OCTOBER, correct? Your stats are null and void.

Furthermore - here are the stats from my logs:

Code: Select all

Firefox	                    56.5 %
	MS Internet Explorer	       25.8 %
	Unknown                     6.0 %
	Opera	                      3.3 %
	Mozilla                     2.9 %
	Safari                      2.7 %
	Netscape                    0.7 %
	Wget                        0.4 %
	NetNewsWire                 0.3 %
	Camino                      0.3 %

[djbrianuk]

*sigh* - it has been in BETA release for some time before that.

[Mae Dean]

Dude, a beta is not enough to get a userbase. When a product is released in full, that's when people start jumping ship and upgrading. MS is not going to support IE6 after a period of time - it seems silly for me to do so.

[dmpotter]

Wait until November when Microsoft pushes IE7 out via Windows Update. I'd be interested in knowing the statistics after that.

[djbrianuk]

Well, lets look at some IE history. IE6 was released in August 2001. In January 2002 (the earliest I can find data for), IE5 was still accounting for 56% of browser use. A year later in Janaury 2003, IE5 was still at 30% and it took until December 2004 for IE5 to drop below 10%.

If this trend repeats, you may find that IE6 will remain in widespread use for considerably longer than you think.

I'll concede that the windows update rollout may accerlerate the process, but considering the problems I had with the Beta release, I won't be in any hurry to install it.

Posted Sun Oct 22, 2006 6:18 pm:

[quote="dmpotter";p="684837"][quote="djbrianuk";p="684799"]IE6 is still the default for over HALF of your viewers, and will probably remain at a high level of use for some time to come.[/quote]
Out of curriosity - WHERE on earth did you pull those statistics from?[/quote]

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

[Mae Dean]

Again, the point is essentially moot, as only a quarter of my readers actually use IE. Currently only 2% of that quarter are using 7, but we'll see where things stand after the rollout.

Unfortunately, my current stats tracker doesn't look at screen resolutions. I'd be curious to see what percentage of readers are using lower than 1024x768. - By the way... if 1024x768 ever drops under... say, 20%... I'll probably wind up redesigning the page for larger view. Perhaps even making the comic itself larger.

[dmpotter]

[quote="djbrianuk";p="684852"]http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp[/quote]
Ah. In other words, the stats have absolutely no relation to this site. I didn't think you could have real stats.

[quote="Greg Dean";p="684856"]Unfortunately, my current stats tracker doesn't look at screen resolutions. I'd be curious to see what percentage of readers are using lower than 1024x768. - By the way... if 1024x768 ever drops under... say, 20%... I'll probably wind up redesigning the page for larger view. Perhaps even making the comic itself larger. [/quote]
That's because it can't.

Very few browsers give the screen resolution to the server in an HTTP request (in fact, the only one I know of that did was the AOL Browser).

However, if you wanted me to, I could show you how to use some JavaScript to record those stats.

[djbrianuk]

[quote="dmpotter";p="684860"]http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Ah. In other words, the stats have absolutely no relation to this site. I didn't think you could have real stats.[/quote]

*Sigh* - real in what sense? Naturally I don't have access to Greg's server logs, but the stats are real in the sense that the site in question has recorded them on itself, and they can be taken as a fair indication of overall use on the internet.

Try http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm - this has collated 7 different sources if you want a more balanced overview - if anything the ones I quoted were conservative - this site has a range of 54-87% IE6 use.

Posted Sun Oct 22, 2006 6:55 pm:

[quote="Greg Dean";p="684856"]Again, the point is essentially moot, as only a quarter of my readers actually use IE. [/quote]

I suppose how big a difference it makes depends on how many visitors you get a day. 25% of 100,000 for instance is a lot of people.

[LQDMTL]

Once again I'll say it...

Microsoft is offering IE7 as a free download. Next month, the company also will begin delivering it to Windows XP users who have signed up to automatically receive security fixes. Hachamovitch said that's because the product makes major security improvements.

Read about it here

Your statistics on how long it took people to adopt IE6 are worthless. They mean nothing. This is not the same scenario. Since the majority of users use automatic updates, they will all have IE7 as of next month. I've said it, dmpotter re-stated it a few posts later.

Arguing about this is pointless. MS is phasing out IE6 in a hurry, pushing IE7 onto people as a security update, and that's all there is to it. IE7 is going to quickly replace IE6 in masse, and thus Greg's choice to stop bothering to fix IE6 errors on his site is perfectly fine.

[Mae Dean]

Well... that's not necessarily the case, though. If anyone can help me figure out what the heck's wrong in this case, I'd be extremely grateful.

And DMpotter - ExtremeTracker tacks screen resolutions... I don't know if it uses Javascript to do so, but it does track them.

[Spongiform]

[quote="Greg Dean";p="684856"]Again, the point is essentially moot, as only a quarter of my readers actually use IE. Currently only 2% of that quarter are using 7, but we'll see where things stand after the rollout.

Unfortunately, my current stats tracker doesn't look at screen resolutions. I'd be curious to see what percentage of readers are using lower than 1024x768. - By the way... if 1024x768 ever drops under... say, 20%... I'll probably wind up redesigning the page for larger view. Perhaps even making the comic itself larger. [/quote]

Some people are stuck with fairly new laptops that still have a screen with a native resolution of 1024x768 even though they use the highest possible res whenever they can.

[Mae Dean]

It would have to be an extremely low percentage for me to undertake such a project.

[dmpotter]

[quote="djbrianuk";p="684863"][quote="dmpotter";p="684860"]http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Ah. In other words, the stats have absolutely no relation to this site. I didn't think you could have real stats.[/quote]

*Sigh* - real in what sense? Naturally I don't have access to Greg's server logs, but the stats are real in the sense that the site in question has recorded them on itself, and they can be taken as a fair indication of overall use on the internet.[/quote]
Which, by the very nature of Real Life Comics, is not representative of the readers here. Which is why the stats Greg gave from the actual site and the stats you quoted disagree by so much. Different sites get widely different browser usage due to their audience.

[quote="Greg Dean";p="684874"]And DMpotter - ExtremeTracker tacks screen resolutions... I don't know if it uses Javascript to do so, but it does track them.[/quote]
I'm curious why you didn't capitalize the P...

But anyway, it has to use JavaScript to track them - the information isn't available otherwise. For example, Firefox's HTTP request looks something like:

Code: Select all

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.reallifecomics.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

Nowhere in there does it mention the screen resolution. If you want access to it, you have to do it through JavaScript's window.screen property. From there you can then call back to the webserver to record the result.

[adciv]

[quote="Spongiform";p="684876"]Some people are stuck with fairly new laptops that still have a screen with a native resolution of 1024x768 even though they use the highest possible res whenever they can.[/quote]

Seconded. My year old 15" laptop supports up to 1024x768. There aren't many laptops this size that support larger unless you go to a widescreen. I don't see this changing anytime soon.