Alert: This post has nothing to do with politics. It’s about what browsers people use to read TPM. So if that ain’t your bag, by all means, skip down to the next post. If you’re geeky enough to be interested, follow me after the jump.
Every year or so I do a post about what browsers people use to read TPM. It’s a measure that we have to follow closely for design reasons. But it’s one that just interests me a lot just because I’m a tech and publishing geek. What always really strikes me though is just how fluid the browser market has been over the last few years. The chart below goes back to the beginning of 2007 — so just about 5 years ago. And as you can see the usership patterns have changed dramatically. The biggest change of course is the steady and dramatic drop off in use of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Back in January 2007, almost half our readers used IE. And that number has fallen steadily ever since. The other big move is Google Chrome, which didn’t exist three years ago and now makes up almost 20% of the visits to our site.
A couple points are important to note. TPM’s usership patterns are quite distinct from the web at large, in a number of different ways. The biggest difference is Mac usership. Almost 28% of visits to TPM come from Macs. That’s between 2 and 3 times as much as the web at large. If you add in iPad and iPhone visits, the number goes to more than 37% of visits to TPM. So there’s a big, big Mac tilt, which obviously pushes down the number of IE usage (which isn’t made for Mac anymore) and gooses the Safari number a lot too.
With all that, here are the numbers.
