Hans-Eric Grönlund has an interesting article on the popularity of FireFox (FF) on his blog, entitled "The Firefox Domination" which you should read. Frank Carr has also remarked on Hans-Eric's blog that he has also noticed a high ratio of FireFox users compared with those using Internet Explorer (IE), which he finds particularly interesting because his site is about all things .NET, which he supposes would attract a more pro-Microsoft audience.
This trend is something that I've noticed on my blog here, although we don't see the marked contrast that Hans-Eric sees. However, it is very clear that those actively subscribing to my blog or being referred from other blogs (etc) are far more likely to be FF users.
Interestingly, our analytic software suggests that overall IE users out number FF users by something like 7-8:1, but this figure is probably skewed heavily in favour of IE because many spiders declare themselves as being based on IE.
The demographics of this intrigued me this afternoon, so I've just checked the analytics for the main Revell Research Systems web site at http://www.rrs.co.uk and the site for the undergraduate prize that we offer annually at the University of Plymouth at http://prize.rrs.co.uk, in order to compare the browser split across them.
I was interested to know whether the 7-8:1 ratio was standard across these sites or whether there was any variance.
IE users on both these (non-blog) sites outnumber FF users by 10:1 or more (although again my cautionary note about spiders should be observed). It is clear that there is a greater propensity for our blog site to attract FF users.
This seems to very tentatively suggest that bloggers prefer FF, perhaps because of its early adoption of RSS feeds... (RSS feeds are after all designed to drive repeat traffic back to a site - or at least offer a means to communicate its content).
I would be very interested to hear what other people's experiences are, especially where they have access to server logs for both web sites and blog sites and are in a position to compare and contrast.
The question is: Do bloggers prefer FireFox?
Please feel free to leave your answers and thoughts either as comments on this post or as a trackback to this post!