Fun with numbers. Last night I crunched some stats on blogger.com traffic for the first time in ages. I used to do it regularly, but the log files got so huge, my stat cruncher would always break after a while if I wanted it to keep any historical data. Looking at the browser usage numbers, I wasn't terribly surprised to learn that 83.6% of Blogger visitors use IE5.x—especially since using Blogger with Netscape (and, god forbid, Opera) is a sub-par experience. (Yes, I do plan to make Opera more usable at some point.) IE6 didn't even make the list, which doesn't seem quite right. It's not officially released yet, but it's been in beta long enough to get a noticeable number of users, I'd think. Netscape 6, though I think it kinda nice, is just not catching on—it lies at 0.43%, while it's nasty little half-brother, 4.x is hanging at 9.77%.

A little more interesting were the OS numbers. 49% use Windows 98, another 14% use Windows ME (basically the same thing), while only 13% seem to like for Win2k. As a Windows 2000 user since beta 2, I was so happy to upgrade to its higher stability from 98 even at that point, I can't believe more people don't use it by now. Perhaps that speaks to a large corporate user base with upgrade-reluctant IT departments? Or home users with old machines?

Macintosh, I'm glad to see, is holding on to a healthy 7.85%, while Linux barely makes the chart at 0.38% (and part of that's probably bots).