Trading places

I know traffic here is far from representative of the rest of the web. Regardless, I see an interesting trend developing. The numbers are drastic enough, I wonder if they prove the trend extends beyond the focus of Stopdesign and the type of people attracted to the content I post.

I’ve been following user agent stats for the past few years. It was only three years ago (January 2006) that Internet Explorer held the dominant percentage of aggregate traffic (70%+) on Stopdesign. Back then, Firefox was just over a year old. ¹ I remember being impressed that Firefox had already gained 10–12% of traffic at that time. Apple’s Safari was just 2 ½ years old ² and was hovering around 3–4% of Stopdesign’s traffic.

So that’s where we were then. IE dominated. Firefox trailed far behind in second position. This is where Stopdesign’s traffic is now:

* Stats represent the last 5 weeks or so of traffic for Stopdesign.com. Captured with Shaun Inman’s excellent website analytics package, Mint, via his User Agent 007 Pepper.

Chrome traffic is higher than normal because of the Recreating the button entry posted two days ago. My theory: Chrome users tend to be more heavily invested in Google products, so they’re attracted to content about Google. (Note: I don’t have access to data that backs this up, nor am I speaking on behalf of Google. But it’s a logical conclusion for anyone to make.) Thus the spike in Chrome’s percentage, which had been hovering around 2% prior to posting the button entry.

For those who care to see the IE breakdown, here are those numbers:

Sources:

1. Mozilla.org: Mozilla Timeline
2. Wikipedia: Safari (web browser): History and development