browsers and surprises

I am not a big fan of Blogger -- Google's free blog program.

It allows a bit of flexibility in setting up a blog page.  But it also has a witch's grab bag of problems -- none of which are the subject of this post.

What Blogger does offer is some interesting information on the people who stop by from time to time.  Most of that information is predictable.  A majority of my readers are in The States -- followed by Mexico, then Canada.  Past that, I have a smattering of hits from a lot of nations.  And a lot of those are spam hits.

I did find a major surprise yesterday, though.

Even though it should not happen, the look of my blog varies from browser to browser.  I revised the format a couple of years ago.  Since then, Internet Explorer users have not been able to see my banner.  And, recently, some Firefox users have been losing connection with my comments section.

Both of those concerned me -- primarily because those two browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox) were once a large majority of my readers.  That is no longer true.

This is a snapshot from yesterday of "Page Views by Browsers:"

Safari	9239 (35%)
Chrome	5927 (23%)
Firefox	5559 (21%)
Internet Explorer	3488 (13%)
Mobile Safari	313 (1%)
Bing Preview	312 (1%)
Opera	301 (1%)
OS;FBSV	268 (1%)
CriOS	156
Mobile	154

Surprised?  I was.

Firefox and Internet Explorer are starting to get the type of results that minor parties in Italy receive.  The two most common choices for browsers are Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.

The Safari result appears to be related to an increase in Apple tablet users and a disproportionate number of Mac users.  Even though 50% of the computers that read my blog are still running Windows, 20% are iPad-run, and 17% are Macintosh. 

And the point of all these numbers?  They are simply a reminder to me that blog readers are not using the same technology as when I started posting back in 2007. 

My readers are far more mobile and they have immediate access to what pops up on line.  Most of us were reading blogs on our stationary desktop PCs in 2007.  Now, I look at as many blogs on my Android telephone as I do on my laptop.

But let me hear from you.  Where do you read my posts?  And what do you use?  I would not be surprised to discover that commenters fall into a completely different profile.

The floor is yours.