Matt Mullenweg writes:
I”m at An Event Apart in Chicago and Eric Meyer just said that browser statistics were “worse than useless.” More specifically, the only browser share numbers that matter are the one for sites you run, not what the web at …

That said, there is one thing to be aware of – what is known as the “self-fulfilling prophecy”. porneL touches on it above and Luke Barton fairly creates it.

If you design syour site one way, so that it works primarily, or only, for visitors using one type of technology be it browser type/version, connection method, reading method etc, then the logs for you site will be massively skewed to the audience you designed it for. Sure there will be te occasional other visitor show up, but they won;t come back and over time your stats will show exactly what you created them to show – not becasue there aren’t users out there with something different that would like to visit/use your site, but becasue, for one reason or another, they are unable to becasue you designed it that way.

I have a small book that was given me as a humourous, and yet serious, gift by one of my mathematics professors when I was an occasional TA for him. It’s called “How to Lie with Statistics”.

December 21st, 2004
Web design world cool-down Don’t Care About Market Share HTML tags ALT attribute (ALT tag, [...]

Martin Reurings:
There are definitely problems with the figures in OneStat’s November press release. They just don’t make sense when compared to their previous releases. More here

“It seems that people are switching from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to Mozilla’s new Firefox browser,” Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com, said in a statement in November.

Microsoft has disputed these numbers, claiming that they do not represent corporate users.

However, it’s verry nice to have a post of someone whom people listen to to back up my story when I try to convince someone that browser-statistics don’t matter.

IE6: 60%
Firefox: 16%
IE5: 9%
Mozilla: 5%
IE5.5: 3%
Opera <1%
NN4 <1%

Our site is not quite as geeky as Meyerweb or Complex Spiral, but is comprised almost exclusively of web developers. Although the stats are completely different than Eric’s, it does support his opinion unequivacably.

there are so many young people leaving collage, Uni, High School, etc. I would love to know that they understand the whole browser debate? What I mean is, do they even know that a browser existed before IE 5.0?

As a lot of the web designers of the future are just leaving higher education right now (in Australia) to enter the real world, I would like to think they have the knowledge they need to really understand where the web has come from, and not just where it is going..

I suppose what I am asking is, are the web designers of the future going to be as backward compatible as the web designers of this era? Do they even know that older browsers don’t support CSS, etc? Unless of course they are the self educating type.

I am personally of the opinion that a solid “web curriculum” is needed within the education systems world wide if these new comers are going to meet the standards set by “geeks” (sorry) like us / you guys ;). To this day there is still not one “course” that would satisfy even my expectations (as an employer) of a “Qualified Web Designer” and this is the year 2004.

By the way, this is all coming from someone who has only 3years experience of running his own web design business, but the point is if you don’t care about what you a serving then why bother serving it at all? (unless time is a constraint when trying to rebuild your own site ;) .)

Sorry I think I may have strayed off topic…

Just my humble opinion, cheers.