The roads I take...

As I reported earlier on those numbers, I think I should give you an update on SeaMonkey rates on the German project website - where the new suite accounted for over half of all hits the second month in a row now!

When I posted here last in August, SeaMonkey just had overtaken the old Mozilla suite in hits on that site dedicated mainly to suite downloads and hosting the default start page for both suite.
Now, SeaMonkey (blue line) goes strongly at over 50% while the Mozilla suite (red) has dropped under 40% in November:



Absolute hits/pages/hosts numbers have been about steady since April, slightly decreasing in summer but gaining again in fall, which means that we gain more and more SeaMonkey users, while the Mozilla suite is equally falling in market share. As 60% of the hits on that website come from people hitting the default home page, or "start page", of German SeaMonkey (and Mozilla suite), web site visits have some correlation with overall adoption of those applications.

In November 2007, we had 96% of all hits on the site coming from Gecko-based browsers (53% SeaMonkey, 39% Mozilla suite, 4% Firefox, other Gecko browser sum up to under 0.1%), a bit below 2% from IE and a bit over 1% from various bots, with about half of the other percent unknown and the other half split between Safari, Opera and consorts.

Split by versions, SeaMonkey 1.1.6 and 1.1.4 top the list with 11.5% each, followed by Mozilla 1.7.12 at 8.6%, SeaMonkey 1.1.5 at 8.3%, 1.1.1 as 6.7%. Mozilla 1.7.13 and 1.7.3 are both over 5%, the rest ranges below that mark. A sum of all SeaMonkey 1.0.x versions reveals 7.1% using the older series still, which means that about 13% of SeaMonkey are on the older versions, which is surely better than how things worked with Mozilla suite, but quite some room for improvement.
Interestingly, IE7 now ranks slightly above IE6 with 0.81% vs. 0.78% of seamonkey.at hits.

A short look on OSes tells us that still 77.8% of those hits come from WinXP, Win2000 is at 8.6%, while Vista is still only at 3.7% - which is good from our perspective, as SeaMonkey 1.x has some small glitches on that OS that will only get fixed in the SeaMonkey 2 series.
Linux at 2.3% and Mac systems at 1.7% are surely the vast underdogs in hits on our page, but probably they are a bit underrepresented due to users of those OSes usually being more advanced and more likely to switch to a non-default home page in their browser.

I hope that the numbers continue to grow as they do for SeaMonkey, so that hopefully more and more users of the old, insecure Mozilla suite switch over to the well-maintained, secure alternative we are developing.

As I mentioned here earlier, the default start page for the German versions of SeaMonkey and the Mozilla suite are running from my site, and I have pretty good statistics about relative usage of those application suites in the German market because of that.
While in February I had still almost 2/3 of the hits coming from Mozilla suite and a bit short of 30% from SeaMonkey, in April Mozilla was down to about 55% and SeaMonkey around 37% - and that trend did continue.

Here's a current graph of hit percentages by browsers:


And you'll see from this that it's time to celebrate - SeaMonkey has finally overtaken Mozilla in July!
The July numbers of hit percentage are SeaMonkey leading with 46%, followed by Mozilla with 45%, Firefox is at 4% and MSIE at 1.5% - all others are well below 1% of total hits on the SeaMonkey German site.

A breakdown by versions is also interesting: SeaMonkey 1.1.2 leads with 15.9% followed by 1.1.1 with 15.0%, the strongest Mozilla version is 1.7.12 at 10.6%, followed by 1.7.13 at 6.3%, 1.7.3 at 5.6%, and 1.7.5 at 3.9%. The newest SeaMonkey version, just release on July 19th, is at 3.6% in July's totals already, Mozilla 1.6, 1.7.11, 1.7, SeaMonkey 1.1 and Mozilla 1.7.8 are all still above 2%, all SeaMonkey 1.0.x versions sum up to about 9% of all hits - that's practically all versions of 1.0.7 and below, the 1.0.8 and 1.0.9 which came out post-1.1 are hardly noticeable in the statistics.

This all gives me the impression that the update notification of SeaMonkey surely works better than no notification at all like we had with Mozilla back then. Also, people who stick with some version seem to not even step up to the respective conservative security updates, like the 1.0.x splitting shows. Many people seem to follow the updates we ship though, when they get notified of them, as the decent percentage of 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 shows, but they might not follow them immediately, as the still high 1.1.1 number makes clear.
I hope our move in SeaMonkey 2 to the automatic update system (AUS) also used by Firefox will make people follow the security updates even more closely.

Still, a Gecko percentage of 96% always sounds nice on a site with over 3 million hits per month - with 2% of the rest being bots, 1.5% Trident (MSIE), 0.15% Presto/Opera and 0.08% KHTML (Safari/Konqueror), just if you might wonder where those other competitors are. Sure, this is a Site dedicated to Gecko browsers and holding the default start page of German SeaMonkey and Mozilla, so Gecko domination is of course expected.

As we're already on this topic and we already know that those hits ale almost all from SeaMonkey and Mozilla suite users, let's take a look at the most-used OSes as well:

1. Windows XP - 78.50%
2. Windows 2000 - 8.95%
3. Windows 98 - 2.49%
4. Linux - 2.28%
5. Windows Vista - 1.73%
6. MacOS X - 1.47%
7. Windows ME - 0.97%
8. Windows 2003 - 0.61%
9. Windows NT 4.0 - 0.38%
10. Windows 95 - 0.09%
11. Solaris - 0.03%
12. OS/2 - 0.01%

I've taken the liberty to only use version splits for Windows, and take the sums for others, as well as exclude everything below 0.01% of usage (i.e. below 300 hits this month). XP clearly dominates suite installations by far, but I wondered how low Vista usage seems to be, and how high Win2000 ranks there. This high usage of Win2k likely points to many corporate and university etc. installs being out there.
Another interesting point is that Windows versions below Win2k, which will be dropped by Gecko 1.9 and therefore also SeaMonkey 2, are already below 4% of our users. Given that SeaMonkey 1.1.x will be supported until April or May 2008 at least (6 months after Gecko 1.9 is released with Firefox 3), there's a good chance that this percentage will decrease enough that not too many people will get hurt by this (esp. as I don't know hoe Mozilla and SeaMonkey users are spread across those OSes, but expect that older OSes have potentially higher usage of the older product).

The trend of SeaMonkey adoption and Mozilla suite being abandoned continues well, but probably slower than some people might expect - for me, at least, it can't go fast enough

When blogging about old Mozilla suite users in March, I presented a few numbers of the www.seamonkey.at website, which is the center for German localized access to SeaMonkey info and downloads, and which contains the default start page for German localizations of SeaMonkey and Mozilla suite.

Since then, SeaMonkey numbers continued rising there, and Mozilla suite usage decreased significantly - and I did some graphs for stats of that page. Counting most hits on the page (this omits some design imagery that bypasses my CBSM system to improve performance), here are some current graphs, including complete April 2007:

Absolute numbers:


Percentages:


Note that any other than the 4 represented browsers are way below 1% and would only give flat lines at the bottom. (Oh, and in June 2006 I had some server problems, that's why absolute numbers did temporarily drop there.)

As you see, Mozilla suite is falling rapidly nowadays that they get scary warnings on their start page (at least in the German L10n), SeaMonkey is increasing well in percentage, but slowly in absolute numbers. As April has 30 days and March had 31, the actual increase is a bit better though, I calculated a 6% increase in daily average of SeaMonkey hits.

Breaking down Browser percentage by versions gives SeaMonkey 1.1.1 a lead with 20% of all site hits, followed by Mozilla 1.7.12 at 14% and 1.7.13 at 8.5% - older Mozilla suites continue to dominate the list: 1.7.3 6.5%, 1.7.5 4.4%, 1.7.11 3.9%, 1.6 3.7%, 1.7 2.8%, 1.7.8 2.6% - a lineup only broken by SeaMonkey 1.1 at 4.3% of all hits. Clearly turning on the update notification alert in SeaMonkey has made people more willing to upgrade to current versions than they were in Mozilla suite times without that alert. Still, summing up all 9 SeaMonkey 1.0.x versions leads to a significant number of 12.6%, so some people seem to have just turned off the notification, even more visible as 1.0.8, which came out when 1.1 was already available and at the same time as 1.1.1, only ranks with very low 0.31% of those hits - way behind Mozilla 1.5 or 1.4 and at the same level as Mozilla 1.2.1 (the last version that was available on MacOS 8/9)!

So, all in all, SeaMonkey's update notification is clearly helpful, old Mozilla suite is dropping, and SeaMonkey is slowly rising. We need to do better in getting 1.0.x users to upgrade to 1.1.x though, and we need to get more publicity overall so we get total hits statistics (SeaMonkey+Mozilla) to rise again, as they're currently decreasing significantly every month. Basically positive trends, but still a lot of work to do!

The Mozilla suite is dead. OK, that might be old news for you. Using the outdated Mozilla suite is a security risk, as you already know. And with the alive-and-kicking SeaMonkey suite and Firefox browser there are quite good upgrade paths available, and you, of course, have followed one of those a long time ago.

Probably this is really true for you - but unfortunately there are a lot of people out there that have not upgraded to one of our current products yet and are still risking their security daily by using a hopelessly outdated browser. You want numbers? OK, here they are: www.seamonkey.at is the homepage of the German SeaMonkey and Mozilla suite localization - and happens to also contain the default start page of those localized suite versions. That domain had 3.2 million page views in February, originating from about 1.1 million different IP addresses (OK, each address is counted once per day, but I guess that doesn't matter much there). Of course, most of those hits come from people hitting their browser's default start page, 56% of all hits go to that page - so it's no surprise that the suites are leading stats for browsers there. The downside is which one is first - it's still the old, outdated, insecure Mozilla suite, scoring 65% of all hits (bots excluded) on that domain in February! SeaMonkey is "only" second with 29% of all hits, leaving 6% to the browsers that don't have their start page set to this domain - mainly Firefox (3.5%) and MSIE (1.4%), all other scoring far below 1% of all hits. That's surely no representative picture of the web, but it should be quite representative for relative adoption of Mozilla suite vs. SeaMonkey (in German-speaking countries - and I doubt other regions of the world would be much different).

For me, having 960,000 hits a month with SeaMonkey is a good start - but after more than a year of stable SeaMonkey releases and 10 months after the last Mozilla suite update, the amount of remaining Mozilla users is really scary - and looking at a version breakdown is even more so, as 1.7.13 only scores 10%, which means that over 50% of my site hits are even older Mozillas (while about 40% of the SeaMonkey users are using 1.1.x already).

So, clearly, something needs to be done to get Mozilla users to migrate to a newer browser. Someone has to kick their butt, so to say. And now, in bug 373065, we're trying to do something in that way for the default en-US version (and I'll go with a similar approach for German at about the same time). We'll be showing all those people a big warning on their start page that they're using outdated, insecure software. At the same time, we'll be pointing them to the recommended upgrade paths - and yes, Mozilla representatives also feel we should present SeaMonkey and Firefox as equal choices there. Yay! It really feels good that our project is recognized that way

I'm still waiting for some text improvements by Paul Kim from Firefox Marketing and an OK from Gerv from MoFo - but expect to see this warning hitting your start page soon. Oh wait, I forgot, you already upgraded, right?