For your interest I enclose percentage browser stats for the last 18 months. There's all sorts of reasons why these numbers aren't scientific but the apparent trends are interesting anyway. You may find these numbers helpful when deciding what features to implement on your pages. 1996 Browsers vers Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec MSIE all 3.9 3.6 5.8 6.4 5.2 5.7 7.3 7.5 9.8 10.2 12.1 14.2 Mosaic all 3.1 3.1 2.9 3.0 2.4 2.0 1.8 1.6 1.1 0.8 0.6 0.5 NetScape 0.9 1.6 0.8 0.9 0.5 0.6 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.1 NetScape 1 7.0 4.2 3.0 2.5 2.8 2.0 1.1 0.9 1.0 0.8 0.6 0.5 NetScape 1.1 30.3 25.8 21.7 18.3 14.9 12.6 9.0 7.8 4.8 4.9 3.6 2.4 NetScape 1.2 22.7 19.1 16.9 11.8 13.4 9.8 6.7 6.8 6.0 5.0 3.9 2.8 NetScape 2 26.8 37.2 44.0 51.3 50.4 53.3 53.4 52.7 44.8 40.4 38.0 35.5 NetScape 3 0 0 0.1 2.2 6.0 11.1 17.8 20.2 29.7 35.0 38.8 41.5 NetScape 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.1 1997 Browsers vers Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun MSIE all 15.2 15.4 17.6 16.6 17.1 19.4 Mosaic all 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.1 NetScape 0.9 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 NetScape 1 0.2 0.4 0.3 0.1 0.1 0.1 NetScape 1.1 1.3 0.9 0.7 0.8 1.4 0.4 NetScape 1.2 1.4 1.5 0.9 0.7 0.8 0.7 NetScape 2 33.8 31.9 28.7 25.7 22.7 18.6 NetScape 3 45.6 47.3 48.5 52.4 53.6 55.5 NetScape 4 0.9 1.2 1.8 2.6 3.2 3.9 All other browsers are very small. About 5000 variants of browsers were logged over the 18 months - but only 1400 were active in the last 3 months! NetScape Version 3 use is still increasing (at the expense of version 2). Version 4 is only increasing slowly - perhaps chemists are not inclined to use it because of problems involving it and CHIME? MS InterNet Explorer (all versions) is rising and is now nearly 20%. More than 97% of all hits are NetScape (v2 or better) + MSIE (all versions) so it appears barely worth bothering to use other than these for site testing. Platform 1996 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Macintosh 23.2 23.5 24.9 25.5 19.6 22.3 26.7 19.8 18.3 20.6 21.4 19.3 PC 64.3 62.3 61.9 59.9 63.2 62.6 59.4 66.7 71.8 71.0 71.1 72.5 Unix 11.9 12.9 12.1 12.4 15.6 13.6 12.6 12.1 9.0 7.4 6.5 6.9 Newton 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1997 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Macintosh 19.5 20.9 18.7 20.2 19.0 21.5 PC 72.1 72.3 74.5 73.0 74.3 70.4 Unix 7.2 5.8 5.7 5.9 5.9 6.4 Newton 0 0 0 0 0 0 No very obvious change. The Newton (messagepad + emate) is my outsider to reach 0.1% by the end of 1997! So far I have had about 6 hits (all from me though!). Dr Mark J Winter (Deputy Head of Department) Department of Chemistry, The University, Sheffield S3 7HF, England tel: +44 (0)114 222 9304 fax: +44 (0)114 222 9303 e-m: mark.winter@sheffield.ac.uk http://www.shef.ac.uk/~chem/staff/mjw/mark-winter.html WebElements is the periodic table on the world-wide web: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~chem/web-elements/ The Sheffield Chemdex is a listing of chemistry sites on the world-wide web: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~chem/chemdex/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)