Happy New Year! For your interest I enclose percentage browser stats for the last 12 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. Browsers ver 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 al 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 0.1 All other browsers are very small. Note the falling % for Mosaic. NetScape Version 3 use is increasing rapidly and is now more used than version 2. Version 2 is dropping as version 3 picks up, while the proportion of version 1 users is also dropping slowly. NetScape 4! Not sure if it's a wind-up but there were a significant number of hits from multiple address using browsers identified as "Mozilla/4.0b1 (Win95; I)" and "Mozilla/4.0b1 (WinNT; I)" MS InterNet Explorer (all versions) is rising and is now around 14%. I note that MicroSoft itself rates itself at better than 20% - perhaps this reflects chemists having different software? Anyway, this is at the expense of NetScape and the minor browsers. More than 91% of all hits come from [NetScape v2 or better + MSIE]. About 98% of all hits are NetScape + MSIE so it appears barely worth bothering to use other than these for site testing. Platform 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 At first sight it looks as though UNIX users are disappearing, but it's more likely that they aren't, rather that PC/Mac users are increasing more rapidly. PS - Style sheets work well in MSIE on the Mac. Assume they will be more popular very soon. PPS - A lot of people must have had a sad Christmas, Dec 25th was not a quiet day on my site here - 32000 html files ! PLEASE NOTE new phone number below 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)114 273 8673 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.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)