Swing State Project

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Thursday, April 28, 2005

Explain This to Me

This entry (at least so far as I know) has nothing to do with politics. It's about technology. Over at DailyKos, 33% of the visitors use the awesome Firefox, while 57% still use the atrocious Internet Explorer. At MyDD, a site thought to have a lot over overlap with Kos, the numbers are actually a lot different: 39% Firefox, 45% IE. Over at Atrios, it's a whopping 48% Firefox to just 33% IE.

And here at the Swing State Project, we're a real low outlier, at just 22% Firefox to 64% IE (including 1% using Explorer 4.0, the only site where that old browser even registered at all). If you look at other liberal/left wing/Democratic blogs, they are similarly all over the map. I don't think size is the explanation. Sadly, No gets about as many visitors a day as we do and they're at 36% FF, 45% IE. Meanwhile, South Knox Bubba, another similarly-sized blog, is an almost perfect match at 21% Firefox, 65% IE.

I would have thought that most of these blogs draw from the same pool of readers, but these numbers indicate that the makeup of the readership from blog to blog can vary substantially. Anyone have any ideas why this is the case?

P.S. If you haven't switched to Firefox, I have no idea what you're waiting for. Go get it. You'll thank yourself.

Posted at 11:11 PM in Site News | Technorati

Comments

No idea, but I'm doing my part with Firefox!



Actually, I have two factors that may contribute:

1) I have often seen diaries on dKos about how great Firefox is and how it makes everything so much better. That could be why Kossacks use Firefox. I can't say I've seen the same thing at MyDD and Eschaton since I don't spend as much time there, but I would certainly not be surprised.

2) I'd be willing to bet that, at this point, a lot of Swing State Project's traffic comes from being linked to from other places (take for example the live-blogging of the San Francisco protest and the recent Senator Burns / Steve Vasell thing). Now, I haven't quite figured out how that may affect things, but your traffic patterns are probably significantly different than the traffic patterns of dKos, MyDD, and Eschaton (which are vast-majority bookmarks, I'm guessing).



Anyway, I'd say a once-in-a-while pimping for Firefox may be in order. It can help your stats be cooler, and it may save large quantities of people from the evil that is IE :).

Posted by: Fran for Dean at April 29, 2005 12:18 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment