07 · 19

What Does Your Browser Say About You?

Recently danah boyd (not a typo...Ms. boyd is, shall we say, hooksian in her approach to capital letters), of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, tweeted the following question:

I wonder what percentage of American college students use Chrome as their primary browser. I keep seeing it everywhere.


So I decided to do an informal survey of my collegiate Twitter followers, and was surprised to find that the majority of people who responded said Chrome was what they used. I recently started using Chrome as the primary browser on my media center. But for my laptop and my work computer I use Firefox almost exclusively. I like Chrome, but I don't yet see the real need to make a switch. Am I now relegated to the older generation of the Internet simply because I don't use the new browser like all the cool kids?

This worried me a bit so I asked my friend Anne, Utah Valley University's Director of Web Resources Services, to give me a breakdown of the browsers used to connect to the public portions of the UVU home page. Here are the results for the last 30 days:

1. Internet Explorer / Windows 365,962  44.36% 
2.  Firefox / Windows 217,124  26.32% 
3.  Safari / Macintosh 108,676  13.17% 
4.  Chrome / Windows 62,047  7.52% 
5.  Firefox / Macintosh 40,370  4.89% 
6.  Safari / iPhone 5,984  0.73% 
7.  Chrome / Macintosh 5,525  0.67% 
8.  Safari / Windows 4,741  0.57% 
9.  Safari / Android 2,924  0.35% 
10.  Firefox / Linux 2,776  0.34% 
11.  Safari / iPod 2,577  0.31% 
12.  Safari / iPad 2,310  0.28% 
13.  Mozilla / Windows 697  0.08% 
14.  Chrome / Linux 587  0.07% 
15.  Opera / Windows 434  0.05% 
16.  Mozilla / Linux 420  0.05% 
17.  Safari / (not set) 410  0.05% 
18.  Firefox / SunOS 216  0.03% 
19.  Mozilla Compatible Agent / iPhone 128  0.02% 
20.  BlackBerry9530 / BlackBerry  89  0.01%

The first thing that I was struck with right away was how many damn people still use Internet Explorer. No wonder there are so many complaints of worms and viruses on our network! Because so many employees use the uvu.edu website everyday it is hard to to tell exactly from these numbers how many students are using IE. But even so, close to 50% of UVU users are experiencing the internet on one of the lamest browsers known to man.

Now compare the UVU numbers to the overall browser market share numbers:


 IE8 IE7 IE6 Firefox Chrome Safari
June 2010
 15.7% 8.1% 7.2% 46.6% 15.9% 3.6%

That means that everywhere else the numbers for the top two browsers are eerily inverse (IE in all its versions at 31%, and Firefox at 46.6%). Weird!

So getting back to the results of my informal Twitter survey (in which I simply asked "What Browser do you use?"), 71% of students who responded said they used Chrome. Since I generally regard my Twitter Friends as the most savvy of all my social media groups I can only conclude that Chrome is the new black and that soon the masses shall follow.

So which browser do you use? Why? And does it really matter?

Berkman Center Browsers Chrome College Firefox Higher Education Internet Internet Explorer Safari Social Media UVU danah boyd