Re: Now Listen about Internet Services

jp may (jpm@TWEB.COM)
Sat, 16 Mar 1996 13:17:46 -0700

Ev noteth:
>On Fri, 15 Mar 1996, jp may wrote:
>> So sadly, aol-like services are here to stay I imagine. But hopefully the
>> rumor that aol is switiching to netscape browser is true. That would mean
>> that about 70% of web hits instead of 35% would be netscape hits - making
>> life easier.
>
>That "rumour" had a really weird arc: I heard it from you on here a couple
>of days ago, then I turned on Headline News that night and saw it
>officially announed that AOL was going to use Netscape as its browser,
>then the next day or the day after that I walked into the department and
>saw a NY Times story saying that AOL had announced one day later that they
>had _officially_ officially contracted with Microsoft to use the Microsoft
>Internet Explorer as the _official_ offical AOL browser, ..

Ah interesting. The only reason I knew about it was .. AOL 'mirrors'
sites and by sheer bad luck they "mirrored" our site at a moment when there
was something rude on it! So I had to contact their like, web master type
department, and they mentioned it. I did not hear about the Microsoft
Explorer part of it. Cool. (Incidentally I heard someone was gonna
litigate against AOL for a mirroring problem like the one described.
Mirroring does sort of suck. Anyone who mirrors is saying "such and such a
web site looks like this, this is what such and such is presenting to the
world just now", with no disclaimers, when in fact it may not be!!

Taylor noteth:
>Also sprach 'jp may' :
>
>>So sadly, aol-like services are here to stay I imagine. But hopefully the
>>rumor that aol is switiching to netscape browser is true. That would mean
>>that about 70% of web hits instead of 35% would be netscape hits - making
>>life easier.
>
>75% of the web hits are already netscape. Though only about half are
>netscape 2.0. And you have probably all heard this but AOL signed a deal
>with microsoft a day after they signed a deal with netscape. So while they
>might provide the netscape browser, they will be making Internet Explorer
>the default. At latst, a decent fight between browsers.
>

webcrawler.com is the most-hit site on the net, they say:

>Netscape is the big winner in the browser market. Approximately 57% of the
>WebCrawler's queries
>came from from Netscape browsers. America Online's InternetWorks browser
>came in second, with
>16% of the queries, followed by a surprisingly strong showing from Lynx, a
>text-only browser whose
>users perform over 5% of WebCrawler's queries! A long list of other
>browsers collectively account for
>13% of WebCrawler's traffic.

Skip over to http://webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/Facts/Browsers.html for the
pie chart

Sorry my figures were so wrong! The last time I looked at
http://webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/Facts/Browsers.html, it was the figuhrs I
mentioned above.

Do you get 75% Netscape hits on hot wired? That would make sense.
IMHobservation commercial sites (just like, some bozo buying a lawnmower or
whatever over the web) get 40-50% aol hits. (Sadly!)

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John-Paul May jpm@tweb.com
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