Boy, am I behind the times!

September 17, 2009 - Each week I check out the Statcounter results for our global website ("global" includes the online subscription pages).  Whether you know it or not, we do have one little cookie that we put on your computer; this helps us know some broad and anonymous information.  For example: How quickly did the first person pick up the online paper this week? (1 minute and 37 seconds yesterday.)  How many of you have visited the new Photos page? (Usually around 10 hits a day, sometimes more.)  How long is a typical visit on the site? (50% of our visitors last week stayed longer than 5 minutes--and half of those stayed for 20!) 

But we also get some technical information about visitors, information which is available to the operator of any website you visit.  This helps us know a small bit more about technical needs--what operating system your computer uses, how big is your monitor, and so on.  (Remember--this is ALL ANONYMOUS, and every website gets this info.)  Part of that information answers this question: What web browswer software did our visitors use?  Yesterday, I came across these numbers:

 Do you see this?  Does it look cryptic?  Let me explain.  MS IE means "Microsoft Internet Explorer."  Out of the last 500 hits on our website, 207 hits involved an Internet Explorer version 8.0 browser.  129 hits used some form of version 7.  (FYI--56 hits used version 6, a handful used Firefox 2 or 3, and there were some smaller numbers for some others, including one very old version of Netscape!  Good luck to you, whoever you are.)

This week, for the first time ever, version 8 outpaced version 7.  This means a couple of things.  First, a lot of you spent last week upgrading your web browser.  Apparently it went well--your computers functioned enough to get to our site.  Second, it means I'm going to have to upgrade, too.