Lets start with browsers, as this is something that is constantly in the news all over the world. Firefox was the number one browser here on Ghacks in 2009, with a share of 49.11%, followed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with 34,90%, Google Chrome with 6.73%, Safari with 4.02% and Opera with 3.88%.

Things have changed noticeably two years later. Internet Explorer is now the most used browser with a market share of 34.59%, that is only .31% less than two years ago. Firefox dropped significantly from the all time high to 32.14%, a drop of nearly 17% in two year’s time. Chrome managed to get market share and is now sitting at 21.01%, an increase of exactly that 17% that Firefox lost. Safari moved up .30 percent, Opera usage dropped to 2.27%, unless Opera Mini is included in the calculation which would add another 2.29% to Opera’s market share.

When you look at the different browser versions you see the following distribution:

Internet Explorer:

Internet Explorer 8 is the most used browser with 56.59%, followed by Internet Explorer 9 with 17.75%, Internet Explorer 6 with 13.83% and Internet Explorer 7 with 11.79%. Microsoft at least here on Ghacks has a lot of convincing to do to get IE users to switch to more recent versions of the browser. It is likely that the majority of requests that use IE6 or IE7 come from company networks.

Firefox:

The most used Mozilla browser on Ghacks in June 2011 was Firefox 4.0.1 with a share of 44.63%, followed by Firefox 5 with 16.07%, Firefox 3.6.17 with 11.25 and Firefox 4.0 with 4.18%. Many users are still using outdated versions of the browser, Firefox 3.6.3 for instance which is still having a share of 1.38% of all Firefox visits. This highlights one of the core problems of Mozilla: Getting users to update the browser to more recent versions. It needs to be noted that Firefox 5 has been released at the end of June. It is expected that the browser’s market share will rise considerably in July.

Chrome:

Google Chrome is the clear winner when you look at market share gain in the past two years. Most Ghacks visitors run various versions of Chrome 12 and 11. Older versions are still being used, Chrome 10 for instance has a market share of nearly 2%.

Opera Mini:

Opera Mini had more connections in June 2011 than the desktop version of Opera. That’s an increase of nearly 2% over the past two years.

Google Chrome, at least here on Ghacks, managed to snag away market share from the Firefox web browser, and not Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Operating Systems

Windows was the most used operating system back in 2009, with a share of 88.62% of all visits, followed my Apple Macintosh systems with 5.60% and Linux with 4.89%.

The situation has not changed by a lot in two year’s time. Windows is still the most used OS with a share of 84.93%, followed by Macintosh with 4.17% and Linux with 3.66%. Android is having nearly double the visit rate of the iPhone, with 1.41% to 0.77%. This is followed by SymbianOS with 0.76% and iPad with 0.72%.

Mobile use is increasing a lot, and it may be time to get a special theme for mobile users to improve their experience on site.

Windows:

Windows XP was the most used Windows operating system in June with a share of 46.51%, closely followed by Windows 7 with 42.88%. Vista came in third with a share of 9.90%. That’s a drop of 17% for XP in the last two years, and of almost 20% for Vista.

And there is apparently at least one user who is connecting to Ghacks with Windows ME.

Screen Resolution

The majority of Ghacks visitors operate a screen resolution of 1024×768 or more. When you look at individual resolutions you see 1024×768 at the top with a share of 20.59%, followed by 1366×768 with 13.85%, 1280×800 with 11.12% and 1280×1024 with 8.51%.

Screen resolutions have – surprisingly – changed only little when compared to two years ago. In 2009, 1024×768 was the most used resolution with 22%, followed by 1280×800 with 19.26% and 1280×1024 with 16.16%. Only the 1366×768 resolution was nowhere to be seen back then. It has become popular in recent years only, especially on notebook systems but also on the desktop.

Other tidbits

Almost 80% of all Ghacks visitors have Java enabled in their browser. That’s an impressive value, considering that it is likely that the majority does not need Java at all on the web.

The top five countries according to Google Analytics are:

• United States
• India
• United Kingdom
• Brazil
• Canada

Most popular languages of the operating systems are:

• en-us
• en-gb
• en
• pt-br
• fr

The top search engine is Google which refers 60.68% of all search engine visitors followed by Bing with 4.95% and Yahoo with 2.39%.

Anything else that’s missing that you would like to know, or something that you want to add? Let me know in the comments.

Some information could give clues on where the Ghacks visitors come from, what browser and operating system they use, the speed of their Internet connection and if they brush their teeth every morning.

Countries and Languages do not contain any surprises. English is the language of the blog and visitors from English speaking countries make up the majority of visitors to Ghacks. Far more interesting is the browser distribution. More than 50% of all visitors use Firefox compared to less than 40% who use Internet Explorer. Opera and Safari are almost reaching the 4% mark.

More than 90% of all visitors to my website use a Microsoft Windows operating system, less than 6% a Apple Mac and less than 3% Linux. No real surprise looking at browser resolutions either. A quarter is running 1024×768 and roughly 20% are running 1280×1024 and 1280×800.

Hope you enjoyed this small piece of information. The most interesting figure is in my opinion that Firefox is way in front of Internet Explorer. This was not always the case. Internet Explorer led the browser pack back in February by a slight margin of 1% (IE 46%, Firefox 45%). If I look back one year it was leading by 10% (IE 51%, Firefox 41%)

I assume that you want to have a successful blog with great visitors, great comments that add to your knowledge and some money that you would earn from all of this. It does not really matter if you just created a blog or want to improve of what you already have achieved. The first thing would be to write down your goals. What is the purpose of your blog ? Money ? Fame ? Women / Men ? Fun ?

It was very helpful for me to write down certain goals I had for ghacks such as reaching a certain visitor level, a pagerank or a amount of money that I wanted to earn. Write that down but be realistic. I wrote down goals that I wanted to achieve every quarter. It is for instance not possible to say when the next pagerank update will start which means that it does not make sense to have the goal of a certain pagerank in the next 3 months.

After you have written down achievable goals you should take a look at what is already there. How many visitors do you get per day ? What is your pagerank, your income ? The most important aspect in my opinion is the amount of visitors that pay your blog a visit every day which means one of the first priorities should be to increase the amount of visitors.

To do this you have several options. Use a sitemap plugin to submit the blog to google. Once that is done search technorati and sites like blogtopsites for similar blogs. Add the ones that you find interesting to your feed reader. If you have none try a web service such as netvibes to have a overview of all your subscribed feeds. Read the feeds and if you find something interesting write about it on your blog and add a trackback.

This has some advantages. First your link appears on the other blog (if not considered spam) which could mean a backlink and visitors from that blog. The blog owner might take a look at your blog as well and in the best case add it to his feed reader. You should also become a regular visitor to some of those blogs and comment on articles which leads to the same effect. Just make sure you do not spam the blogs with stupid comments.

You could also email some of the webmasters and ask for a link exchange. Don’t expect a link from a pagerank 6+ website if you have a pagerank of 0. This does not happen, take a look at sites with a lower pagerank at the beginning. Some webmasters will link to you even though you have a low pagerank. Quality of articles is almost as important as visitors or pagerank. Play that card. Every knowledgeable webmaster knows that sites with high quality articles will sooner or later receive a good pagerank.

It is also important that you write regular. You do not have to write three times a day but once a day would be fine. You could increase the output once the ball gets rolling or you see a stagnation of visitors. More articles means most of the time more traffic as well.

Talking about advertising. You surely are using adsense on the blog. If not this should be the first to add to it. If properly added to your blog you should make a decent income from adsense. This is highly hypothetical but a figure of 4-10$ per 1000 pageviews can be achieved with some customization. Everton from connectedinternet compiled a nice list of adsense tips. The best ad unit should be near the main content of the individual page.

Adsense is not the only way to make money with your blog. You could try to sell links using services such as text-link-ads which have requirements that your blog has to meet before they accept it. I do not want to get into to much detail at the moment, if you are interested in additional methods let me know and I give you some information.

Last but not least we have the pagerank. I like the pagerank of my website because it makes it so much easier to sell links on my site. You need links from other sites that have a pagerank to increase yours. The best way is to let it grow over time but you could speed it up a little bit by submitting your website to directories for instance. I think the best way is to get mentioned on other blogs.

The best advise that I can give each and everyone would be to keep the ball rolling. It will take time but to see that your blog reaches a goal that you set is a wonderful thing. Better than sex :P