I've come across a couple of good sites which highlight the ongoing changes in browser useage and distribution. Statcounter.com has been around for a long time, and was one of the first statistics websites I recommended to my clients before Google Analytics and Woopra came along. Statcounter Globalstats is their new minisite devoted to browser useage, and it's really interesting to see the slow demise of IE6 and 7 as Firefox and Opera take on new users.

You can view stats by country, region or globally and you can categorise by browser, browser type, OS and search engines. Really quite useful for a grand overview! It still doesn't replace detailed browser stats for your own website, as you will of course need to cater to all your own users rather than taking a global view.

The really interesting thing is that if you view by month or 2 months, you can clearly see the effect that business use has on IE and FF. IE useage for 6/7 spikes during the week and FF spikes at the weekend. This is as clear an indication as you could wish that businesses are not yet on board with the latest generations of browsers. It's also a slight vindication for the EU antitrust ruling against Microsofts browser monopoly - bundling IE with all Windows installations.

The demise of IE will be music to the ears of the crowd at www.bringdownie6.com, a site devoted to advancing the demise of the much maligned standards-uncompliant browser. Set up by .Net Mag, it's a call to action for webdesigners and corporations to ditch the anachronistic browser and update to the freely available standards compliant alternatives.

This image illustrates the slow demise of IE6 as Firefox 3 takes a steadily increasing market share. Notice the large spikes in browser useage on weekdays compared to weekends. IE6 has a lot of business users, companies which have modified the core code for their own purposes and have not had the resources to upgrade to IE7 or an alternative browser. FF and IE7 exhibit less fluctuation, with slight peaks at the weekend, indicating a more general useage pattern.