David M. Harrison
Department of Physics
University
of Toronto
mailto:harrison@physics.utoronto.ca
November,
2001
I put a logger in the UPSCALE main page http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/ that records which browser was used to access the page. We logged for 7 days from Monday October 29 to Monday November 5, 2001.
It is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of these accesses were by Physics undergraduates. Note that if a student accesses another UPSCALE page directly, such as the PHY138Y home page http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PHY138Y.html, this was not logged. Also, except for the main UPSCALE server Faraday we do not have information on which of the accesses were via "public" machines such as in the Information Commons, the Nortel lab, etc. and which were from student-owned platforms, and we don't know how many different students these figures correspond to.
| What | Number | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Total accesses logged | 1685 | The text-only Lynx browser is not logged |
| Microsoft® Internet® Explorer® | 824 | Just over 80% of the accesses were for MSIE® Version 5, with some Version 4 and Version 6 accesses. |
| Netscape for Windows® | 539 | Almost 100% Version 4, a very small number were Version 3 (!) and Version 6 |
| Netscape from Faraday | 289 | Via our in-house X-terminals(*) |
| Netscape for Linux not Faraday | 11 | |
| Macintosh | 24 | Because of the small numbers, I don't "break out" Mac usage by browser in the above numbers |
| Opera | 6 | A semi-commercial browser |
| Gecko | 5 | Also known as Mozilla |
For Windows®, the University's Information Commons distributes both Netscape 4.77 and Internet® Explorer® 5.5.
(*) Assuming that all Linux accesses from a 2.4.2-2smp kernel were from Faraday.