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The Internet

Browser Detection of Website Statistics Services 25

Posted by timothy from the from-one-to-another dept.
An anonymous reader submits "David Naylor has reviewed the browser recognition capabilities of seven free website statistics services. Among other things, he kills the myth that many Opera users go unaccounted for in website statistics because of the default UA spoofing. Furthermore, he shows that the quality of browser recognition ranges from absolutely abysmal to near perfect."
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Browser Detection of Website Statistics Services More

Browser Detection of Website Statistics Services

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  • What would be more interesting: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @08:18PM (#11883305)
    The same but with web server log analyzers. For example I suspect Webalizer for not being accurate concerning user agents.
    • Iirc from job 2 years back, depends on how you have it config'd. Yes, you can set it up very sloppily, thus easily spoofed. Otoh default setup on RH9 was maybe too accurate, in that it logged the mozilla's that came with RH, Debian, and SuSE on 3 separate rows even tho all were (supposedly) the same version.

  • Nice work - some minor suggestions for 'ya (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @08:26PM (#11883389) Homepage
    Nice analysis David. I'd personally love to see Analog [analog.cx] (an oldie but googie) added to your table and my guess is that Urchin would be another popular one.

    As you know, one can easily spoof the User Agent (and Firefox makes this totally trivial) - any idea on what percentage of folks are doing this type of stuff? Too bad that Slashdot didn't put this on the front page, because then you could analyze that inbound traffic.

    P.S. FYI FWIW: using Analog, here's my browser percentages [komar.org] for Christmas/2004. I also have a Browser Info Page [komar.org] for those folks interested in seeing real-time what their browser is reporting.

  • I haven't noticed this in any stats I've viewed... does MSN Explorer use IE's UA string, or can it be counted on its own?

    It would be helpful for determing how many people out there actually want a candy-interface all-in-one browsing/email/chat experience.

  • Thanks for the post (Score:3, Interesting)

    by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2005 @10:47PM (#11884564) Journal
    I noticed that many blogs run stats/hitcounters and was wondering which one I should put on mine.

  • Adblock extension interference? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've heard it claimed that Adblock
    drops Mozilla stats for services
    that use web bug like things to
    track. Anyone have an idea of just
    how much this warps reported stats?

  • Cannot be accurate (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    he kills the myth that many Opera users go unaccounted for in website statistics because of the default UA spoofing

    It's just not possible to build accurate statistics from observing HTTP traffic, and I wish people would stop trying. HTTP logs are good for one thing: performance tuning your server.

    Don't believe me? Here's a simple test. Fire up a traffic logger, Internet Explorer, and Opera. Go to a typical dynamic website in Internet Explorer, click on a link, and hit the back button. Now do the

    • When you say 'observing HTTP traffic', do you mean normal hitcounter services with code which you insert into you HTML? I'm a little confused.
    • When measuring browser usage statistics, the number of hits isn't as important as the number of unique connections made. Even if IE met the RFC correctly, hits wouldn't be very telling. A person who opens every page on the site 1000 times each should count the same as a user who opens one page - they shouldn't count as 100,000 users.

      Measuring connections can have drawbacks, too. Did the user close and open their browser, or did a different user from inside the same proxy make a connection? Even so, it
  • To the best of my recollection, Internet Explorer spoofs Netscape by saying it's Mozilla in the HTTP User-Agent header, then adding parenthetical remarks that indicate it is really MSIE. So the notion of Opera pretending to be MSIE means that it has to pretend it's MSIE being Mozilla/Netscape. Microsoft introduced this spoofing because of some bug in web servers, I think that caused MSIE to fail.

    I just wish that all the browsers would send what they really are, and that websites wouldn't deliberately ki

  • I'd rather just use AWstats [sourceforge.net] locally than ask someone else for my site's traffic statistics.

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