Arnþór Snær
Music and browsers
I must warn you. In this post, the term “interesting” is used in a very specific context and is not to be confused with something which is generally interesting. Nope, this is very specifically interesting.
I was going through the web stats for the indie music video-podcast website lofi.tv (one of my pet projects) and came across something interesting.
UPDATE 23.10.2008 : It turned out that lurking behind the browsers is the operating system.
Those who are using the Firefox browser seem to using the website differently than those who are using Internet Explorer. Specifically, users of the Internet Explorer view fewer pages on the site and spend less time on it than their Firefox counterparts. Plus there are more returning Firefox visitors then there are Internet Explorer.
Here are the stats from Google Analytics:
Internet Explorer
Firefox
Lofi.tv is a relatively new website so it will be interesting to see if this is a “early web adopter” bias that will phase out or something more.
Birt þann 17.10.2008 kl. 1:15.
Even though it’s easy to correlate this data towards the actual content on the site it is more likely that other factors come into play.
When I have observed user using IE in the past it feels like that they are not used to the tabbed browsing experience. In essence it feels like they are doing single threaded browsing where they follow links through a single window. In the case of your site this would mean that they check the site out, do not find it imediately intersting and press the back button. Or while browsing are attracted to something else and navigate away.
On the other end Firefox has much smoother tabbing experience and most people I have seen using Firefox are frequently using “open link in new tab”, this does not only make it simple to view more sites the same time but it also makes it simple to casually observe a site at your leisure.
Bookmarking is also alot smoother in Firefox compared to IE6 and 7.
Then other factors could include that higher percentage of veteran internet users use other browser than IE. This means that people that know how to quickly discern if browsed content is interesting to them might be using Firefox above IE.
TL;DR version: Usage statistics can more easily be correlated towards users behaviour within their selected browser than their actual music taste 
So you mean that when the user has arrived at the site, the FF user is running multi threaded while the IE user is running single threaded.
Interesting idea.
Yes, I believe that is the idea. Would need usage behaviour study to be able to confirm/deny this observation.
Well, it shouldn’t be hard to test this.
It only requires general webstats for a particular browser correlated with page views per visitor and average time spent on site.
Not that simple I am afraid.
You will need a group of people that would reflect he user base you are trying to analyse, in this case the whole web. A rough estimation would be 1000 user from varied background. Even that amount would fail to impress most analytics interested in the subject matter.
If you would base it on visits alone you would need to get usage statistics for numerous sites and actually still need to conduct general usage testing towards those sites anyway to achieve a base line.
Science sucks, but it still rocks to support your theories with facts in stead of conjecture.
>Not that simple I am afraid.
Most things sound less simple when you talk about them in more detail. I think we were thinking along the same lines (note “general”).
My idea though was to discover if this pattern was unique to lofi.tv.
To find out if the users of these browsers have these different modes of operating them, you will probably get better results if you analyse screen captures of “normal” computer use.
When all this is said and done, I think the content is the prime factor in how these statistics play out, although I don’t doubt that difference in the tools can influence usage patterns.
The possibilities are endless. This could have been caused by users at work with limited time for browsing and IE mandated and vs. FF users at home.
What about operating systems?