Okay, regardless of the actual percentage, the fact of the matter still stands that Internet Explorer dominates the market of internet browsers and ads being blocked don't pose any real danger to web designers.
according to http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/September/javas.php, around 93% - 94% of all Internet users had JavaScript enabled in Sept. 2006. This falls right in line with my 5%-10% of users blocking ads (which also counted those users who had disabled JavaScript).
My site averages around 2k uniques per day and according to Analytics, less than 1% have JS disabled.
It should be noted that MSIE usage stats are grossly over inflated (especially on sites with lots of pages) by nefarious bots and crawlers that crawl websites scraping pages, looking for email addresses etc. I have "bad bot" traps in place on my website to detect and block bad bots before they suck down too many pages on my site and almost all of them identify themselves as either "Java" or MSIE. Other checking invariably confirms that the bots trapped in my traps but claiming to be MSIE are in fact bots and not real users. I would not be surprised if in fact two or three percent of all traffic reporting to be MSIE was in fact bad bots. I also suspect that 90%+ of all traffic recorded as Netscape 4-, MSIE4-, "Netscape compatible" or unknown by server stats programs are actually bots and crawlers of various types.
So whats the discovery? FF has adblockers? Thats not new. I'd like to hear more about that. Currently I am blocking all known bots by their user-agent but that too easy to change. I am also blocking spambots (badbehavior2 script) which works great, but I haven't found a really good solution to do what you are doing. (I used to send the bots to Microsoft Developer Tools download pages, but then I figured that wasn't such a great Idea and sent them to some myspace page).
Do you think this forum owner will be happy I cannot see adsense to make them even more fatter checks? I dont do it on purpose its just Firefox I think is a lot better to browse with and I only use IE7 when I have to with Java sites and even then its quick and I go back to Firefox
Basically any half way smart spammer, site scrapper, etc. will program their bot/crawler to report their UA string as MSIE6 using a proper UA string, otherwise it is too easy to detect them. Like only an spammer that was a complete idiot would name their bot accurately. What I do is use a series of faux web pages that linked to within the source of my pages via links that users and legitimate bots would never see or access, but bots do. Any bot that hits these traps is then flagged, tracked and automatically banned once certain conditions have been met (to prevent false positives). No canned or freely shared solution will work for long as spammers will be able to adapt to widely used solutions. The best solutions are one off solutions that nobody else uses as it becomes too time consuming for spammers to try to defeat a million different defense strategies. If you watch your logs closely and start to flag certain suspicious behaviors, you will begin to see your own patterns you can use to detect and block bad bots. I just block them from accessing my site but don't redirect them. You could be cheeky and send them into an endless loop of bogus pages that use a sleep function to draw out how long pages take to load. This will keep bots occupied indexing nothing.
MSIE 142912 71.7 % Msie 7.0 No 6100 3 % Msie 6.0 No 134445 67.5 % Msie 5.5 No 602 0.3 % Msie 5.17 No 15 0 % Msie 5.01 No 321 0.1 % Msie 5.0 No 874 0.4 % Msie 4.x No 521 0 % Msie ? No 34 0 % FIREFOX 36121 18.1 % Firefox 2.0 No 932 0.4 % Firefox 1.5.0.7 No 29321 14.7 % Firefox 1.5.0.6 No 731 0.3 % Firefox 1.5.0.5 No 89 0 % Firefox 1.5.0.4 No 343 0.1 % Firefox 1.5.0.3 No 322 0.1 % Firefox 1.5.0.1 No 185 0 % Firefox 1.5 No 334 0.1 % Firefox 1.4 No 29 0 % Firefox 1.0.x No 3752 1.4 % Firefox 0.9.x No 45 0 % Firefox 0.10.1 No 17 0 % Firefox 0.10 No 21 0 % NETSCAPE 1397 0.7 % Others 18613 9.3 % Unknown ? 10967 5.5 % Opera No 3209 1.6 % Mozilla No 2037 1 % Safari No 2032 1 % Konqueror No 183 0 % Camino No 74 0 % WebTV browser No 49 0 % MultiZilla No 20 0 % K-Meleon No 14 0 % OmniWeb No 14 0 % Links No 6 0 % LibWWW No 5 0 % W3C HTML Validator No 2 0 % Lynx No 1 0 % Code (markup): Well, here are some stats for you from my site, TGDB I wouldn't worry too much for Adblocker extensions. What I am pleased to see is how well the Firefox auto update system works, you can see there are very few people using versions before 1.5.0.7. But, another thing interesting is that there are still people using Firefox 1.0, even 0.10. Opera and Safari ... uhmm ... good browsers, but sometimes I wonder if it's worth optimising your sites and testing for compatibility for those browsers.
Here are stats for Sept from TheCounter.com, which are pulled from numerous sites and account for around 24,000,000 visitors and a couple hundred million page views. I suspect these are forged UA strings (e.g. proxies or bad bots). The way to handle all of this is to code and validate to W3C HTML & CSS specifications and test against Firefox or Opera during the development phase. Only once the bulk of development has been completed do I test against MSIE and then I usually only need to make minor tweaks to deal with IE bugs and incomplete CSS support. If one is faithful to this development practice one will learn how to avoid MSIE issues up front and it will become very easy to create sites that work correctly on all modern browsers. It is really hard to convince IE users of this, but when developing sites it really does make development much easier by testing against FF or Opera and not IE. Around 99% of "it won't work" in FF, Opera, etc. are caused by HTML/CSS programing bugs IE allowed to be introduced.