Never Assume

When we look at the traffic on our web pages, we always check to see what browsers are being used. About 8% of our visitors use Safari, the Mac browser, so we've always assumed that 8% of our user population have Macs. However, we lately noticed that only a couple of screens down in the statistics array are numbers for operating systems. 12% of our user population is coming in from a Macintosh OS. That's about double the national rate of websurfers using Macs. Our friends who are techies or artists point out that there are lots of both in Santa Fe, and assert that techies and artists prefer Macintosh. We'll try not to make an assumption about the proportion of techies and/or artists among our web visitors...

Update: Roy Tennant, until recently at California Digital Library and now at OCLC, said on twitter, "across a few sites of my media empire, I see a range of 7-plus % to 12% Mac users. I think it's on the rise." So maybe the proportion is everywhere higher in libraryland than out in the wider world.