UCL Moodle sees in excess of 30,000 visitors per day at the moment and with this number of people coming along it produces some interesting statistics to look over and try to see any patterns which can be addressed. One of which was that Safari is now the most popular web browser accessing the site. With this in mind we published some advice about using the browser, as Safari and Moodle don’t necessarily play well together.

For those who are interested, here are some statistics:

One thing you may notice is the rather rapid descent of Internet Explorer, going from a 55% share and 24 months later coming second in top from Safari – an unlikely outsider. Strangely the adoption of Firefox – a free and open source browser seems to initially correlate with that of IE, each notice in May/June 2009 where IE slumps, Firefox seems to take a reflective ascent. The same happens again in April 2010.

There is also an interesting growth in Apple’s Safari. Perhaps new students arriving with laptops for study (August 2010) and another, perhaps less mysterious increase in December 2011 is Christmas?

One thing to note is that Google’s Chrome is a steady grower in the browser area. Opera (a very powerful browser) isn’t used much at all and other/mobile devices barely try to access Moodle at all. Just to note; we are looking to a iOS and Android mobile Moodle very soon! We will keep you updated.

Attention: Safari users

If you are using Safari (or Chrome and Opera), which is the default web browser for Apple Macs and iOS devices then you may have noticed that you don’t get the same experience in Moodle when compared to using other web browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.

When using Moodle with Safari, Chrome and Opera you do not get the graphical tools when composing content. This maybe when you’re using discussion forums, updating your profile, writing out quiz answers or, if you are staff, creating course content. This is a problem and sadly will be with us until we upgrade to Moodle 2.0 (September 2012 at the earliest). The image below will show the comparion.

Moodle and Safari

No editor available, hard to add content to Moodle.

Moodle and Firefox

Editor is available, much easier to add richer content into Moodle

Note

We understand the editor in Moodle isn’t exactly mindblowing with functionality, but it’s not that bad. It’s much, much harder to write up content, or indeed create a course, if you don’t know this existed.