Stats and browsers

I recently posted a comment in the Slashdot forums referring to some spam and virii reports I was collecting. I started getting normal clickthroughs on the link, and while watching my access logs, I noticed that, for what should be the mainstay of Linux adoption in the geek world, an awful lot of folks were not running Linux.

So I did some stats gathering…

When a web client (like IE or Mozilla) hits a webserver, it hands over an identification string that shows what sort of web browser it is. This can be used by websites to ‘tailor’ the site to a specific browser, though this is frowned upon.

I took this ID string and ran some counts on them.

In just over an hour and a half, I got around 250 hits. The top 10 browsers were:

38 "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10"
25 "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803
10 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
8 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10"
8 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR
7 "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10"
7 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
6 "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707
6 "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
5 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8"

Odd, the top browsers were… running on Windows. Huh. Well, lets break that down further. How many of those 250 clients were actually windows, and how many were others?

174 Windows
61 Linux
16 Mac
5 BSD

This sort of matches the trend we’re seeing – Mozilla and Firefox are very popular, no matter what platform you’re on, but I was a little surprised at the number of Windows users over Linux users. I would have thought Slashdot had a higher Linux percentage.

Just goes to show I’m still a rebel when it comes to my chosen environment 🙂

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A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

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2 thoughts on “Stats and browsers”

  1. Dude that’s like 25% linux users, I would say that’s pretty good, especially if you compare it to the percentage of linux vs windows users in general. Add in the fact that most of us only read slashdot from work will also pump up the windows numbers 🙂

  2. Then there’s the simple and ongoing and perniciously self-reinforcing trend to have non-Windows, non-IE browsers masquerade as Windows IE 6 (or so)…
    Many people who know how to do this don’t want to change every time they come to a stupidly programmed, browser-specific site, so they set it once — to pretend that they’re the borg-user, and if it fails to show up (because it’s ActiveX dependent or whatever), then they figure out what to do — but that’s much rarer than the ones that simply fail to serve non-IE6 users…

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