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One great advantage of Linux, besides being free, is that when correctly tuned it works on very cheap hardware. Even if you just have a 386 or 486, you can still use thousands of decent console applications (including stuff like MP3 players and web browsers -- heck, you can even use mplayer with an EGA graphics card) and get drivers for modern hardware. An old Pentium is fast enough for a simple X11 setup with small desktop aps like WindowMaker, LyX etc.

That being said, I don't buy the 3.9% number without some supporting evidence. Even in developing nations Windows is only slowly being replaced by Linux desktops, with relatively few major rollouts in recent months, and while Linux can run on low cost computers, the problem is that it's not exactly easy as pie to tune and configure properly. Internationalization is another issue ..

As of March 25, 2002, IE 6's global browser usage share was 30.5 percent, up from 2.4 percent shortly after its initial launch only seven months ago, according to WebSideStory's StatMarket (www.statmarket.com), a leading source for data on global Internet user trends. Meanwhile, Netscape's global usage share has sharply declined. Netscape held steady with about a 12 percent global usage share for more than a year, until the release of IE6, at which point it began dropping precipitously. Netscape's global usage share is currently just over 7 percent. Global browser usage share is the percentage of daily Internet users worldwide that access the Internet through a particular browser.

--- http://www.statmarket.com/cgi-bin/sm.cgi?sm&featur e&week_stat

Please post further quotes and stats below... I was looking for raw numbers but couldn't find any...

Davak

Yes, all 0.24 per cent of you.

StatMarket publishes statistics based on the combined data from tens of millions of daily Internet users visiting the tens of thousands of sites that use WebSideStory's HitBox Enterprise and other HitBox Web audience analysis services. HitBox is an outsourced Web site measurement and analysis service that provides real-time statistics about online visitor behavior.

...

While the 125,000+ Web sites worldwide that HitBox monitors are self-selected, StatMarket's figures are culled from more than 50 million unique visitors who visit those sites every day

(another AC)

Statmarket has some figures available... most need subscription but amongst their (older) free sample stats it shows that not even Unix is anywhere near 8%.

This is March 99, but the proportions shouldn't have changed that much...

Windows: 94.39% (and increasing)
Mac: 2.63% (and dropping)
Other: 2.54% (increasing)
Unix: 0.44% (dropping)

Even if Linux is counted as the entirety of both Unix and Other, it's no more than 3%.

According to the OS version chart, in March 99 Linux had a huge and fairly stable market share of... 0.2%.

Other online stat sites show similar amounts of considerably less than 1%, and many of these sites depend on accesses which would tend to boost Linux (lots of students on Linux machines at uni, and we might suggest that many people who are not online and hence not represented are amongst the less technically savvy, hence probably running the 'default' OS of Windows)

Netscape hasn't been the predominant browser in ages. According to StatMarket, IE was being used for 86% of all web traffic, compared to about 14% for Netscape. This statistic was released on 6/26/2000: since there's been no major release of Netscape since then, I think it's fair to guess that their numbers haven't increased much.

[B]ut statmarket.com

Maybe next time I'll remember to provide the right link (bet you didn't know there were four t's in statmarket.com)...

Oh, well. If it happens regularly to the editors of SlashDot, it can happen to even the best of us, right?

It's hard to emulate someone extending his or her arms to either side in a subject line, but anyway...

I find it funny, but statmarket.com is nice enough to represent the browser breakdown with this graphic.

Clicked-through? OK, guess which browser is represented by the red slice?

Excuse my attempt to poke fun at the generosity of "the industry's most accurate source of data on global Internet user trends". Bring up the front page to their site to see the graphic in context. I found it slightly amusing.

Also excuse my (poor) attempts to disguise this "me, too" post as something else. As others have already mentioned, the numbers do vary from one context to another, there is no one, solid (or as you put it, real) browser breakdown to which we can point, and a lot of the numbers taken as authoritive are based on a lot of false premises or applied to cases far beyond those from which the statistics were taken.

There's evidence to back up your statement: Statmarket.com, a subscription service that provides browser stats based on samples culled from sites that user their server stats technology, used to be free about a year ago. Even back then, their stats seemed to indicate that the prevalent setup for machines was 800*600 and 16-bit colour.

From Statmarket

BROWSER / % of total MICROSOFT / 86.08 NETSCAPE / 13.90 OTHER / 0.02 OPERATING SYSTEM / % of total WINDOWS / 93.63 OTHER / 3.48 MACINTOSH / 2.53 UNIX / 0.36

From Statmarket

BROWSER / % of total MICROSOFT / 86.08 NETSCAPE / 13.90 OTHER / 0.02 OPERATING SYSTEM / % of total WINDOWS / 93.63 OTHER / 3.48 MACINTOSH / 2.53 UNIX / 0.36

You've got a good point about games for Linux. I think that's a real weakness if they're marketing this as a game machine.

Web browsing software? No. Email clients? No. KDE? No.

I imagined the OS would be behind the scenes. Rather than "It's Linux a computer for your living room", the marketing should be "It's a console that plays Linux games." I don't agree that no one will want Internet access. There are lots of people who don't want to learn computers just to surf and send email. There are more people using WebTV to surf than Linux.

Who cares if the underlying OS is Windows, Linux, or any other operating system. You should turn the machine on, insert CD, pick up controller, and press start.

The reason I gave that example of "The Sims" was to show how you could turn it on, insert the CD, and start playing. If it's going to succeed, it needs to "just work".

But as you say they are "IT professionals" which would surely increase the chances they have it. In my mind the fact that they are "IT professionals" will only decrease the chance that whatever they decide to test it with will actually have Flash installed. I know I wouldn't have it in there to judge this contest. This contest should be about simplicity and elegance to a given solution. Assuming Flash is present has NO elegance.

It's always struck me as odd that Opera isn't open source. I mean they're trying to pass themselves off as an 'alternative' to the gorillas (coincidentally rhymes with 'mozilla'?), which seems like the standard stance of Linux and many other open source programs.

It seems like GPLing Opera back when their CSS support was non-existant would have helped them catch up. Then again, the only people I know who use Opera strike me as being the type who only like playing with computers if it will result in improvement. But how could the Linux community ever get cosy with a browser that's so non-free it costs money!

For that matter it almost seems quaint that a company would try and sell a browser. Maybe if you had a clear superiority over the competition -- but with a market share so low it's off the charts? Opera, what are you smoking? Open source the Linux browser if not the Windows!

Oh yeah? you big mounthed cricket, then how do you explain this

Note that it's not just Linux, but all unixes combined. What a pity. Xah xah@best.com http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html

If the market share has increased then how do you explain this? It seems that no matter how many of those tacky Imacs they sell, there seems to be no change in the number of Mac Users on the internet (and if you look closely you will see that the line is ever-so-slightly decreasing). If this is Macintosh's big break into the internet, I'm not impressed.

The people who run the Hitbox counter take all the information they get from people hitting that, calculate it daily, and publish it as is. Very useful service, even if it's only 30,000,000 hits a day.

Try it out, it's http://www.statmarket.com.

It won't, but the % os users on those platforms is negligible. You can't please everyone. By writing IE for all flavors of Windows, and Mac, you have 97% of the web surfer market. Why would MS want to waste their time on factions of 3% of all surfers? That'd be a waste of money.

You don't think so? Check this out. Hard numbers: StatMarket