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It seems strange that Drupal with 3.5% market share (globally across both public and private sector) of CMS'es is on the list and yet WordPress, which is the most dominant CMS by far, isn't on the list despite having 59.7% CMS market share (figures from W3Techs).

Maybe the European public sector uses Drupal more than WordPress (I have no specific figures on that), but I seriously doubt it considering the 17:1 worldwide usage disparity. Or is Drupal considered less secure than WordPress and needs more fixes? Again, I doubt that - WordPress is a much bigger target for hackers and has a lot more third-party plugins which vary very widely in quality of code.

we're talking about all Internet sites, not just a small portion of Top 10,000 or Top 1 Million sites

No. Wrong. W3Techs doesn't work that way. From W3Tech's technology overview: "We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We use website popularity rankings provided by Alexa (an Amazon.com company) using a 3 months average ranking. Alexa rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well."

See W3Tech's FAQ and overview.

we're talking about all Internet sites, not just a small portion of Top 10,000 or Top 1 Million sites

No. Wrong. W3Techs doesn't work that way. From W3Tech's technology overview: "We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We use website popularity rankings provided by Alexa (an Amazon.com company) using a 3 months average ranking. Alexa rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well."

See W3Tech's FAQ and overview.

Huh? Joomla and Drupal have hardly lost any market share in the last year, and they're both near the top - Wordpress is still far and away the biggest contender.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management

The user base was not "overwhelmingly against the change". Most users don't care one way or the other and again, most of the noise on the forums were people misrepresenting systemd's design and goals(ex saying that it was designed for the desktop when it was actually solving problems on severs), posting fake or already solved. or taking some forum post out of context.

Proof of all of this is the lack of adoption of Deuvian. If developers were so upset they would contribute to that instead of Debian, but they haven't. Take a look at these stats. What do the top four distros hae in common?. They all run systemd. If users were actually upset, they would switch, but most haven't. Instead we have people trying to hijack every single post about Linux by whining about how their feelings are hurt about systemd being adopted no matter how off topic.

Want to know how the Linux community handles bad ideas? Years ago we had Devfs, people hated it because it wasn't traditional and complained it was badly implemented but in the end, it was adopted with far less discussion than systemd. What did the devs do? They looked, realized that even though the implementation left a lot to be desired it solved some very real wold problems, sat down and created a competing implementation that solved all of the same problems with fewer downsides. Remember bitkeeper? It solved many problems but in the end turned out to be unworkable, did they go back to CVS? NO. Linus himself sat down and started GIT because he couldn't stand the thought of going back to the old way. In the same way, systemd solves very real problems, especially on servers but not just on servers. I'm convinced that if systemd were to be replaced, it would not be a rollback but a redesign of the core systemd functionality, done better.

Flash is here to stay

Even Adobe is telling people to convert to HTML5. Look at the steady decline in Flash usage. Flash has lost.

> and therefore Linux is NOT going to become the largest market portion any time soon.

Oh really? Try taking off the myopic PC blinders for once.

Google achieved 2 Billion devices with Linux in 9 years what Microsoft WinCE couldn't do even in 20 years

MS may have 96% of the gamer's PC desktop but that ignores all the servers and virtual machines running non-Windows, let alone consoles.

MS is a total joke on the Top 500 super computers.

Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs Windows.

Hell, even 33% of Azure runs Linux

In the OS server space things get fuzzy -- are we talking Web Servers? Database Servers? Email servers? Windows be has high as 33% or 20%-- there are no accurate stats.

Let's recap where Linux dominates:

[x] Mobile: Linux
[x] Super computers: Linux
[x] Servers: Technically *nix, due to BSD and OSX.
[ ] PC Gaming Desktop

The only place Windows has a niche in is PC gaming and XBox -- but desktops aren't the only thing anymore.

In the global space MS is slowly becoming irrelevant next to Android, iOS, PS3/4, Servers, Super computers, and Wii/Switch.

Not bad for an OS that "(free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"

I never knew he created FreeBSD. ( the real workhorse of the internet )

You mean the dark horse, don't you? I heard there are a few FreeBSD web servers still running. Nothing against FreeBSD, mind you, some of Linux's core devs were raised on daemon milk.

I think the reason for why they've picked flash to survive is that its by far the most popular plugin both in install base and in use in websites.

https://w3techs.com/technologi...

Flash is said to have 7.2% of use, while Java has less than 0.1%.

Of course, it can be different for the sets of websites you visit.

Flash install base is about 76%: https://metrics.mozilla.com/fi...

Is Red Hat concerned with how systemd has driven so many Linux users to FreeBSD?

Considering BSD has 0.7% server market share which actually declined by 0.2% over the past year, and unmeasurably microscopic desktop share, your loaded question has a false premise.

Flash ain't going away

Yes, it is. The trend is clear.

- "Of course it has ... it just escapes you as you never tried it."
That's a reply like from a religious person. "the love of God escapes you as you never tried it"
- "You failed to name one ... "
Like every other language that is not JS.
All languages have the same power, so obviously I was talking about them.
- "The bugs of what?"
===, the automatic semicolon, "0" = true, and other bugs like the IEEE 754 standard.
- "Nope ... plenty of tools are written in JavaScript ..."
From 0.15% to 0.20% in a year.
https://w3techs.com/technologi...
Java (Tomcat), from 0.52% to 0.57%
https://w3techs.com/technologi...
So, there are way more Java tools written in a year than for Node.js.

- "Of course it has ... it just escapes you as you never tried it."
That's a reply like from a religious person. "the love of God escapes you as you never tried it"
- "You failed to name one ... "
Like every other language that is not JS.
All languages have the same power, so obviously I was talking about them.
- "The bugs of what?"
===, the automatic semicolon, "0" = true, and other bugs like the IEEE 754 standard.
- "Nope ... plenty of tools are written in JavaScript ..."
From 0.15% to 0.20% in a year.
https://w3techs.com/technologi...
Java (Tomcat), from 0.52% to 0.57%
https://w3techs.com/technologi...
So, there are way more Java tools written in a year than for Node.js.

Being considered a toy is a requirement for being a game changer. If a technology is taken seriously early on, it's inmediately locked down with patents and pricetags by big business. That's why toys always win in the long run.

iPhone? Toy. Who want's that?
PC? Toy. Here are the specs and the architecture, for free. Go play. We sell real computers. 20 years later x86 is all there is.
The Web? A toy. ... Whooops.
PHP? JavaScript? Toy languages, laughed out of the room, even still yet. While everybodys laughing, they're taking over the web. Well, PHP at least.
WordPress? Yet another shitty CMS/bloggin engine by someone who can't programm. Toy. Oh. 102 Million active installs. 25% of the web. Mmmh.

Toys win, because they initialy aren't taken seriously and thus have room to get adopted by those who want to build stuff without being at the mercy of some psychopath corporation. Once they've gained traction it's to late to box them in and everybody has to follow suit to stay in the game.

It's that simple.

Being considered a toy is a requirement for being a game changer. If a technology is taken seriously early on, it's inmediately locked down with patents and pricetags by big business. That's why toys always win in the long run.

iPhone? Toy. Who want's that?
PC? Toy. Here are the specs and the architecture, for free. Go play. We sell real computers. 20 years later x86 is all there is.
The Web? A toy. ... Whooops.
PHP? JavaScript? Toy languages, laughed out of the room, even still yet. While everybodys laughing, they're taking over the web. Well, PHP at least.
WordPress? Yet another shitty CMS/bloggin engine by someone who can't programm. Toy. Oh. 102 Million active installs. 25% of the web. Mmmh.

Toys win, because they initialy aren't taken seriously and thus have room to get adopted by those who want to build stuff without being at the mercy of some psychopath corporation. Once they've gained traction it's to late to box them in and everybody has to follow suit to stay in the game.

It's that simple.

PHP was special-purpose in the days where it was that or cgi-perl, but I'm not sure what the fuck PHP is now. It still feels like BASIC but for web programmers.

Now it's the language that drives more than 80% of the web. There's this thing called "Wordpress", you may have heard of it. The code is shit, to be sure, and it's much more popular than it is good, but it's still a thing. More modern frameworks (Zend Framework 1/2, both of which I've contributed to, Laravel, Symfony, etc) are much better. Maybe it isn't the most well designed or efficient language, but it lets you get shit done, which at the end of the day is the idea. Rapid development is important; hardware is cheap, developers are expensive.

Mobile browser statistics suggest otherwise, but OK let's join you in fantasy land where "iOS just isn't relevant" to the web.

How about Adobe? Is Adobe relevant to Flash? Because it was Adobe who pulled the plug on Flash mobile in 2011. Flash on mobile is a bloated battery-draining joke. Apple merely recognized that fact first.

And if you're suggesting that mobile web is less relevant than desktop web, you've gone full retard.

The decline HAS happened, and is still happening (are you saying a decline from ~14% to ~11% in a single year is "insignificant"??). Flash was everywhere 8 years ago. People built fucking site navigation out of Flash, if not entire websites. Those days are long gone, Flash is relegated to specific niche cases now, and continues to dwindle. The mobile-ization of web access (on all platforms) is absolutely the death knell of Flash, albeit one with a very long tail.

3% is not much. Let us look at a different, less drastic, graph from your own site:

http://w3techs.com/technologie...

The "major decline" you and everyone else has been on about nearly a decade just hasn't happened.

The decline of Flash is proceeding at a steady pace. You can't argue with the trend. It has happened.

That is not what their methodology or FAQ describes at all.

They investigate actual web pages, not somehow identify unused modules sitting on the server, which seems to be what you're suggesting.

That is not what their methodology or FAQ describes at all.

They investigate actual web pages, not somehow identify unused modules sitting on the server, which seems to be what you're suggesting.

Yeah, I can't wait to hear how this is spun I to a tale of how great OSS is.

Wait no more!

The article states that the analysts have identified 8,867 infected IP addresses. In April 2014, Netcraft confirmed that there were roughly 958,919,789 sites on the web at that time. Independently of them, W3Techs state that nearly 68% of servers are running some form of Unix, and the vast majority of those can be safely assumed to be running Linux.

So let's say, then, that better than half a billion sites are potentially vulnerable to this exploit, but in practical terms, over the course of years, a mere 8,867 of them actually were infected by this exploit. That means that, uh... carry the 9... somewhere around, oh... 0.0017734% of all vulnerable Linux sites have been compromised by a hitherto unknown and unmitigated active exploit.

Clearly this debacle is indisputable proof that Linux security is a shambolic, shameful charade that needs to be stopped before the world collapses into chaos.

no built-in support for Flash and/or PDFs

Firefox has built-in support for PDFs. Why would you want built-in support for Flash? Look at the Flash usage trend. Adobe began the end of Flash when they dropped mobile support. Flash is a go nowhere, dead end technology in its death throes.

Comodo, not to be confused with the similarly named Komodia from yesterday, are the world biggest issuer of SSL certificates.

Hardly. They give away a bunch of worthless email certs that aren't trusted by anyone, allow me to make wanking motions. No one that matters uses them and no browser that matters trusts their free certs by default.

Ahh, the post of someone who's riled up but doesn't actually understand what they are talking about.

Email certs != SSL server certs. Are you sure you aren't thinking about CAcert instead, which does offer free email and server certs, but which isn't included in browsers? Obviously, CAcert's lack of inclusion in browsers makes it less useful for mose uses. Comodo, however, is a major certificate authority.

Various surveys, including this one (daily updates available here), scan HTTPS-enabled and report on the share of CAs.

Comodo recently overtook Symantec, which was probably helped by CloudFlare enabling TLS for all their customers (including free ones) using Comodo-issued certs -- that single action essentially doubled the number of HTTPS sites on the internet.

Comodo, not to be confused with the similarly named Komodia from yesterday, are the world biggest issuer of SSL certificates.

Hardly. They give away a bunch of worthless email certs that aren't trusted by anyone, allow me to make wanking motions. No one that matters uses them and no browser that matters trusts their free certs by default.

Ahh, the post of someone who's riled up but doesn't actually understand what they are talking about.

Email certs != SSL server certs. Are you sure you aren't thinking about CAcert instead, which does offer free email and server certs, but which isn't included in browsers? Obviously, CAcert's lack of inclusion in browsers makes it less useful for mose uses. Comodo, however, is a major certificate authority.

Various surveys, including this one (daily updates available here), scan HTTPS-enabled and report on the share of CAs.

Comodo recently overtook Symantec, which was probably helped by CloudFlare enabling TLS for all their customers (including free ones) using Comodo-issued certs -- that single action essentially doubled the number of HTTPS sites on the internet.

nobody except Facebook, Google, Yahoo, the BBC, Adobe, Dailymotion, Foxnews, MSNBC, Alipay, Dropbox, Forexfactory, ZDNet, in fact 11.8% of the top 10 million websites on the PLANET use Flash on their main pages.

But I suppose a DARPA funded report means absolutely nothing to you, does it? http://w3techs.com/technologie...

Here are a couple of charts which illustrate the decline of Flash usage on websites. One from Built With and one from W3Techs. The trend is decidedly downwards.

I use Java apps all the time and there is no different between native apps and Java apps. Incomplete list of Java apps that I use: VisualParadigm, Eclipse, FreeMind, ArgoUML. JEdit is quite popular, just like Netbeans.

"Java is just a pig, with its jitting, memory hogging, heavyweight thread locks, etc, etc."

Sure, whatever.

Java is one of the most popular languages, topped only by C, and sometimes ASP.NET and PHP.
http://langpop.com/
http://w3techs.com/technologie...

"well, distributions backport security fixes, so 5.3.3 is secure on distro XYZ".

Are you aware of any analysis as to the extent that is actually true, ie for distro X or Y which patches really have been backported and which are skipped?

I had a quick poke about the W3Tech site and couldn't really see much of their methodology, especially in terms of how they identify PHP usage and what version is being used. I'd have though that if you looked at their PHP page there should be a not insignificant number where they can reasonably guess it's using PHP (due to file extensions in URLs perhaps) but not be able to identify the version being used.

I wonder how much your "% of installs that are secure" statistic could be inaccurate due to most (I'd hope) sites that care even slightly about security suppressing the Apache header PHP version information. Are they just missing from the W3Tech stats? It's possible that a significant number of the "secure" PHP installs could be invisible to your calculations because the sort of people who keep their software up to date are the same people who follow fairly basic server set up recommendations.

I suppose there are also questions as to what "insecure" means in practice. For bulk hosting sites running unknown third party code everything is critical but for a lot of sites running their own code whether they are actually "insecure" depends not only on what PHP does but also what their code does. Eg for the most recent PHP 5.4 release there is a fix for a fairly nasty looking bug in unserialize(), but (as I understand it) a site admin with a defined codebase might quite legitimately determine that they never use unserialize() on user generated data and not be in any rush to update if they have other things to be doing. PHP version 5.4.35 might be "insecure" for the purposes of your stats but may not be in practice someone's server if they know they don't use unserialize() in an exploitable fashion (or mcrypt).

None of the above should be interpreted as criticism of your analysis, just food for thought. I find what you have done very interesting and expect that even if there are 'hidden' secure servers, the number of insecure ones would still be alarmingly high.

That's only because Solaris is expensive. (As is the sun/oracle hardware if you're running it on that). Otherwise, its pretty damn stable even if you walk over and pull the power cords

(We have 7 Solaris boxes from the 1u pizza box to the M5000 running)

To have 'done pretty well' it would have to have captured market share.

For websites, probably the easiest usage to quantify, its less than 0.1%

http://w3techs.com/technologie...

Thats not less than 1%, thats less that zero point one percent.

Did pretty well didn't it.

Any idea the market share in other applications, say database servers for example?

The real question is, Why is anybody still runing WordPress?

Yeah, nearly a quarter of the Internet runs it...what imbeciles!

http://w3techs.com/technologie...

It's Ubuntu, so whatever their market share is.

Not much. RedHat/CentOS dominate — and they are vulnerable...

It is also an OSX bug, an HPUX bug, a vxWorks bug, and, well, really, a bug in any OS that has bash installed

Not quite. Merely having it installed is not enough. Placing it into the all-important role of /bin/sh — that is what makes it particularly dangerous — and a bug of whatever OS does such a thing.

You may have all your CGI-scripts written in Perl or Lisp, but if you use system() anywhere to spawn off a different program, then you are exposed to this problem on those systems.

Whether or not Ubuntu and CentOS are different OSes or just different distributions, is a matter of semantics...

You can knock-off your silly attempt to discredit me, accusing me of posting as an AC to support my own post. No one is buying it. It's also not relevant to the topic at all.

You've written a book here. Why does it bother you so much that people like something that you don't like?

The problem is you've made it clear before you haven't even used PHP much

That must have been in your imagination. I've never said anything that would imply that.

So why not create your own page to summarise your arguments like the guy who wrote the fractal article did? Then you can just link to it.

I'd like to point out that you did, in fact, link to an article that addresses (some) of the shortcomings of the fractal article. There's even a discussion below which includes the fractal author. You ignored the facts there, what possible hope do I have?

I'm sorry that reality does not conform to your preconceptions. That's not my fault.

I see three types of PHP developers here:

I'm sure you've done the relevant research prior to drawing that conclusion, right? Oh...

I get the impression you're very academically oriented, rather than real-world development oriented.

I honestly don't see anything wrong with that. I'll also note that most (if not all) of the "real-world" development stuff you run across is worse than useless -- the technical equivalent of self-help books. You'd think the guys in the trenches would notice, with the never-ending parade of fads competing for their attention, and start to demand actual research to inform them.

The problem with this "feelings" based approach that's become so popular is that it doesn't actually inform you. You don't like PHP. Rather than try to work out why, you do a google search for "PHP sucks" or whatever and try to find reasons to validate your feelings. When you run across an article like the fractal article, which is absolutely abysmal, you feel like you've hit on something akin to real research. It's not. (You'll find many of his facts are flat-out wrong, and the bulk of the article is completely unsubstantiated opinion.) Even worse, it actively discourages you from using your critical thinking skills to make an objective evaluation.

I've not found anyone who works with it to any reasonable degree, who has worked with other technologies to allow them to compare, and who actually likes it.

Check this very thread. Hell, check this post.

If what you say is true, that it's actually fine, then where are all the high end professionals (i.e. not just amateurs and people at the junior level) that use it and actually like it?

Check this thread. If that doesn't satisfy you, consider that PHP powers >80% of websites (a link for you) not just small sites, but also major sites like Yahoo and Wikipedia. You don't get that kind of marketshare by being a virtually unusable mess, like some folks here seem to believe. You get that kind of marketshare by being better suited to the task than competing languages.

I don't think you'll need to look too far to find "high end professionals" (I wonder what your criteria for that would be?) that actually like it. You've got an awfully big pool of users to draw from.

As you're practically minded, why not ask yourself how PHP became so popular? Why has it continued to grow year-after-year in the face of increasing competition and decreasing reputation on sites like Slashdot? How do the alternatives compare to it in practical terms?

Granted, very awful things can also become quite popular, though you can usually find a good reason for it. That's something exploring questions like the above can help discover.

Netcraft.com: "In the February 2014 survey we received responses from 920,102,079 site"

W3tech.com: "Usage of web servers for websites .. Apache: 62.5%, Nginx: 18.2%, Microsoft-IIS: 14.4%"

Can someone explain it in plain english without requiring links to a dozen different projects?

I'll try.

How popular is it?

Answer:

GlassFish is used by less than 0.1% of all the websites whose web server we know.

Source: http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ws-glassfish/all/all

Why would someone choose Glassfish over Tomcat, JBoss, or one of the commercial alternatives? Can someone explain it in plain english without requiring links to a dozen different projects?

Answer: Glassfish is a full Java EE implementation with good NetBeans support that can start and stop very quickly and is appropriate for development. Tomcat and JBoss are better for deployment, since they can better manage larger volumes of traffic. Tomcat and JBoss are also better supported for Eclipse.

And they're down to 1.1% of all web servers, all FreeBSD. From the list of "Popular websites using FreeBSD" only one is in Alexa's top 500 and that's php.net. The Alexa rankings:

php.net: 229
turbobit.net: 557
jvzoo.com: 771
cpanel.net: 1096
neoseeker.com: 5488
starpulse.co: 5818
salespider.com: 4710
weblancer.net: 5125
extranetinvestment.com: 5834
msi.com: 6702

It is literally less than a handful (the top four) that means BSD even still has a presence and 80% of that is probably just one site. I guess BSD code is lots of places like in OS X and embedded and routers and whatnot but BSD is practically dead as a server (cue and queue the Netcraft and Monty Python jokes, please take a number). Who, at this point, would be interested in building a new network stack for BSD? I guess Juniper would since they use it for Junos, but honestly not that many others...

For one thing, the server whose maintainer announced plans to ignore DNT was Apache HTTP Server, one of the most widely used freely licensed web servers. This survey claims that over 65% of web sites run Apache. For another, there may be additional proprietary, company-specific web application code that ignores DNT, and a browser has no way of knowing about it. P3P is supposed to express a site's privacy policy in a machine-readable form, but Google and others have policies that are too complex to be represented in P3P.

Where do you get the statistics for that claim?

Here you go. Let's just say it's a bit better than a "quick look" at a couple of job websites.

That doesn't make any sense either.

Sure it does. It's found a nice niche with high-traffic sites. It's share as a server-side language for the web sits at around 3%. I'd call that pretty minor!

There is a lot more going on in terms of custom software development than web sites.

Obviously! Now try to put that in the context of the discussion.

So let me get this straight, because crappy Word Press blogs outnumber enterprise sites you think PHP is dominant? The mind boggles, even Blizzard and RIOT build their server infrastructures in Java. Almost anything complicated is done in Java or .NET, yeah everyone knows about your handful of PHP examples but you seem completely ignorant of what the web actually runs on.

I heard multiple developers bitching at OSCON that half the job postings were in Java instead of their favorite pet language/platform. Well duh, the ecosystem with massive support runs half the web, who woulda thunk? Seriously, go take a gander at Apache's list of projects, how many are Java compared to anything else? Yep.

Where do you get the statistics for that claim?

Here you go. Let's just say it's a bit better than a "quick look" at a couple of job websites.

That doesn't make any sense either.

Sure it does. It's found a nice niche with high-traffic sites. It's share as a server-side language for the web sits at around 3%. I'd call that pretty minor!

There is a lot more going on in terms of custom software development than web sites.

Obviously! Now try to put that in the context of the discussion.

Yeah, only idiots use PHP -- that's why it's only used by 80% of the web.

Language snobbery benefits no one. Unless you're Chuck Moore, it also makes you look like an idiot who can't form their own opinions.

Usage statistics and market share of Linux for websites

using this page, RedHat + CentOS = 35.6% of websites using various subcategories of Linux. You should also include Scientific Linux, but it's only less than 0.1%.

Drilling down,

• CentOS has 8.3% of all websites
• RedHat has 2.8% of all websites,
• Debian is 10.2%
• Ubuntu is 7.6%

So CentOS plus RedHat is11.1% vs Debian which is 10.2% And of course, this is without knowing anything about all those "unknown UNIX" sites.

Except Red Hat covers a grand total of 2.8% of the market and dropping rapidly. http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-redhat/all/all

I don't feel obligated in any way to support MariaDB. I don't see how any self respecting dev would, especially since the founder made himself richer than Croseus by selling MySQL.

So good luck with that.

For better or worse, WordPress has more marketshare than all other CMS-es combined.
See http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all for an up-to-date look.

Many people still think of WordPress as a blogging platform, but it's really so much more nowadays. Security is not worse than with other solutions, it's just that (like with Windows), popularity attracts attention (and attacks), and usually poorly-made plugins are the problem (the timthumb vulnerability was the most notorious one).

I worked with many CMS solutions over the years - Allaire Spectra (anyone remember it?), DotNet Nuke, Typo3, CMS Made Simple, Joomla, Drupal, even hosted solutions like Squarespace and a bunch of others I can't even remember, but WordPress was the only one I could really develop for (functionality, themes, etc.)

Flash is used on an order of magnitude more sites. See: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/client_side_language/all

I think they should (and will) eventually.. maybe start with any site that has more than 3 flash objects. Then more than 1. Then click to play on all flash. It does make sense to do flash more gradually.

It's not failing because it's not changing, it's failing because less people are using it.

Compared to the alternatives the author suggests? Ruby and Python combined are doing less than Perl. PHP is the runaway favorite, but if you dig into the numbers, you'll find that most of the change is due to Content Management Systems which by and far have been developed on PHP. So these massive zomfg numbers PHP is pulling in isn't due to people programming with it as much as they are copy-pasting it en masse.

Perl is often custom back-end stuff with little visibility. It runs in cron jobs. It happily links various back-end pieces to one another... doing its unglamorous jobs with ease. Yes, Ruby is pretty and shiny. Yes, Python is a hot thing right now. But I've developed for all of them, and you know what? Perl is still what I'd turn to for back-end work over either of them because it's easy to work with and in many use scenarios I encounter professionally... faster as well. Python starts to choke (badly) in a take-down-the-server kind of way when it gets taxed. Ruby is the same way. But Perl seems bulletproof... even in a resource-constrained environment, it just. doesn't. die.

And for me, writing code for corporate use... Reliability trumps shiny any day of the week.

They are used on less than .2% of websites, and many are false positives. Yes some might not be detected as well. I am aware there is one very popular video service that uses Silverlight, can't say the same about Java.

Click on the language for more details
http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/client_side_language/all

Interesting.

Less than 15% usage according to http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ws-nginx/all/all, but creeping up on IIS and serving more high-usage sites.

(w3techs.com gives Apache 64% of websites rather than 55% from netcraft).

After seeking out the privacy information regarding Google DNS, I stand corrected - they do not permanently store the IP, nor associate it with other Google account data. So there's a completely unfounded knee-jerk claim not based on fact, I owe Google an apology.

However, I'd hardly call knowing which domains an IP visits (web and non-web) 'almost useless' - that's exceptionally valuable information, especially combined with existing data. As far as websites go - according to w3techs, although 74.5% of sites that use known ad networks are accounted for by AdSense, this is only 18.5% of all known sites; so you can see how much additional coverage this brings to web alone. To put it another way - would you be happy for a third party to analyse and associate with you every DNS lookup you perform? (again, which Google do not do)

Anyway, moot point - Google are not being evil over this (although I find their claim that they perform the bare minimum of logging to be funny - what they state they log is closer to rabid magpie log mode for a normal DNS server setup.)

Your rock however must be small indeed because BSD is certainly "mainstream", as has been discussed on /. ad nauseam.

I don't know how accurate the stats are, but w3techs puts FreeBSD at 1.1% of all web servers, that's roughly as mainstream as Linux is on the desktop - in other words not at all. It used to big be yes, but my impression is that Linux got corporate backing and raised the quality significantly while BSD remained a mostly amateur project. Particularly they were rather late with production grade SMP support which started a lot of migration to Linux and while a lot of web hosting companies used it in-house and small companies offered support there never formed a big professional support organization like Red Hat was for Linux. Not to mention Linus has by some small miracle managed to keep it together under one banner instead of forking into three branches with duplication of effort.

As of March 2012? About 1 in 4 websites use Flash.

That's a pretty big chunk of the web, by any reasonable definition. But keep on pretending that Flash is irrelevant today if it makes you feel better about using your iPad. I don't mind. It doesn't stop me from enjoying a desktop browsing experience on a more full-featured tablet.