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Eighty percent of the market uses operating systems other than Windows XP

Wrong. I hardly ever see a desktop PC running anything else, but I hate anecdotal evidence, so lets look at some figures. Type "XP market share" into google, and one of the top hits is this:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2

Which give a figure of 78% for XP. Now when I said "has 80+ percent of the market" I was talking about the current version of IE, which is available for 9x, so yes, I do claim that the excluded operating systems (Mac OS, any Linux OS, or any FreeBSD OS, or NT 4 or Win 3.1. Or Amiga OS, for that matter) total less than 20 percent of the market. If you claim different, please provide some figures

Here's an interesting article:

http://www.websidestory.com/news-events/press-rele ases/view-release.html?id=160

Which shows XP managed oa 20% market share of web browsing machines in less than a year. This is hardly surprising, as virtually every store bought PC sold in that time period came with XP pre-installed. The same will be true of Vista. It will achieve market share very rapidly, because every new home PC sold will have it already on the hard drive.

Now, given XP has about %80 of the market, and Vista will have IE 7 pre-installed, I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction. Here it comes:

Within 1 year of the release of Vista, all independent figures will show IE7 as having the largest market share of any browser.

Feel free to prove me wrong. But I'll need to see figures, sir!

Google Analystics is Googles attempt to make a product that can rival this:

http://www.websidestory.com/products/web-analytics /hbx-analytics/overview.html

oops -- the link didn't take, for some reason. This is their browser/OS data collection program:

http://www.websidestory.com/products/web-analytics /datainsights/statmarket/overview.html

Yeah, but how do you know that WebSideStory's numbers aren't taken from sites that attract mostly Windows-only users? For all we know, some of the sites that they monitor could exclude all non-IE browsers.

Where there's smoke, there's mirrors. To believe any numbers, I need to know all the details of the data collection, including and especially demographics, site requirements, and the target readership of the monitored sites.

From what I see from WebSideStory's website, they are online marketers. They appear to sell software that monitors traffic. So if you are not a WebSideStory customer, your data is not counted. This seems to be the software they got the data from, and there is no mention of what web servers are supported. What if it only runs on IIS? That would exclude a HUGE number of Mozilla-based browsers, because Apache sites wouldn't be able to report anything.

TheCounter shows just 2% usage share for Mac OS. Combined with the 1-2% usage share for Safari reported by OneStat and 1-2% "other" browser usage reported by WebSideStory, it's hard to believe Mac OS has 16% of the installed base of desktops. Maybe the vast majority of Mac users don't use pre-installed Safari, or haven't upgraded to Mac OS X yet, or just don't browse the web nearly as much as other OS users?

Whoa, dude. Reading comprehension problems?

TFA never says "first time". In fact, the WebSideStory article referenced in the CNN article never says "first time". Moreover the WebSideStory article says that IE dropped below 90% a couple months ago. So if this isn't the "first time" by either account, how is your assumed comprehension of what the poster meant more correct than mine?

08 Oct 04 to 05 Nov 04 : 0.40% per month
05 Nov 04 to 03 Dec 04 : 1.10% per month
03 Dec 04 to 18 Feb 05 : 0.64% per month
18 Feb 05 to 29 Apr 05 : 0.45% per month

You can see Firefox growth surged after 1.0 was released, and now it's returning to its previous level. At the current rate of 0.45% per month, Firefox will hit 10% share in late November 2005.

08 Oct 04 to 05 Nov 04 : 0.40% per month
05 Nov 04 to 03 Dec 04 : 1.10% per month
03 Dec 04 to 18 Feb 05 : 0.64% per month
18 Feb 05 to 29 Apr 05 : 0.45% per month

You can see Firefox growth surged after 1.0 was released, and now it's returning to its previous level. At the current rate of 0.45% per month, Firefox will hit 10% share in late November 2005.

http://www.websidestory.com/pressroom/pressrelease s.html?id=238&ctl=x08x087h29xg goes to the story

Can anyone actualy find the article at WebSideStory? There is a link on the main site about firefox gaining share if you click Read More it takes you to a page with nothing about firefox.

websidestory

I believe you mean 91% and dropping.

I tried checking the site of the stat-accumulating company quoted in the salon article, WebSideStory, and couldn't find what they consider a usage statistic.

I'm a fan of Moz's pop-up disabling abilities, but if this company uses TOTAL requests, then every other browser has an artificially inflated total.

Like when I use IE, I send out requests via pop-ups all the time and each can, in turn, make more requests. With Moz, I don't make any such requests.

With this in mind, to a particular site I can tally '1' visit with Moz and '1+x' visits with IE (x>=0).

That's the easy way to track general browser use, but since Moz doesn't conform to this general rule, hopefully they have adjusted the numbers accordingly. Any idea how it's done?

With big wins like this, can we hope to see an increase of their market share beyond 2.3%?

websidestory.com and statmarket.com are basing their statistics on their web tracking technology through the use of advertising. The problem is, they use web bugs (see here, here, and here) to accomplish this. Windows users typically do not take actions to inhibit these web bugs, but Linux, BSD, and even many other Unix users do. There's software out there to help, too. Those who do block these web bugs, or all the hitbox.com sites, as I do, won't ever be counted.

Statistics based on web bugs should never be counted to determine platform penetration. Instead, actual HTML loads from a wide variety of real sites should be used, and the distribution variations show, too. I'm sure Slashdot gets more Linux and BSD just because of what it is.

Find out what other sites that /.ers visit, then get platform stats from those sites, and only for their main page HTML hits (not for images or ads or anything else). Then check the variation of that.

I had to go remove them from 6 different blocks in my network to just to view the linked page.

I want to see the stats for the page that story is served from. Fools will see more Linux desktops than they thought existed!

it looks like www.websidestory.com is the responsible party. i wonder how many sites they've fitted out like this...

at least the code doesn't work on our browser! can anyone out there work out exactly what information the script is divulging?

When I think of cookies in images, I think of such tools as WebSideStory, a handy little service useful for learning all manner of interesting information about traffic coming to your website. Cookies are used in a variety of ways, such as measuring return visitors, keeping track of other pages visited on that site, and so on. It may be possible to perform analyses like that with IMG SRCing, given direct access to the logs, but the IMG SRC cookie behaviour makes it very simple and elegant to produce these sorts of services as third-party tools that you simply add in to your site.

Of course, things have changed since WSS started up, and now they provide this enormous, poorly formatted wad of javascript to produce the same result as that original image once did. The offshoot of that is a good demonstration that even if IMG SRC cookies were disabled, banner ad'rs would still have avenues to accumulate the same information... so killing IMG SRC cookies to kill banner ads (or thier data gathering) would be moot, aside from pissing off a bunch of people who depend on that behaviour.

I agree to the idea that collecting excessive information on personal habits is disconcerting and regulation would be nice. Unfortunately, enforcing such a law would be nigh impossible. As some famous type person once said: "You can't legislate morality."

Of course, just because it's impossible to ensure complete privacy doesn't mean you shouldn't make it as hard as possible for the Bad Guys® to scoop up as much information about you as possible. I suppose I've just become jaded from my past experiences, and perhaps a bit lazy because there's very little I do in my life that I couldn't comfortably discuss among friends.

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rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)