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Browser Stats For The BBC Homepage

Posted by Zonk on from the edification-early-and-often dept.

Lord_Scrumptious writes "An interesting article titled 'The software used to access the BBC homepage' has recently been published on a blog by a BBC employee. It's all about the different browsers and operating systems accessing the BBC's homepage. The analysis is from a week of page requests in September 2005. Not surprisingly, Internet Explorer accounted for 85% of site visits, but Firefox had a very respectable 9.7% share. Even requests from Sony's handheld PSP device were recorded, but interestingly there's no mention of mobile phone devices."

3 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Opera by YA_Python_dev · · Score: 5, Informative
    My install of Opera is set to identify itself as IE... are those figures trustworthy?

    Yes, they are.
    Old versions of Opera that identify themselves as IE by default use a user agent string like this:

    Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; Linux i686; en) Opera 8.02

    So the "Opera" string is here and easily identifiable.

    New versions should simply use the proper Opera UA string by default.

    If you use Opera I suggest to check that it sends the "correct" Opera UA string: the sky will (mostly) not fall down.

    --
    There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
  2. Re:No MSI build for Firefox - no mass deployment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There you go..
    http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/
    MSI installers for Mozilla Firefox! Useful for installing Firefox on a single computer for the home user or deploy across thousands of computers automatically with Microsoft's Active Directory. Use Firefox on your corporate computers to decrease virus incidents and increase overall security. Save time and frustration with our installer that is targeted toward the corporate IT administrator with manageability and upgradeability in mind. This is not just a wrapper around the exe installer nor is it another half baked 'captured' install.

  3. Re:Finally.... by searlea · · Score: 5, Informative

    You make a good point, that cache config can affect the amount of traffic directly hitting your website, and therefore affects your logs.

    However, given the headers returned by the BBC site, caches should NOT cache the HTML, as the headers say the content expires immediately:

    Expires: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 11:57:59 GMT
    Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 11:57:59 GMT
    Content-Type: text/html
    Server: Zeus/4.2
    Cache-Control: max-age=0

    So, the BBC figures may be more accurate than you think.