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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."

6 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Finally.... by odaen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Finally some reliable website records which arn't off some obscure coding page. :)

  2. errr by scenestar · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Linux (various distributions) 0.41%

    Windows Vista 0.15%

      MSFT's unreleased os has nearly the same market share as linux?

    We've got a long way to go.

    --
    perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
  3. Variability by site by danfreak · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Interesting. I wonder how much variation there is of browser use by other sites... I imagine BBC is higher than most in the Mozilla-bred catagory, as the BBC News site has posted lots of articles about Firefox over the years. I wonder how different it would be for msn.com, foxnews.com etc.

    On a related note, I hosted some pictures on my website last week that were posted into a fark.com forum, 47.6% of fark readers seem to use Firefox (from some 14,000 hits in two days) - I bet slashdot beats this though!

  4. Fatally Flawed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I visit the BBC web site multiple times a day, but I haven't been to the "main" page in months. I expect most regular Firefox visitors will have bookmarks or just type a URL that goes past the main page.

    The author does point this out:
    And I must stress again, these figures don't represent the breakdown of visitors to the BBC site as a whole, they are based on requests to the homepage alone, over the course of one week in September. Nevertheless I think they provide an interesting snapshot of web activity.

    but it should have been avoided

  5. BBC news, typically read at work by Colin+Smith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So it's probably about right for UK business desktop stats.

    --
    Deleted
  6. No MSI build for Firefox - no mass deployment by ph1l0r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    at companies that run Windows clients. I wouldn't bother to install Firefox more of less by hand on hundreds of desktops myself. The Firefox guys should really get a MSI build ready for easy deployment _and_ update. Firefox is just not 100% enterprise ready like IE is with it's managabilty by group policies. I wonder how many people check bbc.co.uk from their workplace. They might even have Firefox installed on their home computer.