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Browser Stats For The BBC Homepage
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."
Finally some reliable website records which arn't off some obscure coding page. :)
There are specific editions for mobile devices. It's no wonder that they don't access the the front page directly.
Many people go to BBC, CNN and other major sites through their mobile service provider's front pages. These would naturally point to the dedicated mobile editions too.
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
...with a shiny firefox user agent string - we could easy get that figure up to 30%!
As of September 2005, Internet Explorer has an 85% market share, while Firefox has a 9.5% market share.
The BBC's numbers are simply representative of this, as any large web site would be.
The BBC provide specific pages for mobile devices. The front page is way too big/rich for a limited handset.
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!
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
Would be interesting too. Browser stats, OS stats ...
Yes, they are.
Old versions of Opera that identify themselves as IE by default use a user agent string like this:
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__()
So it's probably about right for UK business desktop stats.
Deleted
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.
"but Firefox had a very respectable 9.7% share."
I use firefox and even I can't keep a strait face reading that line. I mean have some self-worth, man. There's nothing respectable about that. Can't we aim just a tad higher here? Especially if we're gonna tag on the word "very"?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
It started with a casual enquiry from a colleague - "I wonder how many Firefox users visit the BBC homepage?" - and before I knew it I was involved in a lengthy statistical analysis of the browsers and operating systems that request the BBC homepage at http://www.bbc.co.uk/
.NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Our old stats reporting tool at the BBC gives a breakdown of requests from different user agent strings, which is where the browsers and operating systems people use to navigate around the web leave their digital fingerprints. It is about to be phased out in favour of a new solution, but I'm not sure that the new system gives the same granularity of data, so once I'd started, I thought I'd look at the figures in some detail before the old system gives up the ghost.
Now if you've never looked at user agent strings, they are rather dull and geeky, and full of lots of technical gubbins like these examples:
* Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-GB; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6
* Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; America Online Browser 1.1; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;
* Mozilla/4.0 NETIKUS.NET GetHttp v1.0
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hotbar 4.5.1.0)
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE)
* Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
* Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; BT [build 60A])
There are of course some caveats around the figures I'm about to talk about.
User agent strings aren't an exact science. Or rather, they ought to be, but in the real world the come out a right mess. I've done my best to untangle them, but I still ended up with a significant number of user agents that I could not identify properly. And that is before we get started on the corporate networks that use the UA string to broadcast their corporate branding to the world whilst masking their operating system. Or requests claiming to come from both Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 5.5. Or that claim to be from a particular Linux distribution and Windows 98 at the same time. Or the plain weird like the inadvisably named KummClient from Hungary that proudly proclaims 'Linux rulez' to anyone like me dull enough to be delving through their logfiles.
User agent statistics on something as big as the BBC homepage could almost be the very definition of the long tail. The most popular user agent string - IE6 on Windows XP - clocked up nearly 6 million requests. I only counted user agents that had made more than 50 requests, but between 6 million and 50 requests there were nearly 11,000 different user agents to look at. Examining that number of requests accounted for 95% of the reported traffic, but only around 1/3 of the stats report. I initially suspected that counting the whole of the tail was likely to increase the market share I derived for the quirkier set-ups, but a random sample showed that a large proportion of the tail consisted of the most popular browsers and operating systems, but with different installed toolbars or corporate network messages that distinguished them as a unique string.
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.
In total I've examined around 32 million requests to the BBC servers - although some of these have been discounted as 'unknowns' and some originate from crawlers and spiders.
The complete dominance of Windows XP and Internet Explor
Firefox comes a preloaded RSS feed ... that points to the BBC for news
:-)
Maybe so, but that's not the homepage, which is from where the stats were taken
'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
The obvious solution is to make the BBC homepage the default homepage for Firefox!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
We need to remember that people who do unusual things with unusual browsers are an incredibly small fraction of all internet users. The message of the article is that there's very rougly a 8/1/1 split between IE, firefox and 'other'. That message is not affected in the slightest by Opera, lynx or any other niche browser.
Yeah, switch to "googlebot" and have free access to all these pay-for-registration sites.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Is the BBC homepage supposed to reflect some important or signifigant user base?
Yes. It is probably the broadest cross section of mostly British web users you are likely to find on a single site.
The fact that nearly 10% of those users use firefox is particularly relevant, and is a good weapon for those of us who do commercial web design to persuade our clients that the extra work to support alternative browsers properly *is* worth it.