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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."

11 of 260 comments (clear)

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

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

    1. 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.

  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. If we all set up some bots... by nmoog · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...with a shiny firefox user agent string - we could easy get that figure up to 30%!

  4. 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!

  5. 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

  6. Slashdot stats?` by zerojoker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Would be interesting too. Browser stats, OS stats ...

  7. 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__()
  8. BBC news, typically read at work by Colin+Smith · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    Deleted
  9. 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.

    1. 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.