Website statistics
Whenever you visit a website, your web browser sends certain information to the web server. It's not personal information like your bank account, and your name and address aren't sent out either, so don't panic! Web servers can't tell who you are and the closest they get to identifying you is your IP address. Every PC needs an IP address and everyone's is unique. It's how the internet knows where to send each packet of data.
The sort of information that your computer sends to the web server is data that might be useful, such as the web browser you are using and the operating system it's running on. This enables web pages to be tailored to the browser and OS. Here are a few statistics for this website.
It is interesting to analyse the web server logs and see what people are using. For example, you can see what operating system is the most popular and which web browsers are used the most. Of course, the information is specific to this website and other websites might have different visitors to this one. However, the figures do seem to be similar to what other people get though, so it seems that the visitors to this site are pretty representative of the wider internet audience.
Operating systems
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As you would expect, the number of website visitors using Windows XP has decreased slightly over the last two years and the number of people running Vista has increased. However, it is surprising how strong XP still is. A large number of people are still using XP and it seems that only a few percent have upgraded to Vista. The increase in the number of Mac users does not mean that people are ditching Windows and are moving to the Mac. The changes in the operating systems of the visitors to this website reflects its changing content. There are now more Apple Mac pages and the number of Mac users has increased too, which is hardly surprising. The number of linux users is small, but with the start of a linux section recently this should change. The section labelled Others in the pie charts is huge (23% in August 2009), so if people aren't use XP, Vista, the Mac or Linux, just what are they using? The usage of other operating systems isn't that great, so perhaps it is simply security software that is preventing some PCs from revealing the OS to the web server. Looking at the detailed statistics, it's interesting to see that people are using their mobile phones to access the website - iPhone (0.14%) and Blackberry (0.06%). |
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Web browsers
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The number of people using Firefox to visit this website has steadily grown over the years and it now represents the largest piece of pie in the chart. However, Firefox users are not broken down by version and only Internet Explorer users are. If you add up all the Internet Explorer versions then it comes to 38% in August 2009, which beats every other web browser by quite a large margin. However, even though more people use Internet Explorer than any other web browser, the market share is down from a respectable 54% in September 2007 and that is a big fall in usage. Internet Explorer has lost a lot of users and the danger is that they may never return even though version 8 is much better. Google Chrome has been around for a year now, but people don't seem to like it much. The number of visitors to this website using Chrome is just 1.97%, which is almost identical to Opera at 1.96%. If Chrome is as good as Google says, how come more people don't use it? Basically, it executes JavaScript benchmarking tests very quickly, but it lacks features that people actually want. Quite a few people use Safari, but with quite a large Mac section on this website, and with Safari being bundled with all Macs, it's not surprising. |
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What does your web browser reveal?
Are you curious just what I can tell about you? Here are some of the things that your web browser is sending out to this web server:
CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)
The information is encoded and it is different for different web browsers and operating systems. Within the text you might see MSIE 7.0 and this indicates that you have Internet Explorer 7. If you see NT 5.1, then this is actually the code name for Windows XP because XP is really just version 5.1 of the Windows NT operating system. Vista has a different code, and the Mac gives something else. It can all be decoded though, so it's easy to tell what people are using.
