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, 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.
Operating systems
Web browsers tell the web server which web browser you are using, which operating system is installed, and a few other bits of general information. 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 with the visitors to this website:
February 2008
Note that this chart shows the operating systems of the visitors to this website only and the visitors to another website could be totally different. For example, www.apple.com probably gets a lot of visitors using Apple Mac OS X and very few using Windows XP or Vista, so Apple's website statistics will be completely different to these here. Bearing this in mind, it is still quite interesting, particularly if you look back and see what people were using last year and compare operating system usage:
September 2007
As you would expect, the number of website visitors using Windows Vista has increased. This is to be expected because nearly all new PCs ship with it preinstalled on the hard disk drive. It's hard to find anyone that will sell you an XP system. Despite this however, it is interesting to see that the number of visitors with Windows XP has actually increased too. It's at the expense of other operating systems like Windows NT, 98 and ME, which are really old now.
Web browsers
It is also interesting to see which web browsers people are using and Internet Explorer 7 has the largest share. Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox aren't far behind though. Opera doesn't appear in the pie chart because so few people use it. It's a shame because it's actually a nice web browser and it deserves to be more popular. The Other Browsers section is so large because people use download accelerators to download the software on this site, and there are numerous utilities scouring the web for web search engines.
February 2008
What can I tell about you?
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:
Your web browser and OS:
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.
