Interesting Numbers

Slashdot Traffic analysis.

I was mentioned on Slashdot on Monday.
Thankfully no servers were melted in the process.
(Actually I have no idea, as Blogger does a fine job for me, and I don't have to worry about these things.)

I thought an analysis of the traffic coming through would prove interesting. As a longtime slashdot visitor, I expected a certain level of tech savvy users. Even with this knowledge, I was shocked at the numbers. These reports are a tally of the peak periods of "slashdot" traffic, I have looked at longer samples and they track pretty much the same.

Firefox (2.0.0.11)	882
Internet Explorer (7.0)	409
Internet Explorer (6.0)	303
Safari (523.10)	72
Safari (523.12)	36
Firefox (2.0.0.6)	33
Mozilla (5.0)	26
Firefox (3.0b1)	20
Firefox (2.0.0.9)	19
Firefox (2.0.0.3)	18

Browsers with less than .5% were excluded. PS3, Konqeror, Camino and Opera etc...

That Comes to 1818 Total Visitors in the time frame I am interested in.
Out of those

Firefox Total........972........53.5 %
IE Total................712........39.2 %
Safari Total..........108.........6.9 %
Mozilla Total.........26..........1.4 %

Good to see. "We" all know that Firefox is a damn fine piece of software. Anyone not using it probably knows no tech-heads, geeks, nerds, or whatever we are calling ourselves this week.
This is was what prompted this post. I kept waiting for IE to catch up. As of this writing, according to Google Analytics, it shakes out like this overall.

Firefox	81.68%
Internet Explorer	11.47%
Opera	2.83%
Safari	1.79%
Mozilla	1.19%

I know us slashdotters are tech heads but I had no idea Firefox was that dominant. Of course my link was almost hidden in the post so only the techiest would have even noticed, plus a fair amount came from the Firehose. So maybe I got an extremely unrepresentative sample this time.

OS Breakdown During same period 2036 Visits
Includes Opera, PS3, and Hiptop (Yeah, I had to look it up too)

Windows XP	1355	66.6%
Linux	194	9.5%
Mac OS X (Intel)	175	8.6%
Windows Vista	171	8.3%
Windows 2000	52	2.6%
Mac OS X (PowerPC)	51	2.5%
Windows 2003	20	1.0%
Unknown	14	.1%
SunOS	3	.1%
Windows 98	1	.0%

78% of Visitors were using Windows, out of these only 171 were Vista, or 10.7% of the 1599 Windows Machines. Climbing past your own ridiculously popular OS is hard enough but the numbers are far worse than that. Vista was consistently beaten by Linux and newer Mac OS X(Intel) machines. and If you lump both Intel and PowerPC Macs together, you get what you would expect.

1. XP
2. Mac
3. Linux
4. Vista
5. 2000
6. 2003
   
   *As of this Posting Linux (14%) is leading Vista by 7% points and OSX by 4% points.
   

There is still a long road to knocking XP off the top. But it may not be as hard to keep Vista in check. Keep in mind, that with such a paltry sample, only a fool would try to reliably extrapolate any meaningful data. I just found it interesting and thought I'd share.

And to my lone Windows 98 reader, I want you to know, there is help available. we could take up a donation, you must be suffering terribly.