Subject:
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Re: A new area of LEGO.com: the Build section
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.lego.direct
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Followup-To:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Fri, 11 May 2001 23:27:01 GMT
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Viewed:
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1166 times
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In lugnet.lego.direct, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> Does anyone have any reliable stats on how many people are left out (as a
> percentage) due to platform issues, due to using obsolete browsers (perhaps
> for perfectly legitimate reasons) and due to running with restrictions
> turned on?
There are a couple good sources of stats like this. Statmarket.com used to
be one of them, but now you have to pay to get access to their stats. After
they changed to pay-only, a couple handy pages like these popped up:
http://www.eleganthack.com/toolbox/browser-stats.htm
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/
With links to lots of useful stats sites. Here are the ones I tend to look
at for my own personal use:
http://websnapshot.mycomputer.com/
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/
They're both based on log analysis programs in use on thousands of sites --
the first one smaller sites, the second one larger ones. The numbers are
pretty comparable, the upshot being that roughly 1% or less are using
Netscape 3. Around 95% or more are using "the common browsers" -- Netscape 4
or IE 4+, which is probably why many people are supporting those as their
baseline target, and trying to calculate the tradeoffs for supporting the
rest. Similarly, Macintosh = 5% or less, Linux = 1% or less, and so forth.
Of course it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in some cases -- if your design is
broken in a certain browser, you won't get many hits from that browser.
The other interesting thing to consider is what kind of users are using the
less common browsers. Older versions are more common in academic,
government, and developing nations. Unix and variants tend to have certain
kinds of users, of course. And Macintosh, interestingly, tends to be widely
supported in part because many designers use Macs -- often the people making
the sites, or handing out coveted design awards. That's the political power
of the Mac, at least on the web. Too bad the same isn't true of the software
market.
> Where I am going with this is that I am wondering exactly who is being
> marginalized by use of JavaScript??? (and I have been in the "has to work
> with IE and NS 3.0" camp for a while now but am thinking of giving up.
> Partly because I myself have something neat I want to do in JS... I will
> have an alternate page too, of course.
Interesting statistics on thecounter.com is that 17%-20% run with Javascript
disabled, which is a whole lot. Which by their reckoning must include a lot
of 4.0 folks. I don't think that statistic is particularly well known. One
good thing to keep in mind is that some Javascripts can be implemented
without any adverse effects on non-Javascript users, or with simple
workarounds. The popular image rollovers are one example. The most common
thing non-javascript users tend to get left out on is pop-up windows.
Anecdotally, a lot of people who do disable javascript do so because they
feel that a) it slows down performance, b) it introduces security risks, c)
their computer can't handle it, d) there are people out there who do really
annoying things with it like pop-up ads and opening new windows when you
close old ones. A lot of people (some very tech-savvy) that I've run into
seem to think that Javascript = Java, and their computer can't handle that
Java stuff. Of course, Javascript has almost nothing to do with Java -- from
what I understand it was named that by Netscape as a sort of
marketing/synergy ploy. Also, Netscape used to (maybe still does) thrash
around while "loading" its Javascript engine, not when the app started, but
the first time Javascript is encountered. This made a lot of people think
that they were hitting some huge download or complicated "Java" app, when it
might have been a one-line script. So reasons A and C are usually not true
unless you have a significantly old computer, and B is mostly a flaw of
older browsers, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread. D is a
depressing fact of life, and I bet pop-up ads account for a pretty big chunk
of the non-javascript users.
For the record, I mostly use Internet Explorer on Windows and Netscape on
Linux, and occasionally Internet Explorer on Mac.
> Not sure where to FUT but probably doesn't belong here if this thread goes
> in this direction
This seems like lugnet.publish to me?
Tomas Clark
tclark@halfrobot.com
No official information of any sort is contained in this post.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: A new area of LEGO.com: the Build section
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| (...) Does anyone have any reliable stats on how many people are left out (as a percentage) due to platform issues, due to using obsolete browsers (perhaps for perfectly legitimate reasons) and due to running with restrictions turned on? Where I am (...) (24 years ago, 11-May-01, to lugnet.lego.direct)
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