May Stats

Now that I finally convinced web-stats to not count our own visits, we have more-meaningful statistics for the site. So naturally, I'm going to annoy all of you with that information. You're welcome.

Total site visits for May was 223 Of those, 151 are suckers that keep coming back for more. The other 72 were just poor fools who landed here by accident and quickly left. But the most-interesting part is the break-down by operating system and browser. We'll start with OS:

XP - 69.5%
Vista - 19.7%
Linux - 4.5%
Mac - 3.6%
Other - 1.8%
NT - .9%

Vista is shaping up to be the biggest Microsoft flop since Windows ME. XP was five years old when Vista was released on January 2007, and is now well over seven years old, and is still more-popular by a 3-to-1 margin. Worse, many PC manufacturers are still offering XP as an option on new PC's, the equivalent of buying a 1962 VW Beetle with rusted out floorboards that burns a quart of oil for every gallon of gas, when you can get a Prius for $100 more. Two years and a service pack after Vista's initial release, drivers are still a problem (we can only print from our old XP laptop) and a lot of software doesn't run or runs with issues (at least in the 64-bit version; I've never used 32-bit Vista). I'm going to be very interested in what happens when Win7 is officially released later this year. Will people just leap-frog Vista or will everyone cling to XP until Microsoft forces the issue and stops issuing security updates?

Maybe it's just the type of people this blog attracts, but I was surprised to see Linux top Mac. I had high hopes for Mac when Jobs was pushing innovation and mostly keeping prices in line with comparable PC's. But now that he's out of the picture, Mac is going back to its rape-the-faithful philosophy, emphasizing immediate profit over market share. The last "refresh" was a complete joke, replacing completely outdated, overpriced hardware with slightly less outdated, overpriced hardware.

NT? Really? Running a 16-year-old unsupported OS on the web? Why not run MS-DOS? I have a shrink-wrapped copy if you have a system with a 3.5" floppy drive. Seriously.

Browsers:

Firefox 3.0 - 36.8%
MSIE 7.0 - 36.3%
MSIE 8.0 - 10.8%
MSIE 6.0 - 7.6%
Netscape 6 - 4.5%
Other - 1.3%
Safari 3 - .9%
Chrome 1.0 - .4%
Firefox 3.5 - .4%
Firefox 2.0 - .4%

(Let me guess; whoever is running NT is also the person running Firefox 2.0. You just really really like having a virus-laden zombie PC.)

Firefox is (barely) in the lead, but only because IE is fragmented across three versions. Combine those, and IE is well out in front with 54.7%. But that still puts Firefox closer to IE than the usual figure of just over 20% for Firefox compared to IE's 70%. Given the low number of visitors we have, it's likely a skew is being introduced by one or two routine visitors that have Firefox. It's also interesting that people don't seem to be anxious to be a guinea pig for Firefox 3.5. Given all the problems they've had getting that puppy out the door, I can't say I blame them.

This year should be interesting in the PC/internet world: Win7, Firefox 3.5, Chrome (which I haven't tried but may yet give a spin), HTML 5, Wave, plus the continuation of Moore's Law which gives every household a wretched excess of computing power for the price of a single month's rent. The crappy economy is holding things back; when we get past this in a year or two, things get really interesting. I'm not predicting The Singularity, but in 18-24 months, there will be a significant shift in how we use these little boxes.

Lunch time!