The Latest Wired.com Logfile Lowdown
Every time we dig through our server logs, we uncover some interesting user data. Today, we dove a little deeper than usual, and as a result, our mining session turned up some particularly unique discoveries. I’ve assembled the most interesting data points below.
Note: These results are for all of Wired.com — stories, blogs, photo galleries, magazine content and the How-To Wiki. Product Reviews and Webmonkey are reported separately, but I’ve included the relevant data points for Webmonkey wherever there’s something interesting to point out.
Browsers:
- Almost half of Wired.com’s readers are Firefox users. Mozilla’s open-source browser accounts for just over 48% of our web traffic. That’s far more than any other browser. Webmonkey’s audience skews a little higher, at around 55% using Firefox.
- Firefox 3, which is over a year old, is the most popular browser among Wired.com readers by a very wide margin. Firefox 3.5, which was released three weeks ago, doesn’t show up until #23 in our rankings. We have more Chrome users than Firefox 3.5 users.
- By contrast, just over a third of our readers with Safari are running the most recent version, and two thirds of our readers with Chrome have 2.0, the most recent version.
- Internet Explorer 7 is the most popular version of Microsoft’s browser we see. The dreaded IE6 is the next most popular, then IE 8 in third. The people we have the most pity for are the poor souls running IE6 for AOL (#34 on the list).
- The only version of Opera that shows up in our top 50 is Opera 10. Go early adopters!
- Firefox 1.0 shows up at the bottom of the list, at #50.
- The oldest browser within the top 50 is Netscape 7.0, which came out in 2002. Please, sir or madam, upgrade.
Operating Systems:
Not too many surprises here. Windows XP is number one, followed by Vista, then Mac OS X. Linux is fourth, followed by Windows 7.
Yes, Wired.com sees more Linux users than Windows 7 users. It’s the same on Webmonkey. Be fair — Windows 7 isn’t even out yet.
And speaking of Be, there’s some funky old junk out there surfing the tubes! This is the bottom bracket in our breakdown of top 30 operating systems:
22. OS/2
23. AIX
24. HP-UX
25. BeOS
26. Amiga OS
27. IRIX
28. Windows 9x/NT
29. VMS
30. OSF/1
Kudos to the BeOS holdouts — does NetPositive have JavaScript yet? And Huzzahs to the Amiga faithful! For the uninitiated, “Huzzah” is what they say at renaissance faires when you tip the beer wench. If you had an Amiga, you’d know that.
But, wow… IRIX? VMS? Windows NT? Anyone who wants to lay claim to those, please do so in the comments.
