I’ve been looking at various Google Analytics stats to see some recent technology trends. This started out as me being simply curious about what technologies people were using to access my blog. But then I got to thinking that it would be interesting to see how the statistics on my (Microsoft/Technology focused) blog fair with regard to other websites.
The most interesting thing I found is that my blog does not match other other, more mainstream, sites I looked at. I seem to have some early adopters that cause jumps in the trend. Other sites tend to have more stable trends.
For example, here’s the graph for my blog showing operating system usage:
In mid-2008 there is a jump of Windows Vista users. I tried to figure out why the number of Windows Vista users should jump like this and the only thing that I can actually think of is that this is about the time of “The Mojave Experiment”. Alternatively, perhaps it is something I did on my blog bringing more traffic to me from people running Windows Vista?
In July 2008 20% of visitors were using Windows Vista, the following month that number had jumped to 32%. Incidentally on August 3rd I wrote a blog post that has consistently be in my top-5 blog posts each month ever since. That post was about installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista. In fact, that single post currently represents 14% of the monthly traffic to my blog.
When looking at the browser usage in use the trend doesn’t have such a wild jump in it. Internet explorer is steadily being replaced by FireFox with most other browsers sitting down below 10%. There is, however, a rise in Chrome usage and I expect it to be past the 10% mark by the end of the year.
What is interesting is the jump when Chrome first came on the market, it jumped in at 3.5% and has been steadily rising since. It is up to 8.1% now so that it is now in 3rd place.
Operating Systems
Let’s compare that to some more mainstream sites. I’m just going to put the graphs up one after the other then comment on them.
First the operating system:
There are some very interesting variations between these graphs and my blog. None of these have a big jump in any particular operating system, so that suggests that Project Mojave, an earlier speculation to account for a jump in Vista users, didn’t have a big effect.
What is most interesting is that people looking at Lingerie websites have more Apple Macs (purple line) that people looking at other sites. Mac usage for the lingerie site runs from 10% to 15% over the course of the two years.
Windows XP usage is coming down, more markedly for the Lingerie site. I’d speculate that since businesses seem to be the ones holding on to Windows XP the longest (still installing it on newly purchased equipment, unlike the home market which will most likely stick to what is on the box already) those viewing the Lingerie website are more likely to do so from home. Certainly, if I was so inclined to visit, I’d do that at home.
On the early adopter front, most mainstream sites have not seen much of an increase in Windows 7 (turquoise line) usage yet. It isn’t released to the general public until 22nd of October. Early adopters will mostly be running the beta and release candidate. Those with MSDN Subscription will be able to run the full release already. It would seem that many developers (or at least those inclined to visit a software development oriented blog) are already adopting Windows 7 as almost 7% of visitors used that operating system. The mainstream sites are sitting around 0.5% currently.
Browsers
It looks like developers buck the trend again. 30%-40% use FireFox to access my blog whereas more mainstream sites get 10%-20% of visitors using FireFox. Also, the lingerie site is also slightly bucking the trend by having around 25% of visitors using FireFox.
Universally, IE is losing market share. It just seems to be quicker for software developers to be abandoning it, even on this Microsoft oriented software development blog.
It would seem that FireFox is the browser in line to take the crown, at least in software development circles as it does seem to have a fair way to go elsewhere. However, Chrome has got off to a good start, gaining initial popularity even on more mainstream sites. FireFox may have some real competition. Safari is not doing so badly either, but that trend does seem to follow the Mac OS trend, so perhaps that’s just getting the kudos through being installed as the default browser on Macs.
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