Browser Stats For The BBC Homepage

Lord_Scrumptious writes "An interesting article titled 'The software used to access the BBC homepage' has recently been published on a blog by a BBC employee. It's all about the different browsers and operating systems accessing the BBC's homepage. The analysis is from a week of page requests in September 2005. Not surprisingly, Internet Explorer accounted for 85% of site visits, but Firefox had a very respectable 9.7% share. Even requests from Sony's handheld PSP device were recorded, but interestingly there's no mention of mobile phone devices."

Finally....

[odaen]

Finally some reliable website records which arn't off some obscure coding page. :)

errr

[scenestar]

Linux (various distributions) 0.41%

Windows Vista 0.15%

  MSFT's unreleased os has nearly the same market share as linux?

We've got a long way to go.

Variability by site

[danfreak]

Interesting. I wonder how much variation there is of browser use by other sites... I imagine BBC is higher than most in the Mozilla-bred catagory, as the BBC News site has posted lots of articles about Firefox over the years. I wonder how different it would be for msn.com, foxnews.com etc.

On a related note, I hosted some pictures on my website last week that were posted into a fark.com forum, 47.6% of fark readers seem to use Firefox (from some 14,000 hits in two days) - I bet slashdot beats this though!

Fatally Flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

I visit the BBC web site multiple times a day, but I haven't been to the "main" page in months. I expect most regular Firefox visitors will have bookmarks or just type a URL that goes past the main page.

The author does point this out:
And I must stress again, these figures don't represent the breakdown of visitors to the BBC site as a whole, they are based on requests to the homepage alone, over the course of one week in September. Nevertheless I think they provide an interesting snapshot of web activity.

but it should have been avoided

Re:errr

[odaen]

So what you are saying is that 1 in 11 people I walk up to on the street will be using Linux?

I think not.

Re:errr

[Hey Pope Felcher . .]

. . . can you please point out some sites that routinely reject Linux users?

It was once useful to make sites think that you were visiting using a different browser other than IE, but, for the vast majority of web sites, those days are long gone. I have never, on the other hand, had to pretend to be using another OS to visit a site, never.

I would be greatly intrigued if you could give some examples that require you to be identified as using Windows.

BBC news, typically read at work

[Colin Smith]

So it's probably about right for UK business desktop stats.

 

No MSI build for Firefox - no mass deployment

[ph1l0r]

at companies that run Windows clients. I wouldn't bother to install Firefox more of less by hand on hundreds of desktops myself. The Firefox guys should really get a MSI build ready for easy deployment _and_ update. Firefox is just not 100% enterprise ready like IE is with it's managabilty by group policies. I wonder how many people check bbc.co.uk from their workplace. They might even have Firefox installed on their home computer.

Super Respectable

[Mulletproof]

"but Firefox had a very respectable 9.7% share."

I use firefox and even I can't keep a strait face reading that line. I mean have some self-worth, man. There's nothing respectable about that. Can't we aim just a tad higher here? Especially if we're gonna tag on the word "very"?

Firefox comes with a "Live Bookmark" to the BBC

[osbjmg]

One thing I noticed when I installed Firefox, is that it comes with just one live bookmark. It is called: "Latest Headlines", and pulls the feed from http://fxfeeds.mozilla.org/rss20.xml/ [mozilla.org] But, this feed is the same as the main stories feed at BBC. I would figure people would click on these and get some more exposure to the BBC site, more than usual. This has actually made myself more aware of those stories, and made me more likely to visit again.

Re:Mobile devices

[corbs]

Also those web savvy enough to be using firefox would go directly to the section of the bbc webby they need (like news.bbc.co.uk). I find nothing particularly useful about the bbc homepage.

Re:Fatally Flawed

[Deaths Hand]

Indeed, I also visit the BBC website many times each day, but might go to the main page about once every three months. Most people (many are Firefox users) in my office have the BBC news main page http://news.bbc.co.uk/ [bbc.co.uk] set as their homepage, but this wouldn't show up in these statistics.

Re:errr

[Tet]

Most linux people use a browser string to look like windows so sites wont reject them.

Errr... no. Most Linux users will use the default setting for their browser, which for most people will not identify them at using Windows or IE. Yes, a very small number of people will do this, but to claim that it's "most" is just laughable.

Re:Variability by site

[peterpi]

I imagine BBC is higher than most in the Mozilla-bred catagory, as the BBC News site has posted lots of articles about Firefox over the years.

I doubt it makes much difference. The BBC news site is read by a lot of Normal People who either couldn't care less about what browser they're using, or have no power to change it because it's a work computer.

I'm really surprised that firefox has such a high share. Of course there have been similar stats released by sites like i-am-a-1337-linux-doodz.com and windoxxors-is-teh-suxxors.com, but to get them from a mainstream site like the BBC must be very encouraging for the developers

Re:As always, defaults play a role

[IngramJames]

Firefox comes a preloaded RSS feed ... that points to the BBC for news

Maybe so, but that's not the homepage, which is from where the stats were taken :-)

Re:Finally....

[Bogtha]

No, it's still unreliable. You simply can't correlate traffic to visitors. That's not the way HTTP works. httpd log analysis can tell you many interesting things, but mainly concerning the load on the server. Any attempt to read more into it is based on assumptions that are not only wrong, but wrong by an unknowable amount.

This is true every time somebody posts some bullshit story about how Firefox has a growing portion of the market, and every time somebody posts some bullshit story about how Firefox has a shrinking portion of the market. Even something as simple as AOL tweaking their cache configs can throw off the numbers by a large amount. Sure, it might make you feel good to look at your access logs and see Firefox gaining 1% every month or so, but that doesn't change the fact that that 1% number (or whatever) only has a tentative link to reality.

If you want to know OS stats, browser stats, or anything like that, you need to conduct an actual survey, and not simple observation of HTTP traffic, because if you are doing the latter, you might as well make up your numbers based on your best guess, because it has just as good a chance of being as accurate.

Re:Slashdot stats?`

[mr_tommy]

You miss the point of interest with the BBC; it is the number one website in the UK and thus has a reasonably representative audience. Slashdot, however much we love it, does not. I'm thinking male, 14-30, pretty high tech outlook - implying a skew towards Linux / Firefox / etc etc.

Bottom line - the beeb gives us a good painting; it's not a picture, true, but it is a good picture. Mozilla folk should be pleased with themselves; their strategy has worked rather well.

Re:Opera

[peterpi]

To the nearest few percent they are trustworthy, even with your Opera install skewing the figures.

We need to remember that people who do unusual things with unusual browsers are an incredibly small fraction of all internet users. The message of the article is that there's very rougly a 8/1/1 split between IE, firefox and 'other'. That message is not affected in the slightest by Opera, lynx or any other niche browser.

Default?

[zaguar]

Remember when you first install firefox, there was this shing RSS bookmark with 'Latest Headlines' and pointing to the BBC news pages?

Anyone considered that, maybe, that might have influenced the results? Having a default bookmark as the page of the study? You wouldnt take browser results from MSN.com or whatever IE's default home page is.

Nevermind me though, I just suggested that a pro-Firefox poll might be biased. Karma be dammed!

Re:Most visited site in the UK

[Vo0k]

All the fake "I'm MSIE" Opera ID strings contain "(Opera)" by the end, so any self-respecting stats program should register them correctly.

Re:If we all set up some bots...

[bloodredsun]

Utter rubbish!

Have a look at alexa [alexa.com] and you'll see that the bbc site deals with 20 to 30 BILLION hits a day. Slashdots 1 billion is not going to make much difference to their servers.

Re:errr

[Tim C]

Do you really think that the sort of traffic the BBC gets will be affected that much by a slashdotting? Or do you not notice the half a dozen or so links a month from here to there?

Make no mistake, slashdot is big traffic-wise, but the BBC is much, much bigger (especially if you consider the whole bbc.co.uk domain, and not just news.bbc.co.uk)

Trend matters, not snapshot

[fnurb]

The relevant information is not the raw number, but the trend. If you see Firefox gaining 1% every month of so, then is is reasonable to conclude that Firefox is gaining marketshare--in fact, it is even reasonable to assume that that gain is about 1% per month, since statistical anomalies and distortions caused by "AOL tweaking their cache configs" averages out to noise in a long-term trend.

While you are right that an accurate snapshot is impossible, snapshots only matter to magazine writers facing a deadline. In both the economic and intellectual marketplaces, what matters is the trend.

Re:LATE BREAKING NEWS!!!

[julesh]

Is the BBC homepage supposed to reflect some important or signifigant user base?

Yes. It is probably the broadest cross section of mostly British web users you are likely to find on a single site.

The fact that nearly 10% of those users use firefox is particularly relevant, and is a good weapon for those of us who do commercial web design to persuade our clients that the extra work to support alternative browsers properly *is* worth it.

Re:errr

[spitzak]

I agree, this used to be true but no longer.

Two reasons: first sites started working, in that at least they removed the check and just fed their HTML, whether or not it worked on non-IE. Second is that the newer browsers support *temporarily* changing the string in a user-friendly way, old browsers would be permanently switched to IE as soon as the user fixed it to display one page.

Actually I suspect a large percentage of those very old IE versions they list are actually alternative browsers permanently switched to identify themselves as IE, inluding a lot of old Netscape versions.