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."

Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

My install of Opera is set to identify itself as IE to websites as I am sure many others set theirs the same way on install. So in that light, are those figures trustworthy?

Slashdot stats?`

[zerojoker]

Would be interesting too. Browser stats, OS stats ...

Re:Sampling?

[Spad]

He had over 33,000 different user agents to sort through - why don't you email him and offer to trawl through the 22,000 UAs making up the 5% of traffic that he didn't generate stats for.

It depends upon your site content

[vivekg]

First here is mirrordot link [mirrordot.org], if you cannot open page (slashdoteffect).

My site and blog mostly related to Linux and Open source stuff, and here is my exprince so far:
OS
Most of the corporate users, uses Windows XP/2000 desktop
Individual user uses Linux/BSD/Mac OS desktop


Browser
Firefox rules
IE (6.x/5.x)

So it depend upon your site content, if you wanna see this stats they are here [cyberciti.biz]

Small AuPair website in the UK

[Kroc]

I'm the webdesigner for a small AuPair company in the UK, our demographic is entirely UK Families and young foreign nationals.

For this month, this is the breakdown of browser access

5250 Views this month:
* 77.5% Internet Explorer (inc. Maxthon & AOL) = 4070 Views
    v5 (57 views) v5.5 (27 views) v6 (3703 views)
* 10.9% Mozilla Firefox (inc. Netscape & SeaMonkey) = 574 Views
* 02.3% Apple Safari (inc. Linux Konqueror) = 122 Views
* 00.4% Opera Browser = 22 Views
* 08.8% Other (Unknown, bots and rare browsers) = 462 Views

Even with this incredibly Windows/IE centric demographic (almost all being "regular" people), I'm very pleased to see a 10% Firefox Usage. The site only counts 1 view per IP per 24 Hours and ignores views from my IP and the Company's business address IP.

Most visited site in the UK

[smallguy78]

I've read the bbc news website is the most visited website in the UK, so it's probably the best indication of what UK people use to browse the web. I wonder how many of the IE stats are Opera however.

a start at Overall Market Share

[twitter]

Actually, the BBC numbers show that IE has LESS than 85% of the market. The author was unable to identify or otherwise did not count 5% of the strings, non of which is IE. So IE has 85% or 95% of the visits to BBC, which is 80.75%. I'm waiting for it to dip lower than 80% on such a huge site.

It looks like the business world is learning. The BBC is a work safe site, so statistics should be dominated by corporate desktop visiting where the user has no choice of software. That's good news for everyone.

These statistics can be skewed by the botnet. The kinds of people who use botnets would be very sad if the world dumped windows, so you can be sure that DDoS attacks use a standard IE string when they are not busy taking sites down. Microsoft, judged by their record of dirty tricks, might even pay them to do that.

Re:Finally....

[Bogtha]

However, given the headers returned by the BBC site, caches should NOT cache the HTML, as the headers say the content expires immediately

Actually, it doesn't say that caches should not cache the resource, it says that caches should revalidate the resource before serving it again, IIRC.

Which BBC site are we talking about anyway? I'm getting completely different headers for www.bbc.co.uk:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:10:13 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Unix)
Set-Cookie: [snip]
Set-Cookie: [snip]
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

That's a cachable resource, and what's more, because there's no Expires header, it's particularly sensitive to public cache tweaking of the kind I just described. Given that you are describing headers from a completely different server, I suspect that you aren't looking at www.bbc.co.uk.

So, the BBC figures may be more accurate than you think.

Well no, even if what you said was true, the public cache was just one example of many. Consider an Internet Explorer user going to the homepage, clicking on a link, hitting the back button, clicking on another link, hitting the back button, and so on. Pretty typical behaviour. Now consider an Opera user doing the same. The BBC homepage will register multiple hits from the Internet Explorer user, but only one hit from the Opera user, because of the differences in the way they handle browsing history (Opera follows RFC 2616, Internet Explorer does not).

I donno about this...

[oztiks]

I run a web hosting business and here is the breakdown for webstats last month, and yes its linux hosting btw:

Windows 16400 70 %
Linux 5497 23.4 %

MS Internet Explorer No 14012 59.8 %
Firefox No 7579 32.3 %

Though windows is the dominator in this respect but it goes to show the website content does really depend on who visits the site and therefore produces the stats.

Lets face it BBC is a news network business people and general interest users are reading these articals; ofcourse nerds and geeks are but on the scale of things we really only make up that 9% :)

9.7% isn't that un-usual

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a restaurant search engine company (www.dine.to) in Toronto, Canada, which is aimed about as far from web-hacker as possible. Firefox gets about 9.5% of the visitors. Like the story says, not a massive amount, but still respectable.

Yet another Opera is undercounted theory coming!

[porneL]

IMHO Opera stats can be skewed in a different way.

It is plausible that some IE users have BCC homepage set as browser's start page and create large number of hits.

but other browsers have alternative mechanisms, that allow user to visit homepage even less often than usual. For example Opera on each start reopens previously open tabs, from cache, so rarely anyone uses start page feature. Opera and FF have RSS that leads users directly to articles, etc.