Is Flash Really On 99% of Net Devices?

Barence writes "Adobe claims that its Flash platform reaches '99% of internet viewers,' but a closer look at those statistics suggests it's not exactly all-encompassing. Adobe puts Flash player penetration at 947 million users out of a total 956 million internet-connected devices, but the total number of PCs is based on a forecast made two years ago. What's more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people — around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total. Is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?"

Ask Google/Yahoo/Baidu

[cypherwise]

If these sites had tiny embedded flash objects whose sole purpose was to test for successful loading or not you would be able to get a ton more stats that any survey. How much do you think they could charge for data like this?

Blockers?

[BrokenHalo]

It would be more interesting to conduct a survey to find what percentage of net users find Flash as annoying as I do.

Maybe some download stats for Flashblock? I would have to agree that Flash is now more or less inescapable, especially if you like YouTube, but if a site is built on Flash it's usually a surefire sign that the content won't be worth the bandwidth.

Re:Count me...

[someone1234]

Well, i hate flash as website menu and eyecandy.
But some flash games are really nice.
If you never played ANY flash game, you miss something.
There are so many different games, one might be good for you.

Unfortunately...

[Strake]

99% seems an ambitious estimate. 64-bit Flash, for example, is still in testing, and many distributions still do not include it. What about the myriad CPU architectures used in embedded devices? Different browsers? Different operating systems?

Perhaps if it were an open standard, it could be more widely supported, instead of supported only on those platforms selected by Adobe.

Re:Count me...

[shogun]

I run flashblock and it works great most of the time. If there is some flash I want to see I can just click on it and let it run.

However there are a percentage of sites that appear to have some script running to check if I can run flash and wont show the flash properly at all even if I have flash allowed for the entire site.

Re:Test YOUR Users

[christurkel]

You just posted a lot but said nothing. How did Adobe come up with it's stats from such a small sample?

Survey shenanigans

[unts]

What's more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people

It didn't help that the survey was done using a flash app. Some might say that skewed the results somewhat.

Re:Let's bigin lobbying Adobe

[failedlogic]

A better lobbying effort would be: Make Adobe less of a CPU resource hog.

A have a 4 or 5 gen old dual-core w/ 2 GB RAM and at times my system almost comes to a halt with a Flash page. I feel sorry for people with lesser systems. Don't they realize this is one reason why Flash Block exists? If they are concerned with PR (the reason for this survey) then they should be more concerned that more and more people are blocking flash.

Re:Unfortunately...

[Hal_Porter]

99% seems an ambitious estimate. 64-bit Flash, for example, is still in testing, and many distributions still do not include it. What about the myriad CPU architectures used in embedded devices? Different browsers? Different operating systems?

Perhaps if it were an open standard, it could be more widely supported, instead of supported only on those platforms selected by Adobe.

Not really. 64 bit Windows can run 32 bit browsers. Flash comes in both 32 and 64 bit forms for Linux.

If you look here

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8 [hitslink.com]

Windows 88.26%
Mac 9.93%
Linux 0.83%

Add them up and you get just over 99%

Anyhow it is open swfdec and Gnash exist. And Adobe offers Flashlite for embedded platforms.

Re:Count me...

[rockrr]

For computers that have the primary drive that is not "C", flash won't install. I have one,(of four)that is without flash. I find that I don't really need it. I would rather read information than have it shown to me.

It's probably pretty close to 99%

[yog]

Flash is pretty ubiquitous. It comes on every Windows PC loaded with Internet Explorer, and it's an easy download for Macs and Linux machines. The Android phone OS from Google supports Flash, and Adobe has announced a working Flash for iPhone, simply awaiting Apple's go-ahead. The new Palm Pre phone will have Flash. Windows Mobile has Flash Lite. Probably, Apple will allow Flash if Pre and Android phone sales take off.

Youtube pretty much ensured Flash's predominance. Suddenly, there was an easy, painless way to watch video and listen to audio without having to mess with Realplayer and Windows Multimedia codecs and stupid digital rights management code that only works in certain versions of MS Windows.

It's interesting how Flash took the web app market away from Java. Flash is the big player in interactive web apps, while Java is a bit player. Java is still huge in server side apps but it's dead on the desktop. I can't even get Java applets to run on my current home machine with Firefox and Suse Linux, but I have no incentive to get it working. There are still a couple of web sites out there that use java applets for their user interface widgets, but these are few and far between.

Which is why they have other ways to measure you.

[an.echte.trilingue]

Lots of tracking software has ways to account for people like you. Xiti, for example, loads both a script and a small image. They err on the side of caution and assume that people who load the image but not the script have fairly restrictive settings. So, Xiti tells me that after filtering out bots 2% of my users have js dis-activated, although I believe that the actual percentage is lower. If I assume that all of those users have flash disabled and combine that with the fact that Javascript-based Google analytics tells me that 3% of my users either don't have Flash or that it doesn't recognize their flash version, at most 5% of my visitors don't have Flash and the actual number is probably a small fraction of that.

In general, I do not advocate the use of Flash in web design, but you cannot deny that it is nearly ubiquitous.

Re:Count me...

[Jamie's Nightmare]

I would have enjoyed reading your rant against Animated GIFs 15 years ago.