battle of the platforms

[Jama Poulsen <jama@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Something interesting happened this week.

While browsing the weekly debianlinux.net webserver log report of this week,
it showed that the number of Mozilla users is now greater than the number of
Internet Exploder users.

  Browser                                                 Requests % Total
  ------------------------------------------------------- -------- -------
  Mozilla                                                     5103    42.5
  MS_Internet_Exporer                                         5074    42.2
  Unknown                                                      661     5.5
  Opera                                                        498     4.1
  Konqueror                                                    307     2.6
  Web_Robot                                                    139     1.2
  Galeon                                                        93     0.8
  Netscape_Navigator                                            69     0.6
  Wget                                                          20     0.2
  Links                                                         20     0.2
  ------------------------------------------------------- -------- -------
  Total for 12018 records                                    12018   100.0

Two years ago Mozilla was at about 20%. This nice trend will probably continu,
and with it the democratic influence on existing (go PNG! go CSS!) and future
(http://www.whatwg.org) web standards.

On the operating system side things aren't as good yet, but the sittuaion is
improving at a slow but steady rate. Two years ago the X11/Linux part was
also at about 20%.

  OS                                                      Requests % Total
  ------------------------------------------------------- -------- -------
  Windows_NT                                                  5951    49.5
  Unknown_X11_System                                          3253    27.1
  Unknown                                                      924     7.7
  GNU/Linux                                                    704     5.9
  Windows_98                                                   643     5.4
  Mac_OS                                                       262     2.2
  Windows_9x                                                   164     1.4
  Windows_XP                                                    53     0.4
  Windows_95                                                    25     0.2
  Windows                                                       24     0.2
  ------------------------------------------------------- -------- -------
  Total for 12018 records                                    12018   100.0

I know that the visiting population for DLN is not really representative for the
broader web space, but the above trend must exist to some degree on all sites.

The Google Zeitgeist statistics (http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html)
don't show this OS trend yet, but I think thats because of the large population
of M$ OS users out there. Its hard to see this situation improve a lot within
a few years, but maybe a 5-10% share is possible if M$ fails to live up to
the hype, and GNU/Linux offers something that most computer users/offices
can't live without. The first part seems a sure bet, the second a bit risky.
A truly devastating serie of virii might be a good tactic, perhaps the best >:-)

Jama Poulsen
http://debianlinux.net
http://vemail.org