I’ve had requests to post the OS & browser stats for the OGRE site, which I didn’t include in my previous demographics post, so here we go.
A caveat to start off with – as a programmer-oriented site our users are obviously a little different in their choice of tech to the population at large!
Operating Systems
Not really a surprise there, Windows dominates the landscape, with Linux and OS X pulling up the rear. Personally on the desktop I’m a Windows and OS X user so my visits are contributing to those rows. There’s a decent showing for the mobile platforms too, iPhone and iPod particularly, a fair few on Android and even some early iPad hits.
Windows Breakdown
It’s worth drilling down into the huge Windows stat to see what versions people are using:
XP still rules the roost then, and thank goodness Vista is sinking rapidly to the bottom like the cast-iron turd sculpture it is – Windows 7 has already more than doubled its share. And it’s amusing to see that a couple of crazy b?st#rds are still running ME and NT.
Mac OS X Breakdown
I’d heard that supporting pre-Leopard versions of Mac OS X was increasingly becoming pointless since almost everyone had upgraded, and these stats bear that out – 96% of users are running 10.5 (Leopard) or better.
Even more interesting was the sole visitor running 10.7! Was that an error, or did we have someone from Apple on an unreleased future version visiting the site? And what’s that ’68K’ entry about – someone running an Apple ][ emulator or something?
The Linux breakdown wasn’t interesting (99% ‘not set’, the rest just kernel versions), so there’s nothing to post for that – don’t email me about missing out Linux please 
Browsers
Firefox is the clear winner here at a huge 50% – this definitely reflects our developer-focussed audience. In fact, I used to be an avid Firefox user until quite recently, when the new version of Chrome added the equivalent to the extensions I relied on in Firefox, at which point I switched because Chrome is more efficient with memory in particular. IE’s share at 18% is definitely not representative of the general user population, but then our users tend to be a bit better informed than that 
So there you go, request fulfilled – hope it was interesting.
April 13th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
I’ve got a Macintosh IIci and a Macintosh SE/30 set up with ethernet cards and Netscape 2.02, so who knows, maybe I contributed one or two of those 68k visits.
April 13th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Interesting, I didn’t expect IE to be in third place and Linux to beat out Mac OSX. I knew the Ogre3D audience was quite advanced but I wasn’t expecting it to be this pronounced.
Thanks for sharing these metrics!
April 13th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Actually, you can get a much better breakdown of Linux users with other analytics packages. Google Analytics just isn’t as good (or maybe they don’t think anyone cares which distribution is most popular).
I’m actually a little surprised how many linux users there are. Over 10% is pretty good even taking into account that it’s a highly technical site.
April 13th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Cool, that was fast. Thanks for the info.
It all looks pretty much standard fare to me, one thing I notice is that (even for the developer crowd) Apple do a good job of making upgrading the clear choice. I mean 73% already using the latest and greatest. I do suppose hesitancy has arisen from the Vista debarcle (whether you think it’s great or not is irrelevant, there was a lot of highly publicised issues, real or imagined). At any rate they’re certainly doing something right.
As for me I’m an avid contributer to the Chrome (well, chromium but I presume that gets put under the same banner) and Linux boxes.
On an unrelated note is it just me or are half these captcha’s seriously hard to read?
April 14th, 2010 at 9:54 am
@Nico: thanks for making the stats more interesting then
And the OS X 10.7 hit is apparently real, although for obvious reasons the person involved is keeping a low profile
@blankthemuffin: You’re welcome. Part of the reason why OS X users upgrade is that Apple make it easy. They charge reasonable prices (Snow Leopard was the same kind of upgrade that Win7 was over Vista (well, except Leopard didn’t suck) and yet it cost £30 instead of over £100 (for Win7 Pro). And they also don’t fragment the user base with 6 different OS options, charging the earth for the top-tier ones, thus confusing everyone about what they actually need and making it pretty unfriendly to the average user so they just put it off until their next PC purchase. Honestly, Windows version fragmentation and the prices they charge for upgrades are an absolute dog’s breakfast.
Captchas are mostly fine for me, only the occasional weird one.
April 14th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
> (Snow Leopard was the same kind of upgrade that Win7 was over Vista (well, except Leopard didn’t suck) and yet it cost £30 instead of over £100 (for Win7 Pro).
Odd, I quite like Win 7. Home version does everything I need, including file sharing. No need for Pro. Putting the myriad version and over-pricing aside, you think it sucks?
April 14th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
No, I was referring to Vista, which I hate with a passion, the slow, awkward, memory-hogging piece of crap that it is. Leopard (Vista) -> Snow Leopard (Win7).
I hear Win7′s a lot nicer, and I have my copy waiting to be installed (waiting until I get at least a few days free to rebuild & test everything). I still object to paying over £100 for an upgrade though (Pro). I need the XP mode personally for a couple of unusual cases (I know I could also use a VM but it’s more of a PITA). Personally I think it’s just MS wanting to milk the business world a little harder since they need the domain-joining and XP-compat modes most. I like that OS X only has one ‘flavour’ that everyone gets, plus you actually get some good apps with it like iMovie & GarageBand, and for less money. Ok so you pay over the odds for the hardware at the start, but these puppies are well built and cheaper to run longer term – my MacBook Pro is holding up much better than any of my Windows laptops after 3 years (and 2 OS upgrades).
April 14th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
> No, I was referring to Vista, which I hate with a passion..
Fortunately, last year I got the Home Premium Family upgade pack(3 licenses) when it was heavily discounted($149). Only lasted to December and the pack is now gone. Microsoft did warn it would be temporary, but geez, why couldn’t they just raise the price to $199 and keep it on bargain rack. Still would have been a good deal in a down economy. They say they want to move people off of XP and Vista, but they seem convinced that most folks are going to just buy a new PC with Win7 on it. I could be wrong, but it just seems like more folks are holding onto their PC’s a bit longer. I know I have. I’m on 3 years now, when I used to get a new system every 18-24 months or so in the past.
I agree on the versionitis, it makes your head spin. They should just go back to the home and pro versions and just DLC all the other ultimate crap if people want to buy it.
April 14th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Urgh I hate buying a cut down thing then immediately having to pay more for all the extra crap. Especially if I’m paying the amount Windows usually costs.
Being a technical person I usually make my PCs last a decent while, I mean I still have a PC running with a Ge Force 4 MX 440. That’s another plus for linux for me.
April 15th, 2010 at 9:35 am
Unfortunately the US got all the good deals there, there was some ‘while stocks last’ discount nonsense on Home Premium (but then I needed Pro anyway) in the UK but frankly, they’re not even trying to compete because they know most people gravitate to Windows anyway or buy a new PC with it on.
I haven’t bought a ‘new’ desktop PC since 1991 – every machine I’ve owned since then has been upgraded / rebuilt one piece at a time, so I always have to buy Windows separately. It’s only laptops that I buy off the shelf, and I’m firmly an Apple convert in that area now
Microsoft are lazy, inward-looking and customer-unfriendly, mostly coasting on the back of prior successes and customer inertia. If they don’t change and start giving people what they want instead of what MS wants to sell, eventually they’ll get a shock when they find their customers have found alternatives (probably non-PC devices, sorry Linux PC fans but your chance for mainstream use has probably passed now, concentrate on Android
) and have very little personal attachment to the Windows brand. People get genuinely excited about buying Apple’s products and increasingly the new Android devices and so on – people buy Windows more grudgingly, mostly because they bought it last time and kind of have to carry on for the time being. There’s no passion there, and there’s only so long they can coast on the conservatism of business users.
April 15th, 2010 at 11:06 am
I don’t see the humble old PC being obsoleted any time soon.
“People get genuinely excited about buying Apple’s products” even if it’s for no apparent reason. I mean really a limited tablet PC is not worth the hype it receives.
Oh and don’t forget the joining of Maemo and Moblin into the new MeeGo, which should be interesting at least.
April 15th, 2010 at 11:20 am
“I don’t see the humble old PC being obsoleted any time soon.”
Nope, but the days of it being considered normal for everyone to need a ‘full’ PC (even a cut-down netbook which I think is an evolutionary dead-end) to participate online are rapidly disappearing. And the days of the PC being the most common device used to access email, social networks, and games.
“even if it’s for no apparent reason. I mean really a limited tablet PC is not worth the hype it receives.”
You’re clearly not the target audience, which is fine. The device-enabled user population is set to fragment along many, many lines, which is part of why I say MS really need to be paying better attention to keeping their users on side, lest they wake up to find an awful lot of them (but of course not all) have gone elsewhere. I know several people who almost live via their iPhones now and rarely touch their home PC anymore.
April 15th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Yes I understand what they’re doing, and they are doing it excellently but to me it just seems like a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Mmm yeah netbooks are nice but I agree they are not going anywhere. It’ll be interesting to see the re-interest in tablet technology now Apple is involved. I suspect it will begin a major revival much like what Asus did with the Eeepc (although they were the first that I know of).
And I agree the new Windows Phone OS (whatever it’s called now, apparently changing the name of something is the new product refresh) really needs to be something special now the iPhone has established itself, Android is looking pretty good and Intel and Nokia are teaming up for MeeGo.
April 15th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Although Windows Phone OS is directly competing, it’s not just that – the Win7 (& other MS software in general actually) heavy-handed licensing and the decline of Windows Phone are all indicators in a wider trend. I really don’t think MS is at all ‘ready’ for the situation where they can’t rely on the momentum from their existing dominance on PCs and ppl running Office. They literally have nothing else that makes any decent money – and I would propose that most of their current user base buys out of habit, existing commitments and/or because it’s bundled rather than for real desire for their new products generally. No-one I know felt they needed Office 2010, but they’ll end up buying it anyway solely because of the upgrade treadmill, support ending etc. It’s really not a very healthy situation – they’ll be able to milk business for a good while yet simply because they can’t afford to change, but I think they’re rapidly losing the consumers who are finding that devices other than a PC often fit into their lives better, devices which most of the time don’t run MS software.
April 16th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
@Steve: Assuming you have a usable license for XP, it seems pretty straightforward to get free VMWare to behave like XP Mode in Win 7 Home: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/11060/create-an-xp-mode-for-windows7-home-versions-and-vista/
I have not tried this yet, but will give it a try.
April 17th, 2010 at 10:42 am
@steve, You have to download XP mode from MS site after installation. It seems to emulate Pentium 2 hardware, with a very generic Video chipset(not 3D accelarator). I tried it, and after taht I simply downloaded VMWarePlayer after looking at wikipedia, It is small free(paid if use for buisness), fast, efficient, more importantly allows to run anything on anything, like Linux and XP both on Win7 or even Vice Versa(The Ultimate guinea pig lab to tes operating systems), can emulate even Core 2 duo chipset, has S3 gfx card emulation(3D Accelaration that can run Half – Life 2). Allows hassle free installation(but you have to update drivers from after installing a OS). Work in “a window” which can be done full screen or minimized by double clicking like media players. Extremely stable and resource efficient. God on cpu side allowing allocating seperate cores and easy filesharing between guest and host OS. All this is available in free edition.
It is really good and XP mode “just” pales in comparison. I am using it and not going back to XP Mode. Ofcourse for buisness u may want free XP mode, but cheapest paid edition of VMWare will outperform it.
On other hand please note taht 3D Gfx emulation is nowhere near even “nvidia 6200 GT”, so 3D graphics checking will be a great problem. Checking anything 3D in original native XP will be far bette as it will use all hardware. I am myself at loss at checking my 3D engine on XP running in it.
For every other thing it is totally awesome, can run Age of Empires 2, UT99, Quake 2(which have problems in win 7, but patches and fixes for Win7 are also available).
April 17th, 2010 at 10:56 am
(but you have to update drivers from Internet after installing a OS)
April 17th, 2010 at 11:12 am
Yeah I know – mostly I want it because some clients may be using it and it’s good to have the same setup for if I need to use XP-bound stuff. All corporate customers will be running Pro simply because it’s required for running inside a corporate domain, thus they’re also likely to run Windows own XP mode on desktops.
I only have one copy of W7 right now (Pro) but further copies will be Home Premium, this is how I did Vista too. I always like to have one Pro version in the office – if I never need it, that’s just a cost, but it costs far more not to have it available to test with and to need it quickly. If it was just for home I wouldn’t bother, but I’m notionally running a business here
April 17th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Than indeed XP mode is the best option, since you are also “emotionally” running a buisness there, always providing customers best value.
April 18th, 2010 at 6:38 am
Vista which I hate with passion ?
really? It was not that bad, and windows 7 is not so different from vista. It feels mor elike vista in new clothes.
I am using it mainly because everyone else is also using it and I need it to test it. But so far I am finding it good for full personal use. Although it does not feel like the improvement over XP as was in the case of Win XP over Win 98.
April 18th, 2010 at 10:47 am
Where to start:
- Ran slower and used more memory on the same machine than XP
- UAC was a POS, popping up every 5 seconds and thinking patch.exe needed admin permissions
- Background indexing and updates often brought the machine to a crawl, no decent balance point between applying updates regularly and intermittently having Vista steal even *more* resources that you’re trying to do actual work with
- Battery life on laptops absolutely apalling compared to XP and especially OS X
- Aero Glass really inefficient – turned my laptop into a hot plate
- Updates take forever to apply, and even after you reboot consider it their right to grind away for another bunch of time while I grind my teeth
- ‘Widgets’ completely useless and about as poor a copy of Apple’s Dashboard as you could get
- Shutdown is ridiculously slow – my Mac takes 3 seconds tops to shut down and it’s 3 years old with lots of apps. The Vista partition has barely anything on it and it takes about 2 minutes to shut down.
- Crappy early drivers; this went away after a while of course
Honestly, I hate using this piece of crap. I’m far from the only one who found it’s an OS that wants to drive the USER rather than the user driving IT.
April 19th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
“Battery life on laptops absolutely apalling compared to XP and especially OS X” – That was really ver bad. Alln your points are really bad about Vista. Atleast in these areas win7 is a improvement. You really nailed Vista.
April 19th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
And hammered it too:)
April 21st, 2010 at 9:44 pm
No, Steve didn’t nail Vista.
Yes, before the first service packs, Vista was really appallingly bad.
Now, it’s faster than XP on my machine. I am happy with it.
And I’m not going to shell out for Win7 – at least not until I upgrade my current machine.
They released Vista too soon, and it never survived that.
And did I mention that I am a happy Vista user?
April 22nd, 2010 at 12:18 pm
@jacome, Yes but service pack 2 for Vista also does not solve all the problems Steve mentioned. But vista is more compatible with XP softwares and games. Whereas win7 is not compatible with even Vista softwares(and XP too).