PCWorld.com Year-End Stats: IE7, Firefox, Vista, Mac
As is my wont, I'm going to do another of my periodic updates on the usage of Firefox by PCWorld.com visitors, as shown in our Web analytics numbers. And since 2007 is practically over, I'll expand my report to look at some other notable numbers, too.
First, let's look at browsers...
2007 has seen the first full year of competition between Internet Explorer 7--Microsoft's first sorta-modern browser--and the upstart known as Firefox. IE7 has steadily grown in usage over the year, going from around 24 percent usage to 37 percent today. But despite some predictions that it would strike a mighty Microsoftian blow against Firefox, it hasn't. Firefox started the year with 25 percent usage and ended it with 36 percent; it's still growing, and as IE6 users have moved on, they've apparently been nearly as likely to jump to Firefox as they have to opt for Microsoft's latest browser.
Here's a chart of IE7 and Firefox's growth in usage on PCWorld.com, with IE in red and Firefox in green:
OK, how about operating systems? On January 30th, Microsoft released Windows Vista to consumers, who have been adopting it in ever-growing numbers. But those numbers have been creeping along rather than rocketing: As of now, Vista (the red line in the chart) is used by 14 percent of visitors, while 71 percent use Windows XP (the green line):
How much of an accomplishment is it for a new version of Windows to get to 14 percent usage in 11 months? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002. In that period, that operating system went from nothing to 36 percent usage on PCWorld.com--more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far. In fact, it only took eleven months for XP (the green line in this cart) to surpass Windows 98 (the red one) and become the most-used version of Windows among users of the site:
(So how come Vista's being adopted so much more slowly than XP was back in the day? It might relate in part to deficiencies in Vista. But I also bet it stems in part from the fact that XP with SP2 is...well, far from perfect, but all that many people need. Back in 2001, the Windows world was more fractured, and XP was a much more modern OS than either the aging Windows 98 or the botched job that was Windows ME.)
One last startling chart: Here's the a graph of the percentage of PCWorld.com visitors who use a Mac to access our site, covering the past five years:
It was as low as one percent at some points, and was around four percent when 2007 began. Now it's seven percent. That's still teensy compared to the 90 percent-plus who use various versions of Windows, but it's almost certainly the highest in the history of this site. (The inflection point on the chart above, incidentally, coincides with the release of the first Intel-based Macs. A lotta folks predicted that the CPU switch would spell trouble for Apple; you sure couldn't prove that by our site stats.)
That's the news as of now. If I don't provide an update within the next few months, nudge me and I'll check in again with new stats...
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It sure would be great if all of these FF users, IE7 users, IE6 users, Vista users, XP users, Mac O/S users, if all of them were crunching for BOINC and WCG. Don't know about this very worthwhile use of your computers' idle time? Visit
http://boinc.berkeley.edu
htp://worldcommunitygrid.org
You will be impressed at all of the scientific research of which you could be a part. And, we need you and your computing power.
We are all ready with the software agents for Windows, Mac O/S, and Linux.
Give us a shot.
I'd be curious to see Linux usage statistics over the last year. Has Linux use since the release of Vista changed?
Your statements on Windows are incoherent. Surely the sucessor to Windows 98 was Windows 2000, not XP? Win2000 was about as good as it ever got, IMHO, in some ways I still prefer it to XP, security considerations aside.
Sorry, no. Windows 2000 was marketed strictly towards the business market, and was typically not available on OEM desktop systems. Consumers were pushed towards either Windows 98SE or Windows ME.
XP was the genuine update to Windows 98. It improved game compatibility as compared to Windows 2000, and it was marketed in both a "Professional" and a "Home" edition.
Too much Vista "hysteria" IMHO. XP was a true departure from the Win 9X series, and as such, many took the plunge. Vista, on the other hand, is really more of an evolutionary XP upgrade...good, as far as I am concerned, but not a compelling upgrade to be made.
My new notebook came with Vista, and runs quite fast, and smoothly, of course being a dual-core cpu based system, it has enough muscle to run Vista well, as one would expect.
My older Win XP desktop, although "capable" of running all flavors of Vista, would tend to bog down at least a little in comparison to XP (SP2), and there is really no reason for me to change the OS to Vista on this machine.
I think that newer, and more hardware-powerful computers make sense coming with Vista installed, but I do not see Vista as a "let's run out and upgrade our 2-3-4 year old computers" deal.