Latest Stats as at 17/11/2008. These figures cover the 15-day period 1/11/2008 to 15/11/2008. Vista Market Share ================== For period 1st to 15th November 2008, figures based on visits:- XP 68.9 (was 69.9, 68.6, 69.2, 70.4, 71.6, 71.8) Vista 18.0 (was 17.0, 17.9, 18.3, 17.5, 15.9, 15.8) Other Windows 4.7 (was 4.7, 5.3, 4.5, 4.5, 4.0, 4.5, 5.6) Mac 6.6 (was 6.6, 6.6, 6.1, 6.0, 6.3, 5.8) Linux 1.1 (was 1.2, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.4) Others 0.7 (was 0.8, 0.7, 0.7, 0.4, 0.7, 0.6) Any increase in Vista seems to be at the expense of XP. Mac is very steady at 6.6%. My opinion is the Vista figures actually comprise two components namely a "home" part which is higher than 18.0% and a "work" part which is correspondingly lower. I find the Vista figures are always higher after processing weekend data. I am working on a way of estimating the two components, or at least making a stab at the "home" component. Browser Breakup =============== For the period 1-15 November: IE 69.5 (was 69.4, 68.9, 69.9, 69.7, 70.5, 71.4 and 72.0) FF 22.4 (was 22.6, 22.9, 22.3, 22.5, 21.7, 21.3) Safari 5.1 (was 5.0, 5.0, 4.8, 4.4, 4.8, 4.8) Opera 0.8 (was 0.9, 0.9, 0.7, 0.9, 1.0, 1.1) Chrome 0.8 (was 0.8, 0.9, 0.7, 0.8) All Others 1.3 (was 1.4, 1.4, 1.7, 1.6, 1.9, 1.7) Opera and Chrome are neck and neck. Firefox has stalled, with 10 weeks of results between 22.3% and 22.9%. The "others" figure is slowly but steadily decreasing. On Windows the main "others" are Mozilla and Netscape, but if you see higher published percentages for Netscape, don't be fooled. It's mainly worms and nasties pretending to be humans and their software is so ancient that they pretend to be Netscape. Search Engines Share ==================== Breakup of visits via search engines for November 1st to 15th. Google 85.8 (was 86.3, 87.0, 86.4, 87.8, 87.2, 85.7, 86.6, 86.2) Yahoo 7.6 (was 8.1, 7.5, 7.8, 6.8, 7.3, 7.3, 8.0, 7.5, 7.8) Microsoft 3.1 (was 2.5, 2.0, 2.3, 1.7, 2.0, 3.3, 2.6, 2.1, 2.3) All others 3.4 (was 3.1, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.5, 5.0, 5.0, 3.7, 3.7) The major players within the 3.4% "All others" category are Ask at just under 1%, AOL around 0.6%, and Altavista, Dogpile and My Web Search all around 0.1%. It's a very steep distribution curve down from Google. Robots working for lots of other search engines are visiting regularly to either update or build a search engine. All up, it's mainly wasted effort. Google have the game sewn up:- (a) Their activities are global. Whilst collecting advertising revenue locally, they somehow interchange database information and update their software between data centres. (b) Google's robots do a lot less work than Yahoo's or Microsoft's. Google are scheduling their robots to match the previously measured frequency of updating found at each web site. (c) Their user interface remains uncluttered and unpretentious, a fact that never seems to have dawned on Yahoo management or Microsoft management, let alone anyone else. Without boasting, they do word stemming (guitar and guitars are the same, party and parties are the same etc etc) and they do spelling correction before searching (pavillion means pavilion, counrty means country etc). Their paid adverts are unobtrusive and not in-your-face, and they try very hard to make the paid adverts relevant to the search. Linux Distro Analysis ===================== 1st to 15th November, 2008. Ubuntu is way ahead of rivals SUSE, Fedora, Debian and Mandriva, but the picture is totally muddied by the even larger number of Linux computers simply identified as the generic i686 without naming the distro. My plan is to add a few months together to give some better percentages, but until the distro builders ensure their browsers name the distro, well, it's a lost cause. And the smaller and specialised distros don't want publicity for their minuscule browsing market share. It's likely that many EEE owners have taken off Xandros and put on Ubuntu - an unhappy ending to all that collaboration between Asus and Xandros. ================================================================