Latest Stats as at 3/12/2008.
These figures cover the 15-day period 16/11/2008 to 30/11/2008. 


Vista Market Share
==================

For period 16th to 30th November 2008, figures based on visits:-

XP 66.7 (was 68.9, 69.9, 68.6, 69.2, 70.4, 71.6, 71.8)
Vista 19.7 (was 18.0, 17.0, 17.9, 18.3, 17.5, 15.9, 15.8)
Other Windows 4.2 (was 4.7, 4.7, 5.3, 4.5, 4.5, 4.0, 4.5, 5.6)
Mac 7.3 (was 6.6, 6.6, 6.6, 6.1, 6.0, 6.3, 5.8)
Linux 1.1 (was 1.1, 1.2, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.4) 
Others 1.1 (was 0.7, 0.8, 0.7, 0.7, 0.4, 0.7, 0.6)

Vista has taken off again, after a period where it seemed to 
have stalled.  All the older versions of Windows are in decline, 
clearly older PCs are being replaced.  M$ is selling their bloated 
offering on new machines.  Mac is rising, whilst Linux is not 
making any headway.  See some later comments about Linux distros. 

There has been a slight change in the counting to identify mobile
phones and Windows CE better. The result is a slight increase 
in the "Others" category, although it's rising anyway.  The most 
popular 3G mobile phone used to surf the net is Apple's iPhone 
at about 0.4%, with Nokia well back in second place at 0.2%.

It's a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation at the moment, 
but eventually all reputable web sites will need to cater for 
users on mobile phones.  Unfortunately the current crop of 
graphics designers and programmers are incapable of this task, 
given their devotion to overdesigned graphics, plus the excessive 
clutter and superfluous features to "enhance the user experience"
despite not being indicated as required by usability research.  

 
Browser Breakup
===============

Percentages for the period 16th to 30th November...

IE 68.7 (was 69.5, 69.4, 68.9, 69.9, 69.7, 70.5, 71.4 and 72.0)
FF 22.3 (was 22.4, 22.6, 22.9, 22.3, 22.5, 21.7, 21.3)  
Safari 5.6 (was 5.1, 5.0, 5.0, 4.8, 4.4, 4.8, 4.8)
Opera 0.9 (was 0.8, 0.9, 0.9, 0.7, 0.9, 1.0, 1.1)
Chrome 0.8 (was 0.8, 0.8, 0.9, 0.7, 0.8)
All Others 1.6 (was 1.3, 1.4, 1.4, 1.7, 1.6, 1.9, 1.7)

Firefox has stalled, with three months of results 
between 21.3% and 22.9%. My prediction is that Firefox's final 
market share after say another three years is not over 30%.  
Reaching 70% or even 50% is a dream. 

If you see published percentages for Netscape above 0.2%, 
don't be fooled.  It's either incorrect measuring by companies 
who should know better or just worms and nasties 
with software so ancient that they pretend to be Netscape. 


Search Engines Share
==================== 

Breakup of visits via search engines for November 16th to 30th.

Google 86.9 (was 85.8, 86.3, 87.0, 86.4, 87.8, 87.2, 85.7, 86.6, 86.2)
Yahoo 7.6 (was 7.6, 8.1, 7.5, 7.8, 6.8, 7.3, 7.3, 8.0, 7.5, 7.8)
Microsoft 2.7 (was 3.1, 2.5, 2.0, 2.3, 1.7, 2.0, 3.3, 2.6, 2.1, 2.3)
All others 2.7 (was 3.4, 3.1, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.5, 5.0, 5.0, 3.7, 3.7)

Within the 2.7% of "All others", the two that standout are Ask 
and AOL, both around 0.6%.  All the old 1990's favourites like 
Altavista and Lycos have negligible market share.

My prediction is that Yahoo and Microsoft will never 
increase their market share until their management learn 
about reducing clutter on the main page.


Linux Distro Analysis
=====================

Ubuntu, the top distro, does not work properly with floppy disks.  
What have the Gnome team been doing?   
After 17 years, they still can't get it to work.  
It won't unmount floppies correctly, and it's so slow showing the 
directory from a floppy that it's unuseable.

Xandros, as supplied with the Asus EEE PC, has never appeared 
in my statistics.  Xandros takes a battering on the forums.  
It's generally despised and most geeks put Ubuntu on instead.
It's getting harder and harder to buy a Linux-powered EEE.

Wireless broadband USB dongles are all the rage.  
Plug them into Windows XP and away you go.  It's hells bells 
trying to get them working on Linux, the help desks tell you 
Linux is not supported and there is nothing you can do.

After hours of reading on forums, you discover these dongles 
don't/can/might/could/should/do work, so it really is a bit tricky.

Next year's big craze will be mini-laptops with the mobile 
broadband internet dongle built-in, but given the patchy 
results to date, it's unlikely that Linux will feature.

============================== ==============================