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I have long been a fan of StatCounter for keeping track of who is visiting my sites.  Now, I’m not going to say that StatCounter is the only good choice for monitoring web traffic.  I am aware of several others that do a nice job as well.  Instead, I want to let you all know about an interesting thing that StatCounter gives to everyone for free:  a view of the kinds of users that are on the Internet.

StatCounter has a page dedicated to the current global stats:  http://gs.statcounter.com/.  It shows things like what browser people are using, what operating systems are popular, and what search engines are being used.

Here’s a few interesting observations:

• As of right now, we can see that Google processes about 90% of all web searches.  Yahoo and Bing are both a bit under 5%.
• Between Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, Microsoft dominates the operating system market.  Mac only has about 5% of the market share, and other operating systems, like Solaris and various flavors of Linux are a combined total of 3%.
• Internet Explorer still leads the web browser wars, at about 55% of all page loads.  FireFox has a significant share of the market as well (about 32%) and is gaining.  Chrome, Safari, and Opera each have somewhere between 2% and 4% of the market, and very little traffic comes from anything else.

So why do we care about this?  I think this is something every programmer ought to know about because it gives important insight into how you should go about developing your software.  If you can only develop for one operating system (or at least, initially), which one should you choose?  Using StatCounter’s global stats as a reference, it is clear that Windows is the ideal first choice.  If you’re making a website, you can see that you clearly need it to work on Internet Explorer, and you’d be foolish to not ensure it works on Fire Fox as well.  And why spend a lot of time trying to get your page to the top of Yahoo’s search results, when everyone is using Google?

Obviously, this isn’t the only consideration to make when deciding how to go about making your software, and it is difficult to predict where the world will be when your product hits the market in a year, but knowing what the world is using is extremely important in knowing how to reach the largest potential market possible.

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