I have been conducting some research over the last, to be honest 3 days concerning browser and operating system trends of people who visit websites I either own or host for people. I collected data based on just over 6000 requests from Saturday morning, until Monday night (11-10-07 to 11-12-07). The results of this were very interesting (to me and a few people I discussed this with). First I will show the usage graph:

os_graph.png
Possible -+0.1% margin of error.

As you can see, this graph shows 6195 total page requests over the 3 days the data was collected. Most requests were 1-2 pages, so this was not the result of user spam. Notice that Windows has 57.1% OS graph, OS X has 39.5%. That is surprising in the fact that OS X has such a high percentage. Most people consider OS X to be in the lower percentile, nearing 1-15% of the market share, but surely not nearly 40%.

Then take a look at Vista, in its splendor. Of the 6195 requests, only 11.5% of them were served to Vista computers. Compare that to 39.5% of OS X requests, and 45.6% of Windows XP requests. Is anyone surprised by these statistics? I honestly am, I expected Vista to have a higher share in the websites I researched (tech websites, due to privacy as of now I am not releasing the domain names).

Does this mean that Vista is not popular? Yes, in the scope of the researched sites. Granted this was in no way a global study, or a in-depth one it does give a glimpse into a few tech-oriented websites over a 3 day time period to show you how Vista is stacking up in the OS world.

And just for the heck of it, here was the data collected on browser trends:

browser_graph.png

-Steve