Statistics

Let me throw some statistics at you.

53% of computer users set their screens to display 65536 colours; 19.37% use 4.2 Billion colours

52.78% of computer users use Internet Explorer 4; 24.77% use Netscape Navigator 4

The top plug-in is "Live Audio" followed very closely by Quicktime

86.57% Internet users have Javascript enabled while 3.02% do not (the rest don't know)

45.81% users have Windows 95; 44.59% have Windows 98; 2.46% use Macintosh

and the list goes on.

How do I know this? There is an incredibly interesting website http://www.statmarket.com that keeps track of the above information plus more? How? That's a whole section of the site devoted to explaining how this data is gathered.

Why is this information necessary? Quite simply, it's there for webpage designers. There's no sense working on a photograph that requires the highest possible resolution to get the nuances that you want detailed on the viewers screen if they are going to view it on a video screen set to display only 256 colours. Is it time to develop utilities that are specific to Windows 98 only? Given the above statistics, that might not give you the market share that you had in mind.

Not only is the raw data available, but it is summarized graphically in a bar chart and the data itself is broken down in terms of trends over time. So, while it might be possible that there are more Windows 95 users at the present time, the trend might lead you to making another decision for the long run.

This is simply a fascinating site to visit and consume the statistics from.

Have you ever suspected that certain hours of the day are slower on the Internet than others? Yes, hour by hour, you can track it at this site.

Well, it's off to do an Internet search for more material. I wonder what the most popular search engine on the Internet is...well, I'll just click on the "Top Search Engines" link to find that far and away the leader is: