The changing face of computing as measured by you

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It’s amazing how much the computing and mobile tech news is changing. You can see it happening. Go back a few years and you had far less widespread coverage of Mac and Linux, yet today folks are tuned in right now to blogs covering a Mac press event. Earlier this morning we had a few stories about Linux, both in the laptop world as well as the new smartphone companion device class. There’s new alternatives for browsers, notebooks, phones and more. As I alluded in one my earlier posts today, it might be time to take another serious look at Ubuntu for mobile device usage.

Aside from the news visibility of these changes, I thought it would be fun to look at the browsers and operating systems that you actually use to read this site. To say that the composition of what you use to get here has changed would be a severe understatement…..

Let’s start with the share of OS, or the operating system reported on that you, the readers use here:

1. Vista is about where I’d expect it, around 15%
2. I didn’t expect any measurable Linux but there’s a good 3% or so
3. Mac OS is near 10%, which I figure was minimal one or two years ago
4. Somebody is using WinME (or it wouldn’t have shown up on the pie chart) and needs to upgrade. ;)
5. A small but solid group of mobile readers hit the site on a Windows CE-based handheld.

Now let’s take a look at the browser share. We knew that Firefox has gained some momentum over the past year or two, but wow…

1. Firefox is on around 40% of your machines, which is much larger than I thought. I use the product as well, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.
2. IE in its various versions are used by around 48% of you…not even half any longer.
3. The new Safari beta for Windows hasn’t had any impact here as I would expect it to show up as "Sarfari 3.x"
4. Opera is a bit lower than I figured (probably because Firefox is higher than I imagined) at around 3%
5. Can you even download Netscape 3.x any longer? ;)

As I stated earlier, the playing field for computing is in a process of transition right now and it’s not only evident by the stories I read every day: it’s evident right here with you readers. Makes you wonder what we’ll see if we revisit this scenario in 6 months, one year, even three years out….