80% of HN is using Chrome? That is unexpected. I'd figure if Firefox would be popular anywhere, it would be here where I would imagine most people run the aurora builds (at least, I do).
The number has been mentioned to be wrong, and it is. I have Aurora 17.0a2 on Ubuntu 64 bit, which is 9 days old.
The OS numbers also seem off, saying 54% of HN is browsing from OSX but 0% from any Linux?
The facebook numbers seem strange. 45% are using Safari but 75% are using Windows. I really don't think 20% of those page views are from Windows users running Safari.
Let's face it, Firefox has been pretty popular among developers because of Firebug but given the rapid development of the Chrome Developer Tools there should be no wonder that's not the case anymore.
Most of the devs I know use one browser for everything and IE for testing. I take it you use FF for dev because of Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar and Chrome for browsing and personal stuff?
I like the Chrome Developer Tools, but prefer Firefox's customizability for my personal use. I can install things like Vimperator/Pterodactl for Vim-like surfing, things like Ghostery to block monitoring sites, etc. Also, the high level of customization in my Firefox profile makes it unsuitable for testing sites.
Well true, Chrome was always the best for browsing, and Firefox for developing, but now that Chrome's web tools kicks Firefoxes ass, you can use Chrome for both :)
Or just separate it, Canary for development, and stable/beta/dev for browsing :)
I agree that Firefox's new built-in web inspector is bad ATM but I don't think it's wise for you to make such a powerful statement when you seem to have forgotten(?) about Firebug.
The OS field seems to be lying. It conveniently adds up to 100% but only has entries for windows, osx, and ios. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04, and I'm sure there's a lot of other Linux users here too.
I pulled up the stats on ihackernews; 86% safari, 6% chrome, 2% for the other big three, but OS says 68% ios, 25% android eh? Safari isn't available on Android, neither is MSIE (2%). The OS field obviously has issues, even beyond not being able to tell the difference between Android and some other Linux machine; even though telling the difference isn't that hard.
UPDATE: I just checked from my Galaxy Nexus and it thinks that I am running Safari, it also claims my browser is 1210 days old, even though Android 4.1 obviously much younger than that;
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.1.1; en-gb; Galaxy Nexus Build/JRO03C) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30
6 days for me on Chrome 22. Nice. I wasn't even aware.
Funny how much lower news.ycombinator.org's average is over .com's. (I'm seeing 19 vs. 61 days, respectively)
No, it's not doing that because I'm on Firefox Extended Support Release (which is currently at major version 10) and it says my browser is 33 days old.
Well, not necessarily because my browser might've got an update around that time. (Most updates to "Extended Support Release" will be security updates IIUC.)
Yep, it's not very smart yet. There's a small json dict of firefox releases that it's referencing (https://github.com/witoff/BrowserAge/blob/master/data/age-fi...). I haven't updated past the stable releases so it's defaulting to the last known release date. Feel free to clone on github :)
Hmm, might be tough - I'm not sure quite how Nightly releases work, but I updated an hour ago and the version changed from 18.0a1 (old date, a few days ago I think) to 18.0a1 (2012-09-30). Meanwhile I check my useragent and I'm just seeing Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/18.0 Firefox/18.0
Will submit a pull request if I get round to looking further and find a decent answer!
edit: Not sure there's going to be any good solution. 18.0 Nightly was first out on August 28th, which is 33 days ago, so despite the fact that I last updated today, and that the whole concept of "Nightly" is to have an update every day, the release number is technically older than the 25 days since the most recent stable release came out. And when, in 10 days, 18.0 moves to Aurora and Nightly moves to 19.0, the user agent most likely won't be different between Aurora users then and Nightly users now.
Thanks @mparlane, turned off prime debugging but was still routing all requests through a WebError handler prior to hitting root. You can otherwise find the rest of the code here: https://github.com/witoff/BrowserAge :)
I just updated iceweasel/aurora (version string conveniently showing it's age is just below 3 days: 17.0~a2+20120928042009-1) and this tells me it's 25 days old.
I'm also on Linux (obviously) and it really seems strange Linux isn't even registering at all.
This is my UA string: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0 Iceweasel/17.0a2
I tried on Chrome and got 6 days old. I then tried it on IE9 just out of curiosity, and got 579 days old. Also, the site doesn't seem to render or work correctly on IE9. The initial table appears at the very left-hand side of the screen, and the [+] button doesn't seem to do anything. (Works fine on Chrome though).
It approximates how long it's been since your browser was released and aggregates other stats based on referrer. I'm asserting that site's being visited by newer browsers are gathering a more tech savvy crowd.
The number has been mentioned to be wrong, and it is. I have Aurora 17.0a2 on Ubuntu 64 bit, which is 9 days old.
The OS numbers also seem off, saying 54% of HN is browsing from OSX but 0% from any Linux?
The facebook numbers seem strange. 45% are using Safari but 75% are using Windows. I really don't think 20% of those page views are from Windows users running Safari.