
What HN Users Use (45% Mac, 63% Chrome) - johnx123-up
http://www.dangrossman.info/2012/08/21/what-hacker-news-users-use/
======
dazzawazza
To be clear it's what HN Users that are interested in a web technology use....
and surprise surprise there are a lot of Macs in that sector.

If you posted something interesting to games developers I'd wager a lot more
Windows PCs and a lot few Macs.

~~~
pjmlp
Quite true.

I remember in the Games Developer Conference Europe 2009, all the Macs I
managed to see, where actually running Windows.

~~~
irunbackwards
Haha, I love that. Had a friend who did the same thing. But seriously: why not
get a beefier computer for your buck and if you need OSX, spring for a copy
and install it on a virtual machine?

~~~
sukuriant
"if you need OSX, spring for a copy and install it on a virtual machine" ...
because that's against the license agreement?

~~~
pjmlp
Except that in most countries EULAs are actually void.

~~~
sukuriant
Really? I wouldn't have guessed that.

I also figured this person was in the States. I didn't even think to check

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aw3c2
More accurately it would be "analysis of user-strings of people's browsers
whose referrer was hacker news when visiting my website"

~~~
T-hawk
Exactly. There will be sampling bias. Opera in particular makes it very easy
to turn off sending referrer information (one click on the quick preferences
menu), so Opera will be underrepresented in any data corpus derived from the
referrer.

~~~
unreal37
I saw the story, but didn't click the link. So it's definitely not going to
match what pg and team see when they examine their logs for actual HN Readers.

~~~
zalew
it would be great if pg published these stats

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olalonde
As with the recent post on HN's age/gender, this does not reflect data
obtained ~5 months ago through a HN poll [0]. On one hand, the poll probably
has some self-selection bias, it is only representative of registered users
and it asks "what's your primary OS" rather than "what OS are you using right
now". On the other hand, the "date range picker for Twitter Bootstrap" post
was probably heavily biased towards people who use Bootstrap and it measures
what OS visitors were using when visiting which is not necessarily their
primary OS. Anyways, here's the results from the HN poll:

    
    
        OS          Points
        --          ------
        OSX         3252 (40.9%)
        Linux       2666 (33.5%)
        Windows     1729 (21.7%)
        iOS         104 (1.3%)
        Android     99 (1.2%)
        Other Unix 
        variant     73 (0.9%)
        Chrome OS   20 (0.3%)
        Other       15 (0.2%)
    

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674>

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duck
From my Hacker Newsletter project (<http://hackernewsletter.com>) I can say
that about 70% of HN users use Gmail.

~~~
Adirael
And probably a lot of people not using Gmail use Google Apps. I rarely use my
@gmail.com addresses, but all my domains with mail are managed through Google
Apps.

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brink
Internet Explorer didn't even make the list for browsers. I'm not really
surprised, but as a web developer it's always nice to be reassured that it's
dying/dead.

~~~
Wilya
You can't conclude that from his data. His audience is web developers, so
obviously IE will be very low.

~~~
brink
I see HN as a fringe audience. Trends in the technology world usually happen
first here. I do see your point though, and I'm not drawing concrete evidence
from this thread.

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logn
I'm surprised Windows users outnumber Linux users. I'd like to see a breakdown
as to how this changes by time of day. I'd suspect Windows users are in second
place because of the workplace. At night I bet linux gets a boost.

~~~
libria
In the other stats thread[1], users self-reported themselves as Linux 34% and
Windows 22%, which I was highly doubting. There are probably a lot of closet
Windows users here, or it's more l337 to claim Linux (even on an anonymous
poll?). I also understand there's a selection bias related to the article's
content.

I won't say polls are useless, but I keep being surprised how unreliable they
are.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4421971>

------
qbproger
I was surprised to see that iOS is beating firefox. While this is just one
website, I hadn't realized firefox had dropped so much in the ranks. It's
still my browser of choice.

~~~
ajross
It's not a global sample. It's a sample of HN readers only. That means it's
dominated by a population focused on web development, which means it skews
heavily OS X and Chrome (and to a lesser extent iOS). Firefox remains popular
among the general public, though it's dropping fast in the face of some really
great work by Chrome. Obviously IE remeains popular too, and it doesn't even
register on the linked chart.

------
megaman821
The data is presented in a neutral way, but from the comments I get a sense
that people are happy that other people use what they use. Why is an Apple (or
Chrome) echo chamber desirable to having discussions with people that use a
variety of technologies and software?

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ghost91
And people without javascript or blocking w3counter are also not shown

~~~
Wilya
There's a noscript fallback. If w3counter does it's job right, people without
javascript should be counted.

Those who explicitely block w3counter wouldn't, but that's few people, unless
it's in an adblock/ghostery/... blacklist.

~~~
phaylon
I'm using RequestPolicy, which I'd assume also hinders tracking even without
being somehow explictely blocked. No idea how wide-spread those extensions are
though.

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BCM43
Will this still collect the data if someone is running no-script?

~~~
pixelbath
Your browser (unless configured otherwise) will still send the User-Agent
string with the request headers, regardless of script settings.

------
dkroy
I am surprised that the estimate for Mac is so high. I would have never
expected that. It could be the topics that he is posting. Either way
interesting read.

------
tankbot
Interesting disparity between OS X users and Safari users.

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Kilimanjaro
Less than 1% IE users is great news!

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heartbreak
Dan, the sidebar makes this page unusable on mobile (Android).

~~~
dangrossman
You're not the first to say that, but I don't know why. The site's fine on my
Android phone and tablet. The markup/CSS is so simple it's hard to imagine any
browser having trouble with it.

I've already spent enough time abusing the display model Android tablets at my
local big box stores to test Improvely without buying a bunch of devices. I
think if I go back again to try to live-fix my blog theme, they might kick me
out. ;)

~~~
ajanuary
It also breaks when zooming in ios, so if it's the same problem and you're on
OS X you might be able to fix it in the simulator?

~~~
dangrossman
I don't own an Apple anything, unfortunately.

~~~
ajanuary
The problem is display:fixed. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4889601/css-
position-fixe...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4889601/css-position-
fixed-into-ipad-iphone) has a good overview of why it happens.

------
filipemonte
hope to see all the web like this!

