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Codejedi: OSX adoption rate
Sun, 26 Nov 2006

In the previous blog entry I ask what the adoption rate for OSX is; it occurred to me after posting that I already have the tools at hand to make a complete guess. I imagine Netcraft and other groups have very accurate statistics but I'm far too clueless or lazy to figure that out, when I can hack something together myself in 5 minutes or less.

Checking one of my webserver hit logs should give a vague estimate; obviously google-bots and spam-info-collection-bots and such will cause a huge inaccuracy problem for comparison against other OSes, but the data does make for an interesting exercise in a like-for-like comparison. The logs include the web browser client information, so scanning for Safari (one of the browsers people use for OSX, when they're not using Firefox, say) is entirely possible. Different versions of Safari come with different versions of OSX, so you can make a guess... but obviously people who upgrade Safari on older machines will also skew things. Further, I don't really know which builds come with which OSXs, except to say Safari 2 comes with OSX 10.4 the distribution sites suggest.

So even with these wildly inaccurate guesses, it would seem that Safari 2 could be used on as much as 80-85% of the Safari hits to one of my sites. Factor in Firefox and it could be more. I'll dig a little deeper but with a 5 minute set of grepping thats what I've come up with. Pretty shocking, and good to know!

I'll see if I can find a log analyzer to spit out some pretty graphs.

Update:

this looks useful for obtaining the build numbers of Safari, so can narrow in on specific versions of the OS. Confirming with some other folks, it definately seems like most have moved up to 10.4 (who are using Safari :)

this shows some stats from the Omni Group; they've got an updater on nearly every OSX Mac likely so this could well be a good indicator (.. for those using Omni Outliner, etc, which I believe has been bundled since OSX 10.3 or perhaps 10.2?)

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