Web site access

It’s been a year or so since the last time I did this, so it must be time for some statistics :-)

• 2007: Bandwidth 23.3GB, peak month   6.1GB, hits 1,086,404, uniques 19,513
• 2008: Bandwidth 35.4GB, peak month   6.6GB, hits 1,496,510, uniques 26,890
• 2009: Bandwidth 69.4GB, peak month   9.8GB, hits 3,080,193, uniques 44,152
• 2010: Bandwidth 78.3GB, peak month 10.6GB, hits 4,966,497, uniques 54,297

Hits are dominated by robots, hence the Uniques column which attempts to determine unique visitors – but this is little more than an educated guess made by the stats software, so don’t take it too seriously.

By the way, we still get thousands of hits over the year from Browse/Phoenix and Fresco. They’re tiny numbers compared to the mainstream browsers, but likely to be both unique – neither browser has anything in the way of automation – and comparatively valuable – since both browsers only run on RISC OS, which is obviously very relevant here!

I can’t determine the numbers for NetSurf. It seems to be sufficiently convincing in setting its User Agent string to masquerade as a more popular browser that the stats engine doesn’t list it as “NetSurf”, instead (presumably) aggregating the numbers with the entries for Firefox or MSIE.

This means that the web site’s visual and technical design will continue to have to cater for very old browsers. Although I do have a few (overdue) upgrades in the pipeline, there can’t be anything too radical and there’s an extra testing burden to make sure that things work acceptably – if not perfectly – on those older platforms.

I can’t determine the numbers for NetSurf. It seems to be sufficiently convincing in setting its User Agent string to masquerade as a more popular browser that the stats engine doesn’t list it as “NetSurf”, instead (presumably) aggregating the numbers with the entries for Firefox or MSIE.

According to NetSurf’s log file it should identify itself as something like “NetSurf/2.0 (RISC OS; armv5l)”

Oh, it’s hidden under “Unknown”, a grab-bag of completely unrecognised UA strings. There are several versions of NetSurf and about a hundred UAs I’ve never even heard of! So that’s not so helpful. “Unknowns” contributed to 24% of hits in 2010, but I can’t get a breakdown on a per-unknown-UA basis and even if I could, I’d have to add up the numerous NetSurf entries individually.

A lot of the unknown UA strings are gibberish – random lower case letters. I imagine that’s a popular approach for malware authors who write vulnerability scanning tools.

I think it’s safe to assume that NetSurf is being used more than Browse variants or Fresco though, since it’s free, runs on (mostly) the same hardware (though it chews a lot of RAM) and is considerably more up to date.

Just checked the NetSurf UAs – about 50/50 from RISC OS / ARM, 50/50 from Linux / x86. One from Windows, one from OpenBSD / x86, one from Amiga / 68K! Don’t know how may hits per UA though. Shame, AWStats won’t report that AFAICS.

One problem with the forums is that they are very slow on Netsurf, so it might be tempting to access them using Browse instead!

Much more complicated looking pages render fine, so I don’t know why Netsurf struggles so much on these pages.

Yes, I know I should raise this on the Netsurf mailing list. I’ll get round to it soon(ish).

NetSurf has been developed into an excellent lightweight browser IMHO; far superior to any previous RISC OS option (with the possible exception of Firefox which is slower and less stable on my system – 512MB Iyo, RO 5.16 – but which does support javascript). The NetSurf developers deserve both credit and thanks!

I use an RSS reader for the forums. It’s way faster.