Browser preferences of C++ programmers

[Alf P. Steinbach]

After some 333 visits (about ten times as many page hits) to my new homepage
it's clear that

NO-ONE

visiting my pages use Internet Explorer. That means absolutely no-one. Zero,
zilch, 0.

Nearly all use Firefox, 1 (one) person used Lynx, 1 (one) used Emacs, and a few
(apparently two or three) used Opera.

And I think that's because they're most all C++ programmers, or at least,
programmers.

So, what's the connection, why do C++ programmers only choose Firefox?


Cheers,

- Alf (off-topical mood )

 

[gw7rib]

After some 333 visits  (about ten times as many page hits) to my new homepage
it's clear that

   NO-ONE

visiting my pages use Internet Explorer. That means absolutely no-one. Zero,
zilch, 0.

I'm sure I went there with Internet Explorer. Are you sure you're
counting right?

Paul.

 

[g3rc4n]

After some 333 visits  (about ten times as many page hits) to my new homepage
it's clear that

   NO-ONE

visiting my pages use Internet Explorer. That means absolutely no-one. Zero,
zilch, 0.

Nearly all use Firefox, 1 (one) person used Lynx, 1 (one) used Emacs, and a few
(apparently two or three) used Opera.

And I think that's because they're most all C++ programmers, or at least,
programmers.

So, what's the connection, why do C++ programmers only choose Firefox?

Cheers,

- Alf (off-topical mood )

it's all about aol explorer

 

[ZikO]

So, what's the connection, why do C++ programmers only choose Firefox?

A techer Professor is not a programmer at all and he's using FireFox too =)

 

[Andrey Tarasevich]

After some 333 visits (about ten times as many page hits) to my new homepage
it's clear that

NO-ONE

visiting my pages use Internet Explorer. That means absolutely no-one. Zero,
zilch, 0.

Nearly all use Firefox, 1 (one) person used Lynx, 1 (one) used Emacs, and a few
(apparently two or three) used Opera.

And I think that's because they're most all C++ programmers, or at least,
programmers.

So, what's the connection, why do C++ programmers only choose Firefox?

Apparently, if there's a connection, it is not as straightforward as you
seem to believe. Maybe there's some more-or-less non-obvious reason why
mostly people using Firefox would ever want to visit your page or
something like that.

For example, it is possible that some people prefer IE for browsing
internet, yet stick with Mozilla Thunderbird to read the Usenet. And
when they click the link in your signature (might be the only place they
ever see that link), Thunderbird launches Firefox (say, it was
configured like that at installation time and nobody ever cared to
reconfigure it to launch IE).

In reality, programmers (be that C++ or any other kind) are among the
least opinionated people when it comes to various "browser wars", "OS
wars" or anything else of that nature. There shouldn't be any
discrepancies between the general IE usage and IE usage specifically
among programmers.

I, for one, use Mozilla Thunderbird for Usenet, but prefer IE for
browsing. My Thunderbird launches IE when a link is clicked. So here you
go (clicks the link...) ... 404. Oh, whatever...

 

[Alf P. Steinbach]

* Andrey Tarasevich:

Apparently, if there's a connection, it is not as straightforward as you
seem to believe.

Bah, you never were a member of the old KGB mind-reader squadron.

Maybe there's some more-or-less non-obvious reason why
mostly people using Firefox would ever want to visit your page or
something like that.

For example, it is possible that some people prefer IE for browsing
internet, yet stick with Mozilla Thunderbird to read the Usenet. And
when they click the link in your signature (might be the only place they
ever see that link),

Most visits where an origin is reported have come from those sigs yes, that is,
reading Usenet then clicking. But a good percentage come from Wikipedia, some
from other sites, and some from links posted in mails (they all use GMail ),
and nearly all use Firefox, or at least some browser identifying as Mozilla.

Thunderbird launches Firefox (say, it was
configured like that at installation time and nobody ever cared to
reconfigure it to launch IE).

In reality, programmers (be that C++ or any other kind) are among the
least opinionated people when it comes to various "browser wars", "OS
wars" or anything else of that nature. There shouldn't be any
discrepancies between the general IE usage and IE usage specifically
among programmers.

I, for one, use Mozilla Thunderbird for Usenet, but prefer IE for
browsing. My Thunderbird launches IE when a link is clicked. So here you
go (clicks the link...) ... 404. Oh, whatever...

Heh heh...

It's not exactly the most dependable hosting in terms of uptime.

But then, it's free.

Cheers,

- Alf

 

[Alf P. Steinbach]

* Jeff Schwab:

IE identifies itself as Mozilla. In fact, I'm not sure I can name a
modern browser that doesn't put Mozilla in its User-Agent header.

Thanks. I have a lot to learn about the server-side of things (and browser
detection -- it's like C++ iostreams, so ugly & repugnant that I've tried to
steer away from it and so my ignorance is only too obvious to others! ).

Still, judging by manual inspection, it seems at least 90% Firefox, unless e.g.
IE also includes word "Firefox"?

I think that would be like Java claiming to be C++-compatible! ;-)


Cheers, & thanks,

- Alf

 

[Michael Mol]

After some 333 visits  (about ten times as many page hits) to my new homepage
it's clear that

   NO-ONE

visiting my pages use Internet Explorer. That means absolutely no-one. Zero,
zilch, 0.

Nearly all use Firefox, 1 (one) person used Lynx, 1 (one) used Emacs, and a few
(apparently two or three) used Opera.

And I think that's because they're most all C++ programmers, or at least,
programmers.

From my Google Analytics data for Rosetta Code's Category:C++ page:

(for September 30 2007 to March 10 2009, with a six month gap where
data wasn't being collected)
Firefox - 235 visits
Internet Explorer - 103 visits
Safari - 23 visits
Opera - 11 visits
Mozilla - 7 vists
Chrome - 4 visits
Konqueror - 2 visits

Just thought I'd throw some data in there.

 

[James Kanze]

Alf P. Steinbach wrote:

[...]

In reality, programmers (be that C++ or any other kind) are among the
least opinionated people when it comes to various "browser wars", "OS
wars" or anything else of that nature. There shouldn't be any
discrepancies between the general IE usage and IE usage specifically
among programmers.

I'm not sure about programmers being the least opinionated
people. And even if it were true, I can think of two reasons
why there would be a discrepancy between their usage and general
usage: they're probably more likely to "shop around", regarding
technical issues, rather than just using the browser which came
with the system, and they're certainly more likely to be using a
Unix based system (other than Apple, almost unused except by
programmers), where IE doesn't work. (I've no particular
opinions concerning IE, and I'd certainly give it a try, except
that it doesn't work very well under Solaris or Linux---the two
systems I use most.)

 

[Balog Pal]

After some 333 visits (about ten times as many page hits) to my new
homepage it's clear that

NO-ONE

visiting my pages use Internet Explorer.

Check now, if it's still the case your calculator is wrong.

 

[Alf P. Steinbach]

* Balog Pal:

Check now, if it's still the case your calculator is wrong.

Actually it was my understanding of browser id strings that was wrong, as Jeff
Scwabbelaffsscha... how-the-heck-it's-spelled pointed out. Googling "Mozilla" is
interesting. I didn't know the origins of that name, but, goes back to Netscape.

Still, even when correcting for that misunderstanding of mine Internet Explorer
is in a very very small minority.

The stats I have for March (so far):


Top 15 of 297 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 508 10.85% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7)
Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7
2 425 9.07% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6)
Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
3 139 2.97% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7)
Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
4 113 2.41% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6)
Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
5 83 1.77% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19
(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.48 Safari/525.19
6 70 1.49% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
7 63 1.35% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7)
Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7
8 59 1.26% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1;
+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
9 55 1.17% Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.htm)
10 53 1.13% W3C_Validator/1.606
11 47 1.00% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR
1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0
12 47 1.00% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7)
Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
13 47 1.00% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; XML Sitemaps Generator;
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com) Gecko XML-Sitemaps/1.0
14 45 0.96% Opera/9.63 (Windows NT 5.1)
15 44 0.94% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4)
Gecko/2008111217 Fedora/3.0.4-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.4


Here Firefox (and variants) is identified in umpteen different ways, but IE
always has MSIE in the string, and there's only such among the top 15 user
agents, and it's at 1% of hits. I guess number could be a little different if
all 297 strings were considered. But 1% or lower is consistent with what I see
manually in Apache logs -- the rest is mainly Firefox, some ~95% or so.

So conclusion is clear (although cause still mystery): programmers prefer
Firefox, and not Internet Explorer.


Cheers, & thanks,

- Alf

 

[Ian Collins]

So conclusion is clear (although cause still mystery): programmers
prefer Firefox, and not Internet Explorer.

Programmers care about security?

 

[Balog Pal]

Programmers care about security?

Semms not really. IE sucked in the past security-wise, then MS made that
huge sec push, that eventually turned the tide. In the last 3 years IE has
less issues than the rest browsers, and improving every day, while
especually FF stays behind. With IE8 issued yesterday the gap will widen
even more.

The other guess that many C++ programmer works on non-win platform may be
more plausible -- as IE is not present there, and if they *also* use win,
using the same browser makes practical sense.

 

[Bo Persson]

Semms not really. IE sucked in the past security-wise, then MS
made that huge sec push, that eventually turned the tide. In the
last 3 years IE has less issues than the rest browsers, and
improving every day, while especually FF stays behind. With IE8
issued yesterday the gap will widen even more.

This caused a lot of people, including me, to move to Firefox. IE6
just wan't good enough.

Whatever MS has done since, hasn't been enough to motivate another
change. If what I have *is* good enough, why go somewhere else?

The other guess that many C++ programmer works on non-win platform
may be more plausible -- as IE is not present there, and if they
*also* use win, using the same browser makes practical sense.

Possibly, yes.


Bo Persson