Stack Overflow 2010 Analytics | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow 2010 Analytics

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38 pointsphwd22 comments

The size of India vs. United Kingdom and the relatively similar visit percentage is interesting. Does this mean the UK has a large number of devs or India has a small number?

You should not compare absolute population of two countries. Rather you should compare population with Internet/computer access which I'm guessing should be similar.

PS: On a similar note I'm surprised China is missing from the list.

And the number of people comfortable with English.

I'm surprised by the number of IE users—seems high for a community of devs.

I'm not; the site's first userbase was .NET developers. Some percent of people looking up those answers are doing so from a company pc that may not allow anything else.

I was more blown away by the number of Windows users, the IE numbers seem pretty reasonable, especially considering the huge .NET crowd there.

You shouldn't conflate .NET and IE usage. I can only think of a few .NET web developers who use IE by choice.

More likely, corporate developers of every flavor are more often locked into IE by company policy. It would be interesting to see those browser usage stats broken down by language. I bet Java and .NET would have similar IE usage.

Well these are World stats, not Palo Alto stats. Windows dominating shouln't be a surprise really.

Well, I assume a lot of the users are pretty much forced to use their company's computer's sole browser... IE.

Not all developers are web developers, your average corp developer working on non-web solutions probably couldn't care less.

I use IE quite a lot for general browsing. The latest versions aren't that bad, and aren't as memory hungry as Firefox.

Not everyone is hipsterfag.

tl;dr; - visitors are more spread out on the globe, Google is the undefeated referrer, SO visitors love Firefox, Windows, and screen resolutions are getting bigger and wider.

Nothing too interesting, really.

Can anyone explain to me how they get user screen resolutions?

Google Analytics provides resolution and colour depth info.

JavaScript: screen.width, screen.height

Search for "javascript screen resolution".

Why no Russia in top countries? Do they have a similar site?

iOS will jump up sharply from 0.4% in 2011 if the folks at Stack Overflow make the site usable with that system. From mobile Safari the site is crippled. You can type in an answer, but the formatting tools and preview panes don't work at all.

The most common use case of Stack Overflow will be a programmer working away on code encountering a problem, googling for a fix, and finding it on stack overflow. I don't see how mobile would enhance that.

While I appreciate there are a few hardcores who will want to answer questions on the go, I can't see that being a big priority.

As an anecdotal point of reference, I monitor a number of stackoverflow categories with RSS feeds. I commonly read and answer these feeds with Reeder on my iPad sitting in a comfy chair in my living room, not at my computer.

I answer less questions than I normally would if the interface were better.

(maybe this is fitting into the definition of "a few hardcores" for you though)

There are many questions that I don't answer, because I'm on my iPad, and it's way too much of a pain to bother.

You're also focused on the users of SO specifically. There are Area 51 sites that would be more prone to having users on mobile devices.

Checkout http://stackmobile.com/

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