Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

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> Similarity is very low for: UTC-07 (3% of users are on the... west coast? This can't be right)

I dunno, seems about right to me. It's only something like 60ish million people and there are somewhere around 5 billion internet users. Obviously who will be checking the site isn't expected to be perfectly even but that's why the number is also 3x higher than plain user count would suggest.

> screen sizes (I thought this was going to be a win because apple consistency, but all values are <0.1% -- except depth, which is best on Safari and identical on FF/Chrome/Edge. Do people not make their browsers the full screen size? (not clicking green expand)).

Screen size, not browser size. Even on the exact same make and model hardware the OS UI scale setting will alter the reported screen dimensions in the browser. The same is true with people who change the default browser zoom in the browser instead.

> It's only something like 60ish million people and there are somewhere around 5 billion internet users.

You know, I feel dumb now that you're pointing this out. I'm not sure why I originally interpreted this value as an "amount of identifiablity" variable rather than the pure amount. You're right to point that this is a variable that can only be used in support of others and not unique in of itself.

> Screen size, not browser size.

I would think this would make it more likely to be less common. Apple has tight control and thus more consistency. But it is a good point, especially considering the prior point. The M2 Air has a different screen size than the M1 Air, which has a different screen size from *-Air which has a different from pros and so on. We don't need to get into UI scaling to change that. I was just thinking about consistency and popularity of the Apple ecosystem, in the West, compared to the variance in Windows machines. For example, I know that canvas fingerprints tend to have lower variance between apple machines of the same model than windows/linux machines of the same model. Just because there is different chip binning. I was thinking about the same thing with screens. But again, I clearly did a major brain fart and I appreciate the correction.

Don’t underestimate how entrenched 1920x1080, 3840x2160 and a few other resolutions are outside of Apple.

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