Last week Frank Taylor linked to Barry Hunter’s Google Earth client version stats for the KML content that gets delivered from his server at nearby.co.uk.
Analysing the last week’s figures leads to some surprises — for example, take a look at the relative size of the different platforms: Linux has about 5% of all queries, Mac 19.5%, with Windows the rest. That is a much larger proportion of people using Mac and Linux versions of the client than what you find for generic web browsers on most web sites.
I can think of a couple of reasons why: There are more Macs at home, where people do their surfing, than at the office, where network administrators likely do not allow installations of Google Earth Free. Also, the average Mac tends to be newer and have a better graphics card, making Google Earth a more viable proposition. And Macs are popular in education, where Google Earth is a hit.
Looking at the figures for Google Earth Pro, just under 20% of all uses are with a Pro client. (Of course, this proportion is heavily dependent on the type of content available on a server.)
Finally, it looks like only about 4% of users are still using Google Earth version 3, though visitors to Nearby.co.uk are most likely to be savvy users, and such users tend to be aggressive updaters.
Conclusions? These, I think:
- There is no need to continue supporting version 3 of Google Earth. Almost everybody has version 4.
- If you make network links or API-based extensions that only work with the Windows version of Google Earth, do realize you are not reaching one in four Google Earth users.
Talking of PC-only contents, why is it that the Berlin network link still doesn’t work on a Mac after almost two weeks? Weren’t they going to fix that? [Update: Um, it seems to be working for some people on their Macs, though not others. Feedback is welcome.]
(Caveat: The above analysis is just an interpolation from one server’s results. If anyone else has such stats, I’d love to hear if they are similar.)
the berlin link for mac was fixed the 2nd day after release!
you have to reload the kmz file @ the 3d-berlin file from their website, the old file can’t update itself!!!!!
oh, and it’s nice to see that the stats show that mac users love google earth;-)
almost 10% or over in the stats, if we mac users get back to that level of owership over all cpu’s then we can be very happy;-)
The number of Linux users may be boosted slightly by Windows 98 users. As Google Earth won’t run on Windows 98, I have to boot up in Linux. I don’t stay in Linux for much else. Not yet anyway.
smokeonit, I reload a new one every other day, and it doesn’t work. Have you tried it successfully recently?