[thelist] survey says...

Shoshannah Forbes xslf at xslf.com
Sun Dec 29 05:54:01 CST 2002


> At the same time, look at how quickly the stats have changed regarding the
> adoption of the Flash 6 (MX) player: March 2002 - 3.2%; June 2002 - 30.2%;
> September 2002 - 53.0%.

What do these numbers actually measure? How many times flash got
downloaded? Or how many users have flash in practice? Those two are
rather different numbers.

 >It seems that for the most part users aren't
 >adverse to Flash, or to upgrading their player to use it; in fact,
 >they upgrade at an extremely rapid pace.

If you ever used Win/IE to surf web sites that have some flash (even
flash ads) in a version newer then what you have installed, you get a
pop-up telling you to install flash. Unlike in Netscape, the only way to
have IE stop popping up those annoying messages is to install flash.

So- How many of those win/ie downloads are because the user wants flash,
   how many are because IE told the user to download it, and how many
are just so IE would shut up about it?

Certain browsers (Mozilla on linux, Chimera on mac osx) tend to crash
with certain versions of flash installed- the only way to fix it is to
upgrade the flash plugin. How many users upgraded their flash to get rid
of the crashes?

Not to mention browsers that come with flash, regardless if the user
uses it or not. I have a blind friend who uses win/IE with a braille
screen. Yes, he has flash- it came with his IE. But he never came upon a
site that used it in a way that he can access it. Since his braille
software sits on top of the OS, web sites have no way of knowing that he
can not view it (as his browser just seems like a regular IE install).
Thus, you need to subtract people like him from the flash install base
numbers.

Another questions: How many of the users with flash installed, use
utilitys to disable it, block it, skip it, avoid sites that use it, or
just mutter something unpleasant when they bump in to it?

How many power users keep flash installed for the few sites who use it
well, but hate most flash uses out there?

It seems to me that the percentage of users who have flash installed,
even if we just count the recent versions, does not tell us much about
what users actually thing of flash content.

> This leads to the question, who is
> represented by that last 2-5% of users, which seems to be the ceiling for
> viewing Flash content?

All the people that don't fall in the categories above :-)





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