Self Debugging

There were a few heated discussions about Vista on Hacker News yesterday that got me wondering: What operating systems do people in this community use? How about browsers?

As it happened, I had just posted an announcement about my new startup a few days ago and I had Google Analytics installed, so I managed to collect a fair amount of information. Here is what I found most interesting:

1. Internet Explorer accounted for a mere 9.6% of all browsers. And, yes, that includes both IE6 and IE7 combined.

Sure, I did expect more Firefox users than IE given the high-tech nature of the community, but this was unexpected. Only 9.6%!! And, sure enough, Firefox was #1 with 71%, followed by Safari with 11%. Below is a more detailed report. Click to see the larger image.

2. Windows still has the majority with 52.7%, but it’s so close to losing it.

Here I actually expected to see more Mac users because, seemingly, Apple news make up over 90% of all tech news. However, Macs came in second with 28.9% followed by Linux with 18%.

As for Windows itself, XP still accounts for 83.7% compared to 9.9% for Vista.

3. News.YC users came from 66 different countries.

And that’s more interesting when you consider the fact that it’s a niche Web site targeted to startup news, and mostly US startup news. The recent expansion of scope to include more technology news might explain this, though. But, not surprisingly, over 75% of the visitors came from the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom with 63.8%, 7.2%, and 5.6% respectively.