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Re: Q for the Candidates: How many users?



On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:52:19AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> I note Steve points out:
> 
> On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 03:06:37PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/123481/index.html
> 
> which cites estimates of 6-8 million Ubuntu users, for a factor of
> between 4 and 5.3 compared to Ubuntu's popcon reports. If you assumed
> a similar factor for Debian's popcon reports, that would give an
> estimate of between 350,000 and 500,000 users. I tend to think Ubuntu
> users are more likely to run popcon than Debian users, and thus that
> those numbers are low, but I don't have any data to back that up or to
> estimate how low. And obviously I don't have any idea where the 6-8M
> estimates were pulled from, or how realistic they are.

FWIW, a rough estimate of iceweasel 3.5.8 users (which means testing,
unstable and backports), based on access logs for the page that gets
displayed after version upgrades, is somewhere around 100,000 users,
as of today.

While popcon can't tell us how many of the popcon users are using
iceweasel 3.5.8 vs. 3.0.x, we can have an upper bound of that from the
number of xulrunner-1.9.1 installations.

Surely, galeon, conkeror, kazehakase,etc. also depend on
xulrunner-1.9.1, but they don't account for so many popcon users
(it's also impossible to tell apart which ones are using xulrunner-1.9
and which ones are using xulrunner-1.9.1).

So there would be less than 13062 popcon users with iceweasel 3.5.x
installed, but not much less.

Also, the number of xulrunner-1.9.1 users accounted by popcon went
dramatically up recently, in two waves, the first one from the migration
to testing and the second one from the update of backports. I see the
same waves on the access logs used to estimate the actual number of
iceweasel users above.

The factor for testing, unstable and backport desktop users would thus
be somewhere around 7.7.

Mike


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