[HN Gopher] Number of people on government websites now
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Number of people on government websites now
Author : wylie39
Score : 333 points
Date : 2022-01-20 04:46 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (analytics.usa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (analytics.usa.gov)
| fareesh wrote:
| Is it possible to FOIA how much it cost the US government to
| build this page?
| Jolter wrote:
| Only one way to find out.
| EricE wrote:
| Sure - but as others pointed out there is a pretty good blog
| post that goes over it: https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-
| built-analytics-usa-go...
|
| And you can see the code and development lifecycle on github:
| https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov
|
| Pretty lightweight for what it is.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Yes. But it's probably faster and easier to just look online.
| The data is very likely there.
| hollerith wrote:
| Chromebooks have high (unit) sales (some say) but I've yet to see
| any signs that they are used a lot. Here only 1.4% of visits are
| from ChromeOS.
| dhogan wrote:
| My whole local library is full of Chromeboxes. Maybe things
| like that make an impact.
| riskable wrote:
| My anecdote: A lot of people seem to be using Chromebooks to
| replace tablets (because good, non-Amazon tablets that aren't
| expensive are rare these days). You can pick up a $250
| touchscreen Chromebook that works as a vastly superior web-
| browsing and video-watching device than a $250 Samsung tablet.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Keep in mind that the majority of all fed gov visits are USPS
| tracking pages and the like. Chromebooks are majority used by
| students so I would expect this.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Is it mainly students in schools? They wouldn't have much
| reason to access govt sites yet
| jedberg wrote:
| Every Chromebook I've seen in the wild is being used by a
| student or teacher. I suspect students don't have many reasons
| to visit government websites.
| Shalomboy wrote:
| The fact that a lot of Chromebooks are being sold is fairly
| solid; I would reckon that the questionable claim is that
| Chromebooks have strong sales traction with retail consumers. I
| bought myself a Lenovo Duet tablet last fall because I wanted a
| device that could last multiple days with intermittent
| streaming use and I missed the feeling of a cramped 10"
| netbook. I got it on sale for $200 USD and was _floored_ by how
| nice the experience was on a PC that cheap. But friends and
| family who saw me with the tablet were shocked that I, an adult
| who likes computers, owned a Chromebook. I only know one other
| person IRL with a personal chromebook, and they bought it after
| being given a school-deployed one in college.
| bmhin wrote:
| I use one and have had a couple over the years. Decently
| cheap and I functionally just want a laptop form factor and
| UX for a tablet use case: web browsing, some light app usage
| (often for casting / streaming), and also being able to type
| as needed, all from an actual couch / on the lap / wherever.
| Used to be no Android App support so that part was a no go
| and now you have the linux containers to fall back on if you
| need to run something else or want a proper terminal.
|
| I have a bulky work laptop and a big desktop PC. The niche
| left over maps to a nice slim, fanless device for casual
| usage very well in the Chromebook space. Maybe preaching to
| the choir here, but my keyboard will need to be pried from my
| cold, dead hands and the tablet + detachable options all
| seemed way too delicate.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| As someone pointed out in another thread, there is something
| fishy going on with these with a high percentage of usage coming
| from Graceville. Who knows if they are spoofing user agents and
| what not.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| perhaps there's an internet exchange in one of the
| Graceville's, and it accounts for traffic from nearby cities
| too?
|
| I noticed that San Jose makes the list, as does LA and Seattle
| right now, but no San Francisco. I suspect that SF traffic goes
| through San Jose and thus most of the bay area appears as San
| Jose in their numbers. Not a big leap to imagine this happens
| in other places too.
| Axsuul wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30004042
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| Visitor Locations Now: London 2%
|
| Clearly a HN hug!
| tradertef wrote:
| India is 7.7% of total traffic and China is 5%. It is night now,
| but still these numbers are surprisingly high.
| flypaca wrote:
| Probably just looking at immigration/Embassies related
| websites. It is day time in India and China.
| dmode wrote:
| My guess is this is mostly related to immigration and travel
| related
| jorgesborges wrote:
| Indeed, as I look now 42% of all traffic is international.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The US consulates and embassy in China are the only reliable
| source of information regarding air quality and pollution.
|
| Also, India having a large number of English speakers, probably
| has a significant percent of the population that prefers
| getting COVID-19 info from the CDC.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The most common website is USPS by a significant margin. Could
| that explain much of the international traffic?
| deltree7 wrote:
| Immigration and Travel too
| saagarjha wrote:
| COVID tests, I assume.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| "Free of charge" pen testing more like. You may have missed
| the news but since yesterday there aren't even any
| commercial flights between China and the US anymore, they
| were all cancelled.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Both of these countries have around 1.4B people. 1B people is
| around 17x Germany, or around 21x the UK.
| ascar wrote:
| I think you're missing the .4 of 1.4B in your second
| sentence.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Uh, yes :)
| drugstorecowboy wrote:
| In state government, many desktops are set up with the agency's
| website as the browser homepage with no way to change it. I would
| think federal government is the same, that alone might skew some
| of these statistics.
| throwaway89374 wrote:
| This does not seem to work correctly. I visited from separate
| browsers and the number remains the same.
| ixnus wrote:
| It updates every 5 minutes.
| firechickenbird wrote:
| Apple covers 45.3% of the visits, that's insane
| yftsui wrote:
| Indeed, very surprising to see it below 50% given iPhone
| accumulated market share over the years.
| etchalon wrote:
| Apple's marketshare in mobile is ~ 62% based on this, and ~
| 25% on desktop.
| mobilio wrote:
| And Safari - >36%
| WesternWind wrote:
| That's probably IOS safari
| earthscienceman wrote:
| The last bastion, never thought I would approve of an
| impact of Apple's lock-in on iDevicess but it's the only
| thing keeping the web free.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| From the info, it looks like a lot of the recent traffic is due
| to the free COVID test.
| lkbm wrote:
| Looks like it converts URLs to lower-case in the "Top Pages"
| list. One of the most visited sites right now is listed as
| https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webblaunch/whereiswebb.html but
| that's a 404. Actual URL has a capital L:
| https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html
| ralferoo wrote:
| Wonder if tomorrow, the analytics site will show up as the top
| most visited government website!
| [deleted]
| minaor wrote:
| Proven wrote:
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Under "Visitor locations right now," 1% are coming from
| Graceville. As far as I can tell, that's either a town of 4k in
| Australia, 2k in Florida, or there are two Gracevilles in
| Minnesota with a few hundred people. Any idea what's up?
| gibolt wrote:
| I'd guess either some ISP/VPN is masking to that location, or a
| block of ips incorrectly map to that spot (perhaps by the
| library they are using to determine location from ip)
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| It might be a default set of coordinates used for geolocation
| of some IPs used in a larger region (or even state). This sort
| of thing has in fact caused trouble in the past at least once:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-m...
|
| > IP mapping isn't an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a
| default address when it can't identify its true location. That
| address just happened to be the Arnolds' property, a remote
| farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.
|
| > More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their
| farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from
| MaxMind's database.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Imagine the spam mail they must be getting.
| politelemon wrote:
| When it says "now", how "now" do they mean? I've refreshed a few
| times and the number hasn't changed (171,533). I went to cisa.gov
| (disabled all my blockers) but the number here is still the same
| over here.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It's now showing 168,571 people, maybe it's every few minutes
| or possibly every hour as it's x:05 currently.
| jaywalk wrote:
| If you open up DevTools and look at the requests, realtime.json
| contains a "taken_at" property which shows that the data is
| updated every five minutes.
| qwertox wrote:
| While I was looking at the data, the ranking of the top visited
| pages changed without reload, so I assume it is streamed in
| real-time. But I guess that the real-time data comes from
| aggregated and somewhat delayed data.
| plasma_beam wrote:
| This site went live in 2015 and hasn't changed too much since
| then. Participating agencies have their google analytics data
| collected by GSA, which is hosting this webpage.
|
| It's very useful, and I've referred to this site many times over
| the years (probably bc a couple sites I've worked on are in the
| top 50!).
|
| For those people wanting other awesome and informative govt
| sites, take a look at https://www.usaspending.gov/, which has all
| government contracts data easily searchable (and bookmarkable).
|
| https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-go...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Participating agencies have their google analytics data
| collected by GSA, which is hosting this webpage._
|
| Mostly off-topic, but the GSA is one of those federal agencies
| that is really under-appreciated.
|
| When I was a reporter in the days before the commercial
| internet (yes, my tools were pencil, typewriter, and teletype),
| the GSA would publish lists of what government reports were
| coming out each month, helping you find all kinds of incredibly
| useful data. If you needed help, you just picked up a phone and
| they would point you in the right direction. I always looked
| forward to getting their big blue envelopes in the mail at work
| because I knew I could find something meaningful in there that
| I could localize for my audience. And the information was
| always presented in a manner that was both professional, and
| easy to understand.
|
| The GSA is one of those agencies that is best left alone to do
| its work in obscurity. Every once in a long while, a politician
| will stick his nose in there, but usually only to get a name
| put on a building.
|
| See also: The Congressional Budget Office.
| jwithington wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that link to USA Spending! Seems like a lot
| of interesting information is buried there...and they have an
| API!
| EricE wrote:
| USA Spending is a summary data set - if you really want to
| drill down into the details you need SAM/FPDS:
| https://sam.gov/reports/awards/standard
| eminence32 wrote:
| I bet the US government has lots of useful websites that I've
| never even heard of. But every now and again I randomly stumble
| across one (like the one from your comment), and it makes me
| wonder if there is a "discovery problem" here. What other
| useful govt sites are out there, but are unknown to me.
| kibwen wrote:
| Here's one I stumbled upon recently: the NOAA (National
| Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has an interactive
| sea level rise map where you can see whether a given location
| in the US will suffer flooding/inundation from sea level rise
| based on the value the user selects:
| https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#
| jrwr wrote:
| Interesting thing with that tool, it doesn't show any rise
| in the great lakes, I wonder if they would rise at all.
| deeg wrote:
| All else being the same I would expect the great lakes to
| rise. My guess is that the lake levels are so strongly
| tied to rainfall patterns that it's pointless to predict
| their future levels right now.
| EricE wrote:
| They are higher than the ocean (Niagara Falls!) so no -
| unless the paths between them and the path to the ocean
| gets blocked they won't rise.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The discovery problem is not only known, it's writ large.
| There is a vast bureaucracy of benefits available to
| Americans that most Americans don't know about because the
| creation of the programs rarely includes advertising in the
| budget.
|
| If you've ever seen the "question mark vest guy" (Matthew
| Lesko, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko), who
| offers book on federal programs available and how to take
| advantage of them... He's been criticized as a charlatan or
| misleading people, or encouraging people to "freeload," but
| here's the thing... He's really quite sincere. He believes
| the US government bureaucracy has failed in its duty of
| public information and education and is full of under-
| utilized programs that, as a result, become tools for the
| informed to siphon resources from those the programs were
| intended to help. He thinks that's unfair. The "Free Money
| Now" book covers and TV advertisements are employed because
| his target audience is assumed to not be savvy enough to do
| the research themselves, so he's trying to reach them with
| noise and spectacle where quiet black-and-white announcements
| buried in the back pages of local newspapers have already
| failed (and the fact that he started his work in the era
| where the easiest way to reach his target audience was still
| books because the sorts of people who didn't know about
| benefits programs they were eligible for were strongly
| correlated with lack of Internet access, not surprisingly).
| EricE wrote:
| All the information in his book is freely available too:
| https://pueblo.gpo.gov/Publications/PuebloPubs.php
|
| He makes it easier to find since he actively advertised on
| TV, but still probably isn't worth the fee for that
| convenience.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Probably not worth it to you and me. For the target
| audience, the fact that the linked site doesn't have
| "tangible dimensions" (i.e. I don't know where I am "in"
| the site) and can't just be read front to back is already
| daunting.
|
| I have relatives who have Lesko's book and just browse
| through it in the bathroom. It's comforting to them not
| only how comprehensive it is, but that in some sense it
| has a beginning and an end; when they finish the book,
| they have some kind of confidence that the percentage of
| programs they're aware of is now large. That might be a
| false confidence, but the sense it's possible keeps them
| reading. Hard to do that with a searchable index.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _There is a vast bureaucracy of benefits available to
| Americans that most Americans don 't know about because the
| creation of the programs rarely includes advertising in the
| budget._
|
| It's intentional. In addition to the lack of advertising,
| making people fill out needless/confusing forms, etc. also
| filters out people who are legitimately entitled to
| government benefits. It's a special type of cruelty to
| dangle a benefit behind so much red tape in front of people
| who don't have the time or know-how to deal with it!
|
| The US COVID test program, seems good at first blush. On
| the one hand, it was a breath of fresh air that all you
| have to do is go to one website and fill out one very short
| form. On the other, the parameters of the program were 4
| tests per address. USPS already knows every address, so why
| did I even have to bother filling out the form? _Why aren
| 't they just sending out the tests?!_ There are going to be
| people who want/need the tests but won't get them because
| of the bureaucracy.
| hooande wrote:
| They aren't sending the tests out, in part, because 1/3
| of Americans would performatively destroy them on social
| media. Not to mention that the tests cost money and
| sending them to people who didn't ask for them isn't good
| practice.
|
| The government generally has a responsibility to avoid
| waste, fraud and abuse. If they send something to
| everyone who qualifies then sooner or later it will be
| abused or inefficient, and those will be the stories that
| make the news.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| The covid test program is a universal benefit. If someone
| wants to burn them, that's their prerogative. I don't
| care. What's good practice is giving people the benefits
| they're entitled to. I don't understand why sending them
| to people who didn't _explicitly_ ask for them isn 't
| good practice. If there's an explicit opt out, OK, that's
| different. Benefits really shouldn't have to be opt-in
| though. Requiring opt-in costs money ands slows down,
| maybe even prevents, some receiving their benefit.
|
| That's the problem, when you make it so hard for people
| who need benefits to get them, when you trap them in a
| constant web of confusing paperwork and means testing
| (and don't forget, all this bureaucracy, developing and
| reviewing paperwork, ain't cheap, either), it's easy to
| find fraud based on technicality, by filling out a form
| incorrectly, even if you're really entitled to something.
| It's also easy to _make_ someone give up because they don
| 't have the time or access to resources required to sign
| up.
|
| In addition, with a lot of overhead, it makes it easier
| for states to abuse the system [0] as well. I get that
| this is a big mental block to overcome, but saying the
| government has to avoid waste and fraud in this way is a
| bit of a cop out.
|
| 0 - https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2021/07/14/florida-
| to-pay-...
| EricE wrote:
| I was looking at all the domains in .gov for a project at
| work and there are indeed some fascinating ones out there.
| Lots of abandoned stuff too.
|
| If you want a fascinating rabbit hole:
| https://18f.gsa.gov/2014/12/18/a-complete-list-of-gov-
| domain...
| echelon wrote:
| Firefox's usage percentage is upsetting.
|
| I hope they don't die, but this looks really bad for them.
| zohch wrote:
| ycuser2 wrote:
| 3% of almost billions(?) of browser users are still a fews
| millions of Firefox users. Millions of users is not "dead".
| noahtallen wrote:
| Right, but I think the overarching point is that 3% is
| awfully close to the 1% that is Internet Explorer, which many
| would consider dead. If usage decline continues, it just
| wouldn't take much for no people to stop supporting it.
|
| This is from someone who uses Firefox
| Aeolun wrote:
| Isn't it open source? If the company behind it dies I'll
| just compile it myself.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| If the company behind it dies then development on it will
| likely drastically decrease and it will quickly become a
| less attractive option. There's probably a reason why you
| chose Firefox over any number of other open-source
| browsers that don't have much development activity.
| ayngg wrote:
| Aren't they basically being kept alive by Google at this point?
| Almost 90% of their revenue is from that one deal at it has
| felt like they have been more concerned with other initiatives
| for a while now.
| rvz wrote:
| yes.
|
| 14 years on and still haven't found a way to make themselves
| any less independent of Google's money. >90% of their revenue
| derived from their direct anti-privacy competitor makes them
| entirely on life support.
|
| Rust was their opportunity to escape that, now they just
| threw it away and now they are back to where they started.
|
| Firefox is in decline. Nothing has changed.
| pawsforthought wrote:
| In what way did Firefox throw anything away with Rust?
| (Just don't know the story.)
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I used to love Firefox, but fell out of love majorly. First
| there's a still long-standing bug (5 years and counting) that
| newly opened tabs don't have access to localstorage. Then 96.0
| broke a lot of our code somehow. Cross-checked with 95 and
| everything still worked fine.
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| I hit and reported a very similar bug over a year ago. Try to
| add a cookie or localstorage entry in Dev Tools on a page
| that outputs JSON, such as:
| https://api.ipify.org/?format=json (Spoiler: it's broken)
|
| The DX for firefox just isn't that great when compared to
| Chrome.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| FF has presently 163 open bugs for localstorage-related
| issues. Some of them open for 3+ years. https://bugzilla.mo
| zilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=localst...
| amelius wrote:
| I don't understand why large companies ban Gmail but allow
| Chrome. They should be using Firefox instead.
| slig wrote:
| Things are only getting worse in this regard as more and more
| devs don't even test on FF, and FF lags behind new features.
| Internal business apps are going to be Chrome only and it's
| only downhill from there.
| EricE wrote:
| It's Internet Explorer all over again. Except this time
| it's a walled garden by a benevolent dictator! (yeah,
| right)
| IncRnd wrote:
| They aren't banning due to a dislike of Google. They are
| trying to stop unmonitored exfiltration of data.
| riskable wrote:
| > They are trying to stop unmonitored exfiltration of data.
|
| This was always a pipe dream (preventing data
| exfiltration). The best any company do is to prevent
| _accidental_ exfiltration of data. Like when someone
| attaches a spreadsheet with social security /credit card
| numbers to an email going out over the Internet. There's
| tools to detect that sort of thing (and stop it) but they
| don't work when the data is encrypted.
|
| There currently exists no technology that can stop the
| _human problem_ of data exfiltration. Here 's a quick quiz
| to see if anyone in your company can exfiltrate whatever TF
| they want: Can employees play sounds on their desktop (as
| in, _it emits sound_ )? Then they can exfiltrate _any_ file
| they have read access to pretty damned quickly. Even huge,
| multi-gigabyte files!
|
| Current data exfiltration methods can take advantage of a
| tiny corner of a monitor, the sound output (direct connect
| to line out or optical is ideal!), _power lines_ (yes, this
| works! https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2018/04/13/data-
| exfiltration...), various USB tricks (even if entire
| categories of "storage" devices are blocked via software),
| and many, many more. Most of them are basically
| undetectable as well and can be executed with JavaScript in
| any browser that gives the user access to the developer
| console.
|
| Obviously, if end users have access to PowerShell or Python
| that's even faster/better at exfiltrating the data.
|
| My favorite one though has got to be the sound output...
| You can write a simple script that converts bits into
| inaudible sounds that can be picked up by a cell phone in
| your pocket! It's not nearly as fast as a direct connection
| to the line out jack but _it is so cool_! haha
|
| Second place has to be data exfiltration, "by blinking the
| numlock LED"
| 7steps2much wrote:
| Not gonna lie, sending out data via inaudible sounds is
| pretty fly!
| rypskar wrote:
| It seems like this data is from Google analytics, which is not
| only blocked but also is being shimmed by Firefox, at least
| when strict privacy is enabled. So this do not show the correct
| number of Firefox user, only the users without privacy
| protection enabled and without any tracking blocker
| nitn wrote:
| Why is the government using Google Analytics (which is now
| illegal in some countries) instead of self hosting an analytics
| solution.
| xeromal wrote:
| Easy
| hhh wrote:
| Is it illegal in the United States?
| charcircuit wrote:
| No
| blibble wrote:
| the GDPR doesn't care where the website is as long as it's
| accessible to EU citizens
|
| it would be most amusing to watch the EU commission attempt
| to enforce its extraterritorial !bad, bad cookies! law
| against the US federal government on its own website
| qiqitori wrote:
| Back in my day, the mantra was "Information wants to be free",
| and laws limiting freedom on the internet and freedom of
| information were looked down upon.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Back in the day usage of the internet grossly over-
| represented one country with a concept of free speech that,
| by global standards, is extremist.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what you're saying
| shadowgovt wrote:
| As a DARPA project, the early internet was populated
| almost exclusively by Americans for quite a long time. It
| grew rapidly, but I suspect that you're thinking about
| the culture that was steeped in almost everybody you
| talked to being an American.
|
| Americans have a philosophy of the freedom of speech
| grounded in the principles of the First Amendment. Those
| principles are not universally shared, and indeed, even
| amongst the liberal nations the American take on the
| topic is pretty liberal (contrast the way, say, speech
| overtly supporting fascism is treated in Germany vs. the
| relatively new and controversial hate speech laws in the
| US, or the principles of affirmative defense for
| defamation in the US not shared by the UK, or the Refused
| Classification category for videogames in Australia, or
| the fact that the law of against "publication or
| utterance of blasphemous matter" was repealed in Ireland
| in 2020).
|
| As the average internet user grows to resemble more the
| average human than the average American human, regression
| to the international mean on freedom of information is to
| be anticipated.
| notatoad wrote:
| is there a self-hosted alternative that provides the same
| functionality?
| EricE wrote:
| Lots! One that I really liked - tried on a small personal
| project so not sure how it works at scale:
| https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics
| caaqil wrote:
| From the data at
| https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json, Microsoft Edge
| has more than 2x the users of Firefox (322,890,632 vs
| 143,040,483).
| gibolt wrote:
| That makes sense considering Edge is a default browser on the
| most popular (desktop) OS, and this is from a random
| distribution of users.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| What's 'Mercary_d'? 4 million page views over 90 days and
| haven't even heard of it yet. Same for 'Welltory'.
| NV2k9JtLJpba5BN wrote:
| `totals.browser` contains user agents (or something similar).
|
| Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who
| sets that as their user agent?
| keewee7 wrote:
| >Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well?
| Who sets that as their user agent?
|
| Might be some programming exercise. It's a common network
| programming exercise to build a HTTP client using bare
| sockets. But they don't look like student email addresses.
| NavinF wrote:
| Some APIs require contact info in the user agent header. For
| example, all calls to the reddit API are supposed to contain
| the dev's reddit /u/username in the user agent.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I think for respectful web scraping it is common/preferred
| etiquette to include some contact info.
| antisthenes wrote:
| 124 people still rocking Netscape!
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Or bots. When I still cared about visitor statistics 10+
| years ago, I saw unrealistic amounts of visitors using old
| versions of Netscape, browsers on Amiga and other niche
| systems. They were probably all bots in disguise.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Last week, one of those was me. I was messing with old VM
| images and was using .gov web sites for testing connectivity.
| deepstack wrote:
| and 2039 are on "whatever you want". That's kind of browser I
| want to use.
| dalbin wrote:
| "whatever you want" is the User-Agent in the top answer for
| "Change user-agent for Selenium web-driver" on Stack
| Overflow :
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29916054/change-user-
| age...
| EricE wrote:
| I love it when people put the instruction for what to
| enter into a field instead of actually filling out the
| field.
|
| I run into it ALL the time and no matter how you write
| instructions, at least 1/3 of people won't read them but
| just skim to what they think they need and then
| copy/paste. Ugh.
| ixnus wrote:
| Also shows a shocking 90,832 users viewing who are users of
| 'BestBuy'.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yes, the only place with less visitors than the 'Department for
| Housing and Urban Development' is the 'National Science
| Foundation'.
|
| Sign of the times?
| kortilla wrote:
| But why would a regular person visit those sites? I hold a PhD
| and I think I visited the nsf website <50 times during my
| entire academic career.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| Im a researcher in a government lab and I don't think Ive
| ever been on it.
|
| NIST? Definitely
|
| LLNL MPI tutorials? Obviously.
|
| But NSF... never?
| earthscienceman wrote:
| Also a professional researcher in a government lab. The NSF
| site is a once or twice a year visit.
| Victerius wrote:
| Breakdown:
|
| By device type:
|
| Mobile 53.7%
|
| Desktop 44.1%
|
| Tablet 1.9%
|
| By browser:
|
| Chrome 48%
|
| Safari 36.2%
|
| Edge 6.4%
|
| Firefox 2.8%
|
| My personal conclusions:
|
| Tablets remain a niche product, Firefox is dead, and Edge will be
| dead in a few years if it can't eat more market share, which it
| won't.
| warvariuc wrote:
| It means that Edge is less used within Mobile device type.
| mrintellectual wrote:
| I am fairly certain this is a side effect of people sharing
| this link through messaging apps, thereby inflating Chrome
| (default browser for Android devices) and Safari (default
| browser for Apple devices) relative to Firefox.
| tomcam wrote:
| Many many tablets are reported as mobile
| sersi wrote:
| The problem is that a lot of Firefox users block google
| analytics, so it would not surprise me that Firefox is very
| much underrepresented.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Tablets remain a niche product_
|
| iPads don't show themselves to be iPads. They read as full
| computers.
|
| It's an anti-profiling feature Apple added a few years ago.
| amitport wrote:
| It's not dead. US gov sites do not represent the entire web.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
| Victerius wrote:
| US gov sites may not represent the entire web, but the
| platforms that the entire population uses to access
| government websites, does. People don't use a different
| browser for the State Department and for Facebook. The data
| presented here is actually reflective. If anything, it's
| conservative. Not many teens are looking up tax forms or
| passport renewal forms (their parents do it for them). And
| these young users are less likely to use anything other than
| Chrome and Safari.
| amitport wrote:
| US is not the world. Just felt like it had to be stated.
| black3r wrote:
| currently it states that 56.3% visitors there are from
| outside the US.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| It's currently nighttime in the US, so that's not too
| surprising.
|
| But it doesn't mean that the overall fraction of visitors
| from outside the US is that high.
| amitport wrote:
| The people that surf to US gov sites (even from outside
| the US), IMO, are not a very good sample of the world's
| web users.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The US has more spending power than most of the rest of the
| world.
| patcon wrote:
| Ack. I've used PubMed for over a decade (since it was taught as
| the de facto way to search the science literature in my Canadian
| university) and it never occurred to me that it was a US federal
| government website :facepalm:
| EricE wrote:
| Any home page with FOIA in the footer is probably a US
| Government website :) Same if they also have usa.gov as a link.
| kube-system wrote:
| ... or if the TLD is 'gov'.
|
| https://home.dotgov.gov
| substructure wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but this shows that in the last 90 days
| 5.06 billion visits came from 31.3% Windows while 1.1% were from
| GNU/Linux. If we assume that both groups visit government
| websites equally often, then for every GNU/Linux user there exist
| (31.3/1.1) = 28.5 Windows users. Scary stuff.
| mywaifuismeta wrote:
| > If we assume that both groups visit government websites
| equally often
|
| My pattern matching experience from real life tells me that
| this is unlikely....
| iqanq wrote:
| Really you assume there are as many Linux users as there are
| Windows users, or am I misunderstanding you?
| fareesh wrote:
| In my social circles I know a grand total of zero GNU/Linux
| users. I am the only one
| haroldp wrote:
| For what it's worth, Linux is over represented in the (fake)
| User-agent strings of the bots that attack my web servers. Most
| probably are indeed on linux, since they are predominantly
| scripts running on cloud providers. :)
| [deleted]
| georgyo wrote:
| This is heavily skewed by iOS being used for USPS shipping.
|
| The following is for people logging into government services,
| it is a better source for metrics on browsers/OS usage.
|
| https://analytics.usa.gov/general-services-administration/
| substructure wrote:
| That site shows 113.1 million visits in the last 90 days with
| 47.2% being Windows and 1.2% linux. (47.2/1.2) = 39.3 windows
| users for every linux user.
|
| I agree that it is skewed in a number of ways. I just wanted
| to estimate a lower bound.
|
| Thank you for pointing out a better source of data for my use
| case.
| NavinF wrote:
| 1.1% is way too high. I bet they didn't filter out all the
| scrapers that poll gov't websites.
|
| Hmm I wonder if just parsing the HTML still works like it did 8
| years ago when I had to scrape the USPS:
| https://github.com/NavinF/USPS-scraper/blob/master/USPS_scra...
| As long as the USPS only allows API requests from browsers (as
| opposed to the much more common situation where you need to
| update the status of every tracking number in a database),
| people still have to scrape their website pretending to be a
| browser.
| jjeaff wrote:
| The USPS has long had an API. I don't remember it being fun
| to work with, but it has a lot of functionality.
| NavinF wrote:
| Oh they had an API 8 years ago too. It's just that they
| only let you use that API from JavaScript running on your
| users' browsers.
|
| The undocumented tiny ratelimits and threat of bans for
| server-side API users (while no such ratelimits applied to
| the HTML pages) forced pretty much every app to scrape
| their HTML server side.
|
| From my README which quotes their old docs: "Note: The
| United States Postal Service expressly prohibits the use of
| Web Tools "scripting" without prior approval. Web Tools
| scripting can be defined as a technique to generate large
| volumes of Web Tools XML request transactions that are
| database- or batch-driven under program control, instead of
| being driven by individual user requests from a web site or
| a client software package. The USPS reserves the right to
| suspend server access without notification by any offending
| party that does not have prior approval for Web Tools
| scripting. Registered Web Tools customers that believe they
| have a legitimate requirement for Web Tools scripting
| should contact the ICCC to request approval."
|
| What an asinine process.
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