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apple.com being so high is (to me) a little counter-intuitive. microsoft.com too for the same reason. They don't seem like the sites people would be using a l

apple.com being so high is (to me) a little counter-intuitive. microsoft.com too for the same reason. They don't seem like the sites people would be using a lot in their day-to-day lives. I guess it's counting dns lookups from devices and not necessarily "human" web page/app requests?

CSSer 5y ago
It's been forever since I've seen this first hand, but iirc apple.com and microsoft.com are both default homepages in Safari on macOS and Edge on Windows, respectively. That may artificially inflate the numbers a bit too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Closi 5y ago
  That’s a good point. Both companies also offer single sign on services too so again maybe that could keep redirecting users back to their sites.
greggsy 5y ago
If you’ve worked on or around an enterprise gateway team, you’ll learn pretty quickly that 1) Microsoft, Akamai, Cloudfront and Apple traffic appear to represent 95% of traffic in a given organisation, and 2) providing meaningful reports on internet usage for executives is *hard*
- randomswede 5y ago
  Somewhat over two decades ago, the #1 site in the web cache stats for the web cache between an ISP dialup pool and the internet at large was "icons.hotmail.com" (may have been a number on "icons", actually). With probably 2-3 x the hits than the first porn site.
dylan604 5y ago
how many iDevices and their apps/services ping back home via a *.apple.com domain? In other words, is it possible that the traffic isn't from people visiting the website in a browser?
ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
Think docs.Microsoft.com etc - some people spend all day every day on there! I spend quite a lot of time looking at new MacBooks :)
KwanEsq 5y ago
"Am I on a captive portal?" tests might make up a decent chunk of requests, I believe both Apple and Microsoft have equivalents to http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt

CSSer 5y ago

It's been forever since I've seen this first hand, but iirc apple.com and microsoft.com are both default homepages in Safari on macOS and Edge on Windows, respectively. That may artificially inflate the numbers a bit too.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Closi 5y ago
That’s a good point. Both companies also offer single sign on services too so again maybe that could keep redirecting users back to their sites.

greggsy 5y ago

If you’ve worked on or around an enterprise gateway team, you’ll learn pretty quickly that 1) Microsoft, Akamai, Cloudfront and Apple traffic appear to represent 95% of traffic in a given organisation, and 2) providing meaningful reports on internet usage for executives is *hard*

randomswede 5y ago
Somewhat over two decades ago, the #1 site in the web cache stats for the web cache between an ISP dialup pool and the internet at large was "icons.hotmail.com" (may have been a number on "icons", actually). With probably 2-3 x the hits than the first porn site.

dylan604 5y ago

how many iDevices and their apps/services ping back home via a *.apple.com domain? In other words, is it possible that the traffic isn't from people visiting the website in a browser?

ed_elliott_asc 5y ago

Think docs.Microsoft.com etc - some people spend all day every day on there! I spend quite a lot of time looking at new MacBooks :)

KwanEsq 5y ago

"Am I on a captive portal?" tests might make up a decent chunk of requests, I believe both Apple and Microsoft have equivalents to http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt http://detectportal.firefox.com/success.txt