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Number of people on government websites now
- throwaway89374 5y agoThis does not seem to work correctly. I visited from separate browsers and the number remains the same.
- ixnus 5y agoIt updates every 5 minutes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- echelon 5y agoFirefox's usage percentage is upsetting. I hope they don't die, but this looks really bad for them.
- ycuser2 5y ago3% of almost billions(?) of browser users are still a fews millions of Firefox users. Millions of users is not "dead".
- noahtallen 5y agoRight, 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 5y agoIsn’t it open source? If the company behind it dies I’ll just compile it myself.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y agoIf 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 5y agoAren'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 5y agoyes. 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 5y agoIn what way did Firefox throw anything away with Rust? (Just don’t know the story.)
- rvz 5y agoMozilla gave all the Rust trademarks away and the opportunity to create a consultancy out of Rust (Since that has taken off) has been completely ruled out - which may have been a way out of not depending on Google's money fo 90% of all their revenue.
- rypskar 5y agoIt 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
- amelius 5y agoI don't understand why large companies ban Gmail but allow Chrome. They should be using Firefox instead.
- IncRnd 5y agoThey aren't banning due to a dislike of Google. They are trying to stop unmonitored exfiltration of data.
- riskable 5y ago> 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-via-power-lines/ 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 5y ago
- ricardobayes 5y agoI 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 5y agoI 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 https://api.ipify.org/?format=json (Spoiler: it's broken) The DX for firefox just isn't that great when compared to Chrome.
- ricardobayes 5y agoFF has presently 163 open bugs for localstorage-related issues. Some of them open for 3+ years. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=localstorage https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=localst...
- zohch 5y ago
- nitn 5y agoWhy is the government using Google Analytics (which is now illegal in some countries) instead of self hosting an analytics solution.
- xeromal 5y agoEasy
- hhh 5y agoIs it illegal in the United States?
- charcircuit 5y agoNo
- blibble 5y agothe 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 5y agoBack 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 5y agoBack 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 5y agoI'm not sure I understand what you're saying
- caaqil 5y agoFrom the data at https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json 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).
- antisthenes 5y ago124 people still rocking Netscape!
- TonyTrapp 5y agoOr 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.
- deepstack 5y agoand 2039 are on "whatever you want". That's kind of browser I want to use.
- dalbin 5y ago"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-agent-for-selenium-web-driver https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29916054/change-user-age...
- EricE 5y agoI 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.
- reaperducer 5y agoLast week, one of those was me. I was messing with old VM images and was using .gov web sites for testing connectivity.
- Victerius 5y agoBreakdown: 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.
- sersi 5y agoThe problem is that a lot of Firefox users block google analytics, so it would not surprise me that Firefox is very much underrepresented.
- amitport 5y agoIt's not dead. US gov sites do not represent the entire web. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
- Victerius 5y agoUS 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.
- substructure 5y agoCorrect 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 5y ago> If we assume that both groups visit government websites equally often My pattern matching experience from real life tells me that this is unlikely....
- haroldp 5y agoFor 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 5y ago[deleted]
- fareesh 5y agoIn my social circles I know a grand total of zero GNU/Linux users. I am the only one
- NavinF 5y ago1.1% 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_scraper.py 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 5y ago
- hollerith 5y agoChromebooks 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.
- Rastonbury 5y agoIs it mainly students in schools? They wouldn't have much reason to access govt sites yet
- agloeregrets 5y agoKeep 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.
- Shalomboy 5y agoThe 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoAs 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 5y agoperhaps 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 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30004042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30004042
- tradertef 5y agoIndia is 7.7% of total traffic and China is 5%. It is night now, but still these numbers are surprisingly high.
- flypaca 5y agoProbably just looking at immigration/Embassies related websites. It is day time in India and China.
- jorgesborges 5y agoIndeed, as I look now 42% of all traffic is international.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThe most common website is USPS by a significant margin. Could that explain much of the international traffic?
- saagarjha 5y agoCOVID tests, I assume.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago"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.
- deltree7 5y agoImmigration and Travel too
- dmode 5y agoMy guess is this is mostly related to immigration and travel related
- H8crilA 5y ago
- boomboomsubban 5y agoUnder "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 5y agoI'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 5y agoIt 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-mapping-lawsuit-kansas-farm-ip-address 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 5y agoImagine the spam mail they must be getting.
- politelemon 5y agoWhen 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 5y agoIt's now showing 168,571 people, maybe it's every few minutes or possibly every hour as it's x:05 currently.
- qwertox 5y agoWhile 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.
- jaywalk 5y agoIf 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.
- fareesh 5y agoIs it possible to FOIA how much it cost the US government to build this page?
- Jolter 5y agoOnly one way to find out.
- reaperducer 5y agoYes. But it's probably faster and easier to just look online. The data is very likely there.
- EricE 5y agoSure - 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-gov/ 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 https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov Pretty lightweight for what it is.
- firechickenbird 5y agoApple covers 45.3% of the visits, that's insane
- yftsui 5y agoIndeed, very surprising to see it below 50% given iPhone accumulated market share over the years.
- etchalon 5y agoApple's marketshare in mobile is ~ 62% based on this, and ~ 25% on desktop.
- mobilio 5y agoAnd Safari - >36%
- WesternWind 5y agoThat's probably IOS safari
- earthscienceman 5y agoThe 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.
- ralferoo 5y agoWonder if tomorrow, the analytics site will show up as the top most visited government website!
- Proven 5y ago
- m4tthumphrey 5y agoVisitor Locations Now: London 2% Clearly a HN hug!
- Aeolun 5y agoYes, the only place with less visitors than the ‘Department for Housing and Urban Development’ is the ‘National Science Foundation’. Sign of the times?
- kortilla 5y agoBut 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 5y agoIm 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 5y agoAlso a professional researcher in a government lab. The NSF site is a once or twice a year visit.
- minaor 5y ago[flagged]
- plasma_beam 5y agoThis 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/ 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-gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-go...
- eminence32 5y agoI 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 5y agoHere'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/# https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#
- erwincoumans 5y agoFrom the info, it looks like a lot of the recent traffic is due to the free COVID test.
- patcon 5y agoAck. 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 5y agoAny 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 5y ago... or if the TLD is 'gov'. https://home.dotgov.gov https://home.dotgov.gov
- drugstorecowboy 5y agoIn 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.
- lkbm 5y agoLooks 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 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 https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html