They are the small programs and libraries: legion, ceaseless yet imperceptive in their work and well- known to every internet user – each of us has seen at least one of them. This could be a beginning of a gore virus, trojan or other cyber pest story, but today we are going to focus on a rather pleasant subject – the browsers plugins and extensions. They make your online travels less troublesome, more interesting and sometimes at all possible. Cool, but what do we really know about them? It turns out that it’s not too much… Could we accept this state of affairs? No. What could be done about this? We could, for instance, conduct research on a mammoth sample of 50 thousand internet users… Actually, this is exactly what we did.
In spring this year we came across an idea to check what kind of plugins and extensions are normally used by the Polish internet population. A survey we displayed to 48,101 internet users contained a script which collected information on the plugins installed in their internet browsers. And so this tiny part of the online realm was no longer a mystery. What exactly did we learn by making this insight?
First of all, we analysed the popularity of particular plugins and extensions dedicated to different types of browsers. An example of this is the Shockwave Flash which was detected in 99.4% respondent browsers. The most plugin-alluring browser is FireFox, for which the programmers all over the world created the largest proportion of extensions and add-ons. In course of the research, we identified 373 different plugins dedicated to this browser, while for the commercial Opera, the list closed with number 199. It also turned out that an average researched internet user has as many as 10 different plugins, while the record holders (0.5% of all respondents) have even more than 20 extensions installed on their computers.
Since all information obtained with this atypical research seem equally crucial and interesting, in today’s post we decided to present only two, carefully picked league tables – a ranking for 5 most popular plugins with the users of Firefox and Opera and with the users of Windows, Linux i MacOS operating systems. Some further and more detained data concerning the plugins, add-ons and extensions to the browsers used by the Polish internet users is contained in the special Gemius report available free-of-charge on Polish version of the gemiusRanking website.
Chart 1. Rankings for top 5 web browser plugins by share among internet users surveyed by Gemius in Poland who work on FireFox and Opera (29.03.2010 – 30.03 2010, n=48101)
Chart 2. Rankings for top 5 web browser plugins by share among internet users surveyed by Gemius in Poland who work on Windows, Linux and MacOS (29.03.2010 – 30.03 2010, n=48101)
As it is the case with any other research, our popularity audit for browser plugins is merely an approximate picture of the reality. We do hope, however, that it will contribute to the body of the internet knowledge with some interesting and practical information. This plugins popularity research is dedicated to software developers, webmasters or interactive agencies, and all those who are simply interested in what’s going up in the Web. Enchanted by its expanse and beauty we can make one promise – we are bound to come up with many similar ideas in the future.
