This result surprised me, really. I thought that it would be much higher. I understand that it is not a worldwide statistics but app. 1/5 of top 5000 sites using Flash is really not a good sign or is it?
Hard to find information to compare Flash against other technologies, maybe because Flash is quite alone on this market? Silverlight, want to compete with Flash but it represents only 0.08% of the top 5000 website (ok they are too young on the market). We could also think about Javascipt / Ajax to build the same user experience but I couldn’t find any stats about the use of Javascript on top websites.
We could try to analyze this from the user point of view. Adobe claims that 90% of the web users on mature market have Flash Player 9 installed (in June 2007) and 99% got Flash Player 7 installed. That might lead us to think Flash is very commonly used on the web, but cannot inform us about the top website. For Javascript, the penetration is 96% (4% don’t have Javascript in September 2007).
Final conclusion, with a so deep penetration of the Flash Player we can only be happy to develop for the Flash Player 😉
Ahmet
The methodology for that study is not clear… here’s what I read there:
“When you lookup a page on BuiltWith, a robot goes off deep into cyberspace and looks at the page in question. It them compares that page with the technology list at BuiltWith.com and if it finds any matches, reports the information to you… BuiltWith.com detects technology by matching substrings of the technology name. If a page contains a matching substring it will report the page as featuring that technology”
http://blog.builtwith.com/index.php/faq/
After the IE/Eolas issue, many sites write OBJECT/EMBED tags from external .JS files, and there would be no .SWF in the front page’s markup at all.
A crosscheck is to see what Google inventories of the site, rather than the front page’s markup. I don’t know of a way to automate this for many sites, but here’s the basic procedure:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ametah.ch+filetype%3Aswf
I don’t have all the info on that “builtwith.com” site, but from what they say, the above is what I see.
jd/adobe
John, I would go even further and wonder how they evaluate the top 5000 sites? Traffic, popularity, price of an add, ….
For the IE/Eolas, you are totally right.
Your propositions is interesting to crosscheck what Google inventories, but it works only for Swf (not for JS.
What I really want to know is what is the most used technologies.
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