2.6 by the numbers

WordPress, ,

Now that we’re now 10 days into the release of version 2.6 of WordPress, it’d be interesting to look at a few of the numbers around it.

  • There have been around 23 thousand downloads per day. (Of just the English version.)
  • According to the update system there are 201 thousand blogs using 2.6 already.
  • That’s about 9% of all known WordPress.org blogs in 10 days.
  • The video in the announcement post has been viewed 665,080 times.
  • There have been over 300 themes submitted to the new Theme directory, which launched just 6 days ago.
  • In the same period (10 days) there were 579,871 downloads of 2,527 plugins.

I imagine 2.6 adoption will pick up after the 2.6.1 release — a lot of people wait for the .1 before upgrading.

How are we celebrating? By working on 2.7!

It should be a fun release both for the features we have planned and also because it might incorporate some of the aspects of Crazyhorse, our experimental bizarro world dev branch which we’re laser-eye-testing in NYC next week. (700 blogs are running 2.7 already.)

IE6 Independence?

Stats

Hot off the news that 37signals is removing support for IE6 in their products I thought it would be interesting to look at the stats from WordPress.com as an update to my previous post just under a year ago. Is it reasonable to drop support for IE6 in a mainstream app?

These stats cover Jan 1 – Jun 30: 787 million “absolute unique” visitors, 1.6 billion visits, and 3.3 billion pageviews. I feel these numbers are large enough and WordPress.com-hosted blogs diverse enough to be fairly representative. All the numbers come from Google Analytics. In parentheses I’ve put the delta from the last time I blogged these stats.

  1. 59.41% – Internet Explorer (down 3.05%), sub-breakdown:
    1. 53.42% – Version 7.0 (up 18.25%)
    2. 46.28% – Version 6.0 (down 17.82%)
    3. 0.14% – Version 5.5 (down 0.14%)
  2. 32.82% – Firefox (up 2.08%)
  3. 4.81% – Safari (up 0.98%)
  4. 2.04% – Opera (up 0.26%)
  5. 0.41% – Mozilla (down 0.11%)

The operating system breakdown:

  1. 89.41% – Windows (down 0.95%)
  2. 7.86% – Macintosh (up 1.13%)
  3. 1.82% – Linux (down 0.37%)
  4. 0.17% – iPhone (out of nowhere!)
  5. 0.10% – PlayStation Portable (up 0.07%)

So as you can see, IE6 users account for about 27% of all the visits we saw. If I were building something for “the internet” IE6 compatibility would still very much be on my radar. Everyone’s users or customers are different, and if I saw IE6 falling below 10% on one of my sites I’d probably very seriously consider what 37signals is doing.

The good news is most trends are going in the right direction: strong growth of Firefox, IE7, and Macintosh, and the iPhone came out of nowhere to generate 2.6 million visits (and another 1.1 million from the iTouch).

Happy July 4th!