Tekool.net - Java JRE version penetration stats with Google Analytics

Some people still use Java applets instead of Flash, Silverlight or Javascript for RIAs. But Sun did not maintain any Java JRE version penetration statistics as Adobe does with Flash. So when you need to explain people that recent Java JRE aren't so widespread they could imagine, you haven't got any good stats to prove it on the Internet. Here is finally jre-analytics, a tool to log Java JRE version penetration stats with Google analytics.

It seems that this script does not need the browser to launch the Java virtual machine to get the JRE version. So Java will not slow down the loading of the page while initializing. Two problems with this script is that "Bounce Rate" will report as null and that it uses DeployJava.js (official Sun equivalent to SWFObject for Java) which is as criticized as the old Adobe official Flash detection kit. I will investigate in the Bounce Rate problem, I'm sure that we could runtime patch the Google Analytics script to correct this.

Target of a recent buzz www.riatstats.com do not provide any stats for Java at the moment, I hope they will find some website to host jre-analytics with Java JRE version detection activated to log those reports.

On the original post introducing the script its author asks users to reports their stats on a forum post.

The most interesting results on this page are :

A total of 1002 visits (excluding "not set")

Java: 1.6.0 (52%)
Java: none (29.94%)
Java: 1.5.0 (7.94%)
Java: 1.6.0_10 (3.79%)
Java: 1.4.2 (3.29%)
Java: 1.5.0_06 (0.8%)
Java: 1.6.0_07 (0.7%)
Java: 1.6.0_02 (0.3%)
Java: 1.4.2_03 (0.2%)
Java: 1.6.0_03 (0.2%)
Java: 1.8.0 (0.2%)
Java: 1.4.1_02 (0.1%)
Java: 1.4.2_05 (0.1%)
Java: 1.4.2_06 (0.1%)
Java: 1.4.2_18 (0.1%)
Java: 1.5.0_05 (0.1%)
Java: 1.5.0_09 (0.1%)
Java: 1.5.0_15 (0.1%)
Java: 1.6.0_05 (0.1%)
Java: 1.6.0_06 (0.1%)

In summary:
1.6.0_00 to 1.6.0_09: 530 (52.89%)
none: 300 (29.94%)
1.5.0: 93 (9.28%)
1.6.0_10: 38 (3.79%)
1.4.2: 39 (3.89%)
1.8.0: 2 (0.2%)

1.4.2+: 700 (69.86%)
1.5+: 661 (65.97%)
1.6+: 568 (56.67%)

Thank you Francis for your help on this.

Comments

jre-analytics is calling Google Analytics event tracker to many times. It calls it as many times it found a Java JRE version on the visitor’s computer. Each call adds a GIF to the web page to submit parameters. I do not need to know each JRE version penetration stats. I do want to know which is the highest version my visitor have. I so have finally switched from the jre-analytics code to my own snippet as follow :

var jreVersions = deployJava.getJREs();
jreVersions.sort();
var highestVersion = jreVersions.pop();

var highestVersionLabel = highestVersion ? highestVersion.substr(0,5) : ‘none’;
pageTracker._trackEvent(“java”, “highest version”, highestVersionLabel);

[ 26 January 2009 18:58 ]

Tekool

I just discovered that http://www.riastats.com now reports Java JRE version. Don’t know if this blog post helps on it. Quite a good news anyway!

[ 1 February 2009 15:05 ]

Tekool

Java JRE version penetration stats with Google Analytics

Java JRE version penetration stats with Google Analytics

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