how many % of users have js enabled ?

[piniyini]

Hello guys,
I just wanted to know (out of curiosity) how many percentage of users have javascript enabled? & is there a way (a script) to find this out ?

[Graeme Hackston]

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/

Or do you mean on your site?

[zoobie]

Although Graeme's link shows 10% disabled for the month of Sept, that's just for visitors to that site...techies most likely. I just read where overall, it's like 1-2% so I wouldn't worry about it. Most don't know how to turn off scripting anyway. :D

[Graeme Hackston]

Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe they use statistics from more than 1 million sites. If not, close to 1/2 million visitors/hour is an awful lot of visits to 1 site.

Here's a snippet from their index page:


Global Statistics
Global Statistics offer you a peek at our mega-report, which combines the traffic reports from our more than 1 million customers worldwide. Find out how Internet users are viewing the Web.


Remember that a large portion of that 10% is from devises like WebTV and cell phones. As I understand it, WebTV can “sort of” read javascript but registers disabled.

[joh6nn]

what he's asking is if javascript is enabled, not disabled. so you guys have to reverse your numbers. about 90% of people have it enabled.

as far as telling if people have javascript turned on or off, that's not so easy. it's incredibly easy to find out if people have javascript on, because you can use it to send yourself a message ( with the help of server side languages ) telling you it is. if javascript isn't turned on, things get tricky.

there are <noscript> tags, and everything insde them, will only be parsed if javascript is turned off.

other than that, you're stuck.

[zoobie]

I'm thinking the million it uses to measure with are techies, hackers, and, as mentioned, web tv users. Actually, a million is a very small sample considering...It wouldn't even be accepted as statistically significant in 'global' terms...It's wayyy too small a sample. They probably don't want you to know that...:D

[joh6nn]

i think that's supposed to be the statistics from one million sites, not one million web surfers. that jumps the value of the statistics up a bit. however, all of these statistics, are still only a starting point. you have to collect you rown statistics to see what people are using on your own site.

[boywonder]

I remember a discussion on this topic in the old forum. A number of knowledgable people pointed out that whenever anyone stops a page from completely loading, or leaves before the page had a chance to load, the server sees that as a non-javascript browser. Which would lead one to believe that very few people are actually disabling javsascript or using a non-javascript browser, it just appears that way in the logs.

I don't know for sure, and never researched it myself. Anyone can back that up ? or dispute it? 10% of audience is a fairly large number if some content display or navigation relies heavily on javascript...

[whammy]

I'll give you some figures about a month from now (for my website, at least) - as I just started tracking which "hits" have javscript enabled using a tricky pixel. :)

[piniyini]

Thanks guys for all the info, it was very helpful.

I was wondering, how does the thecounter.com know if the user has javascript disabled ?
After all, they use javascript to track thier hits. So if a user has javascript disabled, they cant track them ?

Same goes to Whammy for his site.

Thanks again, y'all.