Number of people on government websites now

https://analytics.usa.gov

by wylie39 • 5 years ago

362 139 5 years ago

analytics.usa.gov

echelon• 5 years ago

Firefox's usage percentage is upsetting.

I hope they don't die, but this looks really bad for them.

ycuser2• 5 years ago

3% of almost billions(?) of browser users are still a fews millions of Firefox users. Millions of users is not "dead".

noahtallen• 5 years ago

Right, but I think the overarching point is that 3% is awfully close to the 1% that is Internet Explorer, which many would consider dead. If usage decline continues, it just wouldn’t take much for no people to stop supporting it.

This is from someone who uses Firefox

ayngg• 5 years ago

Aren't they basically being kept alive by Google at this point? Almost 90% of their revenue is from that one deal at it has felt like they have been more concerned with other initiatives for a while now.

rvz2• 5 years ago

   yes.

14 years on and still haven't found a way to make themselves any less independent of Google's money. >90% of their revenue derived from their direct anti-privacy competitor makes them entirely on life support.

Rust was their opportunity to escape that, now they just threw it away and now they are back to where they started.

Firefox is in decline. Nothing has changed.

rypskar• 5 years ago

It seems like this data is from Google analytics, which is not only blocked but also is being shimmed by Firefox, at least when strict privacy is enabled. So this do not show the correct number of Firefox user, only the users without privacy protection enabled and without any tracking blocker

amelius• 5 years ago

I don't understand why large companies ban Gmail but allow Chrome. They should be using Firefox instead.

IncRnd2• 5 years ago

They aren't banning due to a dislike of Google. They are trying to stop unmonitored exfiltration of data.

slig• 5 years ago

Things are only getting worse in this regard as more and more devs don't even test on FF, and FF lags behind new features. Internal business apps are going to be Chrome only and it's only downhill from there.

ricardobayes3• 5 years ago

I used to love Firefox, but fell out of love majorly. First there's a still long-standing bug (5 years and counting) that newly opened tabs don't have access to localstorage. Then 96.0 broke a lot of our code somehow. Cross-checked with 95 and everything still worked fine.

sevenf0ur• 5 years ago

I hit and reported a very similar bug over a year ago. Try to add a cookie or localstorage entry in Dev Tools on a page that outputs JSON, such as: https://api.ipify.org/?format=json (Spoiler: it's broken)

The DX for firefox just isn't that great when compared to Chrome.

nitn• 5 years ago

Why is the government using Google Analytics (which is now illegal in some countries) instead of self hosting an analytics solution.

xeromal• 5 years ago

Easy

hhh• 5 years ago

Is it illegal in the United States?

charcircuit2• 5 years ago

blibble• 5 years ago

the GDPR doesn't care where the website is as long as it's accessible to EU citizens

it would be most amusing to watch the EU commission attempt to enforce its extraterritorial !bad, bad cookies! law against the US federal government on its own website

qiqitori• 5 years ago

Back in my day, the mantra was "Information wants to be free", and laws limiting freedom on the internet and freedom of information were looked down upon.

shadowgovt4• 5 years ago

Back in the day usage of the internet grossly over-represented one country with a concept of free speech that, by global standards, is extremist.

notatoad• 5 years ago

is there a self-hosted alternative that provides the same functionality?

EricE9• 5 years ago

Lots! One that I really liked - tried on a small personal project so not sure how it works at scale: https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics

caaqil• 5 years ago

From the data at https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json, Microsoft Edge has more than 2x the users of Firefox (322,890,632 vs 143,040,483).

gibolt2• 5 years ago

That makes sense considering Edge is a default browser on the most popular (desktop) OS, and this is from a random distribution of users.

NV2k9JtLJpba5BN• 5 years ago

`totals.browser` contains user agents (or something similar).

Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who sets that as their user agent?

keewee7• 5 years ago

Why are there (personal?) email addresses in there as well? Who sets that as their user agent?

Might be some programming exercise. It's a common network programming exercise to build a HTTP client using bare sockets. But they don't look like student email addresses.

NavinF3• 5 years ago

Some APIs require contact info in the user agent header. For example, all calls to the reddit API are supposed to contain the dev’s reddit /u/username in the user agent.

mxuribe• 5 years ago

I think for respectful web scraping it is common/preferred etiquette to include some contact info.

antisthenes• 5 years ago

124 people still rocking Netscape!

TonyTrapp2• 5 years ago

Or bots. When I still cared about visitor statistics 10+ years ago, I saw unrealistic amounts of visitors using old versions of Netscape, browsers on Amiga and other niche systems. They were probably all bots in disguise.

deepstack• 5 years ago

and 2039 are on "whatever you want". That's kind of browser I want to use.

reaperducer4• 5 years ago

Last week, one of those was me. I was messing with old VM images and was using .gov web sites for testing connectivity.

ricardobayes3• 5 years ago

What's 'Mercary_d'? 4 million page views over 90 days and haven't even heard of it yet. Same for 'Welltory'.

ixnus2• 5 years ago

Also shows a shocking 90,832 users viewing who are users of 'BestBuy'.

Victerius2• 5 years ago

Breakdown:

By device type:

Mobile 53.7%

Desktop 44.1%

Tablet 1.9%

By browser:

Chrome 48%

Safari 36.2%

Edge 6.4%

Firefox 2.8%

My personal conclusions:

Tablets remain a niche product, Firefox is dead, and Edge will be dead in a few years if it can't eat more market share, which it won't.

amitport3• 5 years ago

It's not dead. US gov sites do not represent the entire web.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Victerius2• 5 years ago

US gov sites may not represent the entire web, but the platforms that the entire population uses to access government websites, does. People don't use a different browser for the State Department and for Facebook. The data presented here is actually reflective. If anything, it's conservative. Not many teens are looking up tax forms or passport renewal forms (their parents do it for them). And these young users are less likely to use anything other than Chrome and Safari.

charcircuit2• 5 years ago

The US has more spending power than most of the rest of the world.

warvariuc• 5 years ago

It means that Edge is less used within Mobile device type.

mrintellectual• 5 years ago

I am fairly certain this is a side effect of people sharing this link through messaging apps, thereby inflating Chrome (default browser for Android devices) and Safari (default browser for Apple devices) relative to Firefox.

sersi• 5 years ago

The problem is that a lot of Firefox users block google analytics, so it would not surprise me that Firefox is very much underrepresented.

tomcam• 5 years ago

Many many tablets are reported as mobile

reaperducer4• 5 years ago

Tablets remain a niche product

iPads don't show themselves to be iPads. They read as full computers.

It's an anti-profiling feature Apple added a few years ago.

substructure2• 5 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this shows that in the last 90 days 5.06 billion visits came from 31.3% Windows while 1.1% were from GNU/Linux. If we assume that both groups visit government websites equally often, then for every GNU/Linux user there exist (31.3/1.1) = 28.5 Windows users. Scary stuff.

mywaifuismeta• 5 years ago

If we assume that both groups visit government websites equally often

My pattern matching experience from real life tells me that this is unlikely....

haroldp• 5 years ago

For what it's worth, Linux is over represented in the (fake) User-agent strings of the bots that attack my web servers. Most probably are indeed on linux, since they are predominantly scripts running on cloud providers. :)

fareesh2• 5 years ago

In my social circles I know a grand total of zero GNU/Linux users. I am the only one

NavinF3• 5 years ago

1.1% is way too high. I bet they didn't filter out all the scrapers that poll gov't websites.

Hmm I wonder if just parsing the HTML still works like it did 8 years ago when I had to scrape the USPS: https://github.com/NavinF/USPS-scraper/blob/master/USPS_scra... As long as the USPS only allows API requests from browsers (as opposed to the much more common situation where you need to update the status of every tracking number in a database), people still have to scrape their website pretending to be a browser.

jjeaff• 5 years ago

The USPS has long had an API. I don't remember it being fun to work with, but it has a lot of functionality.

iqanq• 5 years ago

Really you assume there are as many Linux users as there are Windows users, or am I misunderstanding you?

georgyo• 5 years ago

This is heavily skewed by iOS being used for USPS shipping.

The following is for people logging into government services, it is a better source for metrics on browsers/OS usage.

https://analytics.usa.gov/general-services-administration/

substructure2• 5 years ago

That site shows 113.1 million visits in the last 90 days with 47.2% being Windows and 1.2% linux. (47.2/1.2) = 39.3 windows users for every linux user.

I agree that it is skewed in a number of ways. I just wanted to estimate a lower bound.

Thank you for pointing out a better source of data for my use case.

hollerith• 5 years ago

Chromebooks have high (unit) sales (some say) but I've yet to see any signs that they are used a lot. Here only 1.4% of visits are from ChromeOS.

Rastonbury• 5 years ago

Is it mainly students in schools? They wouldn't have much reason to access govt sites yet

agloeregrets• 5 years ago

Keep in mind that the majority of all fed gov visits are USPS tracking pages and the like. Chromebooks are majority used by students so I would expect this.

Shalomboy• 5 years ago

The fact that a lot of Chromebooks are being sold is fairly solid; I would reckon that the questionable claim is that Chromebooks have strong sales traction with retail consumers. I bought myself a Lenovo Duet tablet last fall because I wanted a device that could last multiple days with intermittent streaming use and I missed the feeling of a cramped 10" netbook. I got it on sale for $200 USD and was floored by how nice the experience was on a PC that cheap. But friends and family who saw me with the tablet were shocked that I, an adult who likes computers, owned a Chromebook. I only know one other person IRL with a personal chromebook, and they bought it after being given a school-deployed one in college.

bmhin• 5 years ago

I use one and have had a couple over the years. Decently cheap and I functionally just want a laptop form factor and UX for a tablet use case: web browsing, some light app usage (often for casting / streaming), and also being able to type as needed, all from an actual couch / on the lap / wherever. Used to be no Android App support so that part was a no go and now you have the linux containers to fall back on if you need to run something else or want a proper terminal.

I have a bulky work laptop and a big desktop PC. The niche left over maps to a nice slim, fanless device for casual usage very well in the Chromebook space. Maybe preaching to the choir here, but my keyboard will need to be pried from my cold, dead hands and the tablet + detachable options all seemed way too delicate.

dhogan• 5 years ago

My whole local library is full of Chromeboxes. Maybe things like that make an impact.

riskable2• 5 years ago

My anecdote: A lot of people seem to be using Chromebooks to replace tablets (because good, non-Amazon tablets that aren't expensive are rare these days). You can pick up a $250 touchscreen Chromebook that works as a vastly superior web-browsing and video-watching device than a $250 Samsung tablet.

jedberg• 5 years ago

Every Chromebook I've seen in the wild is being used by a student or teacher. I suspect students don't have many reasons to visit government websites.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

As someone pointed out in another thread, there is something fishy going on with these with a high percentage of usage coming from Graceville. Who knows if they are spoofing user agents and what not.

dgoldstein0• 5 years ago

perhaps there's an internet exchange in one of the Graceville's, and it accounts for traffic from nearby cities too?

I noticed that San Jose makes the list, as does LA and Seattle right now, but no San Francisco. I suspect that SF traffic goes through San Jose and thus most of the bay area appears as San Jose in their numbers. Not a big leap to imagine this happens in other places too.

Axsuul• 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30004042

tradertef• 5 years ago

India is 7.7% of total traffic and China is 5%. It is night now, but still these numbers are surprisingly high.

jorgesborges• 5 years ago

Indeed, as I look now 42% of all traffic is international.

boomboomsubban3• 5 years ago

The most common website is USPS by a significant margin. Could that explain much of the international traffic?

saagarjha• 5 years ago

COVID tests, I assume.

deltree7• 5 years ago

Immigration and Travel too

dmode• 5 years ago

My guess is this is mostly related to immigration and travel related

flypaca• 5 years ago

Probably just looking at immigration/Embassies related websites. It is day time in India and China.

H8crilA2• 5 years ago

Both of these countries have around 1.4B people. 1B people is around 17x Germany, or around 21x the UK.

ascar• 5 years ago

I think you're missing the .4 of 1.4B in your second sentence.

908B64B197• 5 years ago

The US consulates and embassy in China are the only reliable source of information regarding air quality and pollution.

Also, India having a large number of English speakers, probably has a significant percent of the population that prefers getting COVID-19 info from the CDC.

boomboomsubban3• 5 years ago

Under "Visitor locations right now," 1% are coming from Graceville. As far as I can tell, that's either a town of 4k in Australia, 2k in Florida, or there are two Gracevilles in Minnesota with a few hundred people. Any idea what's up?

gibolt2• 5 years ago

I'd guess either some ISP/VPN is masking to that location, or a block of ips incorrectly map to that spot (perhaps by the library they are using to determine location from ip)

TonyTrapp2• 5 years ago

It might be a default set of coordinates used for geolocation of some IPs used in a larger region (or even state). This sort of thing has in fact caused trouble in the past at least once: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-m...

IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify its true location. That address just happened to be the Arnolds’ property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.
More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from MaxMind’s database.

Aperocky• 5 years ago

Imagine the spam mail they must be getting.

politelemon• 5 years ago

When it says "now", how "now" do they mean? I've refreshed a few times and the number hasn't changed (171,533). I went to cisa.gov (disabled all my blockers) but the number here is still the same over here.

boomboomsubban3• 5 years ago

It's now showing 168,571 people, maybe it's every few minutes or possibly every hour as it's x:05 currently.

qwertox• 5 years ago

While I was looking at the data, the ranking of the top visited pages changed without reload, so I assume it is streamed in real-time. But I guess that the real-time data comes from aggregated and somewhat delayed data.

jaywalk• 5 years ago

If you open up DevTools and look at the requests, realtime.json contains a "taken_at" property which shows that the data is updated every five minutes.

fareesh2• 5 years ago

Is it possible to FOIA how much it cost the US government to build this page?

Jolter• 5 years ago

Only one way to find out.

reaperducer4• 5 years ago

Yes. But it's probably faster and easier to just look online. The data is very likely there.

EricE9• 5 years ago

Sure - but as others pointed out there is a pretty good blog post that goes over it: https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-go...

And you can see the code and development lifecycle on github: https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov

Pretty lightweight for what it is.

throwaway89374• 5 years ago

This does not seem to work correctly. I visited from separate browsers and the number remains the same.

ixnus2• 5 years ago

It updates every 5 minutes.

firechickenbird• 5 years ago

Apple covers 45.3% of the visits, that's insane

mobilio• 5 years ago

And Safari - >36%

WesternWind• 5 years ago

That's probably IOS safari

yftsui• 5 years ago

Indeed, very surprising to see it below 50% given iPhone accumulated market share over the years.

etchalon• 5 years ago

Apple's marketshare in mobile is ~ 62% based on this, and ~ 25% on desktop.

ralferoo• 5 years ago

Wonder if tomorrow, the analytics site will show up as the top most visited government website!

m4tthumphrey• 5 years ago

Visitor Locations Now: London 2%

Clearly a HN hug!

Aeolun2• 5 years ago

Yes, the only place with less visitors than the ‘Department for Housing and Urban Development’ is the ‘National Science Foundation’.

Sign of the times?

kortilla• 5 years ago

But why would a regular person visit those sites? I hold a PhD and I think I visited the nsf website <50 times during my entire academic career.

tagoregrtst• 5 years ago

Im a researcher in a government lab and I don't think Ive ever been on it.

NIST? Definitely

LLNL MPI tutorials? Obviously.

But NSF… never?

plasma_beam• 5 years ago

This site went live in 2015 and hasn't changed too much since then. Participating agencies have their google analytics data collected by GSA, which is hosting this webpage.

It's very useful, and I've referred to this site many times over the years (probably bc a couple sites I've worked on are in the top 50!).

For those people wanting other awesome and informative govt sites, take a look at https://www.usaspending.gov/, which has all government contracts data easily searchable (and bookmarkable).

https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/03/19/how-we-built-analytics-usa-go...

eminence32• 5 years ago

I bet the US government has lots of useful websites that I've never even heard of. But every now and again I randomly stumble across one (like the one from your comment), and it makes me wonder if there is a "discovery problem" here. What other useful govt sites are out there, but are unknown to me.

kibwen• 5 years ago

Here's one I stumbled upon recently: the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has an interactive sea level rise map where you can see whether a given location in the US will suffer flooding/inundation from sea level rise based on the value the user selects: https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#

shadowgovt4• 5 years ago

The discovery problem is not only known, it's writ large. There is a vast bureaucracy of benefits available to Americans that most Americans don't know about because the creation of the programs rarely includes advertising in the budget.

If you've ever seen the "question mark vest guy" (Matthew Lesko, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko), who offers book on federal programs available and how to take advantage of them... He's been criticized as a charlatan or misleading people, or encouraging people to "freeload," but here's the thing... He's really quite sincere. He believes the US government bureaucracy has failed in its duty of public information and education and is full of under-utilized programs that, as a result, become tools for the informed to siphon resources from those the programs were intended to help. He thinks that's unfair. The "Free Money Now" book covers and TV advertisements are employed because his target audience is assumed to not be savvy enough to do the research themselves, so he's trying to reach them with noise and spectacle where quiet black-and-white announcements buried in the back pages of local newspapers have already failed (and the fact that he started his work in the era where the easiest way to reach his target audience was still books because the sorts of people who didn't know about benefits programs they were eligible for were strongly correlated with lack of Internet access, not surprisingly).

EricE9• 5 years ago

I was looking at all the domains in .gov for a project at work and there are indeed some fascinating ones out there. Lots of abandoned stuff too.

If you want a fascinating rabbit hole: https://18f.gsa.gov/2014/12/18/a-complete-list-of-gov-domain...

reaperducer4• 5 years ago

Participating agencies have their google analytics data collected by GSA, which is hosting this webpage.

Mostly off-topic, but the GSA is one of those federal agencies that is really under-appreciated.

When I was a reporter in the days before the commercial internet (yes, my tools were pencil, typewriter, and teletype), the GSA would publish lists of what government reports were coming out each month, helping you find all kinds of incredibly useful data. If you needed help, you just picked up a phone and they would point you in the right direction. I always looked forward to getting their big blue envelopes in the mail at work because I knew I could find something meaningful in there that I could localize for my audience. And the information was always presented in a manner that was both professional, and easy to understand.

The GSA is one of those agencies that is best left alone to do its work in obscurity. Every once in a long while, a politician will stick his nose in there, but usually only to get a name put on a building.

See also: The Congressional Budget Office.

jwithington• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing that link to USA Spending! Seems like a lot of interesting information is buried there…and they have an API!

EricE9• 5 years ago

USA Spending is a summary data set - if you really want to drill down into the details you need SAM/FPDS: https://sam.gov/reports/awards/standard

erwincoumans• 5 years ago

From the info, it looks like a lot of the recent traffic is due to the free COVID test.

patcon• 5 years ago

Ack. I've used PubMed for over a decade (since it was taught as the de facto way to search the science literature in my Canadian university) and it never occurred to me that it was a US federal government website :facepalm:

EricE9• 5 years ago

Any home page with FOIA in the footer is probably a US Government website :) Same if they also have usa.gov as a link.

kube-system• 5 years ago

... or if the TLD is 'gov'.

https://home.dotgov.gov

drugstorecowboy• 5 years ago

In state government, many desktops are set up with the agency's website as the browser homepage with no way to change it. I would think federal government is the same, that alone might skew some of these statistics.

lkbm• 5 years ago

Looks like it converts URLs to lower-case in the "Top Pages" list. One of the most visited sites right now is listed as https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webblaunch/whereiswebb.html but that's a 404. Actual URL has a capital L: https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html

Number of people on government websites now

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