How many users have installed Flash, Java, Unity, or other plugins?

Question

Is there a good data source for the percentage of loading popular plugins?

Answer 1

For flash: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/ and also: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/PC.html

Please note that this is a PC and therefore omits devices such as phones.

For Unity take a look at this: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/39362-Web-player-adoption

There are 1 or 2 billion Internet users and just over 1 billion Internet-enabled computers. There are only a few tens of millions of plugin users (maybe ~ 20 million). It is difficult to interpret this data without any context for what you are trying to understand.

The Unity plugin allows you to create things that the Flash plugin cannot easily create, if at all possible.

Which plugin you want to use depends largely on what type of application you want to create.

Minecraft runs on Java in a browser. It would be difficult to create the same application in Flash (and make sure that it works quite efficiently).

Answer 2

No, there is no “good” source for this data. You can probably find some not-so-good sources for browser statistics, including plugins, but such statistics suffer from several problems.

One of the main problems is the choice of bias. Anyone who collects and distributes statistics can only collect data from browsers visiting their site. An example is browser share; more technical sites report a higher market share in Firefox compared to more general sites. This is due to the fact that more technical people use Firefox more than others, and they most often visit a technical site.

An example for Unity is that Linux users are much less likely to visit a site that uses the Unity plugin because there is not one for Linux, so you don’t count the true percentage of people who have the Unity plugin installed.

Kdoto links are suitable for getting a basic idea of ​​usage, but any statistics are likely to overestimate the percentage of users with X and - if you decide “I can live with the exception of 5% of users who don't have X”, you really exclude a higher percentage than this is.

Answer 3

I know this is a pretty old record, but we thought about adding something, as I spent some time studying the topic.

Some statistics can be checked directly on a Unity or Flash site , so comparing them is not difficult, but if you want to find out how many facebook or twitter users have a plugin, it becomes more complicated.

If you are going to decide whether to create your own flash game or just a web player that you might want to read: Unity games and Facebook , which is the third part of Developing games with Unity3d and Facebook .