Steve Souders, the web page speed guru, after he put to use the latest of the useful tools created by him, has declared that he has found the top 17,000 or so web sites have decreased or done away with using Adobe’s Flash Player in around the last six months. Souders has specifically started showing data that his HTTP Archive project, which keeps track of a large number of statistics about a collection of the top 17,000 websites on the internet, has collected. He announced the details about the existence of HTTP Archive at the end of March; however he had started logging the data last year itself.
This site lets its users compare the statistics about the creation of websites from two instances of time. One interesting figure that has come out of this is that after Apple very openly attempted to deter the world of browsers from their reliance on Flash, the usage of Flash has undergone a 2% drop from the 49% it held on the 15th of November last year to 47% on the 29th of March. It doesn’t look like a very big fraction; however, it is quite noticeable as it only took four and a half months for the drop to occur. Interestingly, the data patterns of the HTTP Archive data also suggest that these figures can also be misleading as some high fluctuations have been observed over time, such as the 50% rise of Flash usage for the Archive data for December 16th.
This archive is not only for casual amusement of the users, it can also prove to be a handy tool for engineers who are looking for real data concerning the web. Souders has also expressed hopes that it will be useful for improving the performance of web pages, which will be a big achievement.
