Web Technology Penetration Report - CSS continues its rise and frames still survive in 16% of websites!
I came across an interesting report of web technology penetration rates, dated 1 April 2006, by SecuritySpace. It's based on a sample of 1,358,991 web sites in 2006, so it's a pretty significant study. The following table shows the penetration rates of a variety of client side web technologies, for the years 2002, 2005 and 2006:
| Technology | 2002 % | 2005 % | 2006 % | 2006 Sites |
| JavaScript | 45.46% | 59.37% | 58.08% | 789,309 |
| Frames | 26.71% | 18.17% | 15.91% | 216,280 |
| StyleSheets | 21.16% | 39.93% | 49.51% | 672,803 |
| Java | 4.24% | 1.67% | 1.64% | 22,314 |
| IFrames | 3.99% | 12.12% | 9.88% | 134,319 |
| GIF Images | 62.98% | 58.54% | 63.26% | 859,760 |
| JPG Images | 47.08% | 47.25% | 54.11% | 735,287 |
| PNG Images | 2.63% | 6.42% | 7.78% | 105,749 |
| Flash/Shockwave | 6.08% | 8.77% | 12.75% | 173,253 |
2002 was as far back as I could go with these stats, but the trends they show are very interesting. Among other things it shows that JavaScript has increased in popularity. Perhaps this is not surprising, when you consider that the 'J' in AJAX stands for JavaScript! The biggest gain though has been for stylesheets, which now has a nearly 50% penetration across the Web - up from just 21% in 2002.
I was a little surprised that Flash is only 12-13% penetration - although it has increased from 8-9% a year ago. On the other hand, Java seems to be dying a slow death, down to just 1.64% penetration.
Of the image formats, GIF is still going strong, but expect to see the PNG figure rise over the next few years. I use PNG for most of my web images these days, because I find the quality to be better.
Interesting also to see that nearly 16% of all websites still use frames! I guess Web 2.0 hasn't quite made it onto those sites yet :-)