>That number is higher than I expected given that the general web was apparently closer to 1.3% in 2010.
mmm.. that study looks too old to be relevant, two things on that:

1) Numbers from 2010 do not include mobile browsers with widespread use nowadays. 
For example: "Opera Mini". We have >1% of requests only from this browser (and I bet than in 2015 Yahoo is  seeing quite a few of those). Note that this 1% is a more precise one, derived directly from hadoop logs, requires no guesswork. 

So it is not surprising that the number of disabled javascript pageviews has gone up if you take mobile into account. Opera Mini does not support javascript in the ways you would expect: https://dev.opera.com/articles/opera-mini-and-javascript/


2) Our data differs from global stats in significant ways. 
For example, our IE6 and IE7 traffic is way higher than global stats reported by http://gs.statcounter.com/ on the month of January. And note these browser percentages are more precise estimates on our end (unlike the javascript estimate that requires some cross checking and guesswork). Also, note the total percentage we report over pageviews includes bots so excluding those our IE6 and IE7 traffic is even higher than the one I am noting below.

Browser, Percentage of total pageviews by our account, global percentage by statscounter
IE6: 1.01%, 0.09%
IE7: 0.7% , 0.14%

I do not expect that our numbers are going to match 100% to statscounter but I think is an OK guide to cross-check oneself, especially cause they deploy their beacons worldwide:http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology


>Finally, is there a way to gauge the difference in JS support between anonymous & authenticated users from this data?
No, I do not think we can do that with this dataset.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 7:19 PM, Gabriel Wicke <gwicke@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thank you, Nuria!

That number is higher than I expected given that the general web was apparently closer to 1.3% in 2010. Do you think there are ways to fine-tune this, perhaps by excluding clients that also didn't download images?

Finally, is there a way to gauge the difference in JS support between anonymous & authenticated users from this data?

Gabriel

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 6:38 PM, Nuria Ruiz <nuria@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Gabriel:

I have run through the data and have a rough estimate of how many of our pageviews are requested from browsers w/o strong javascript support. It is a preliminary rough estimate but I think is pretty useful.

TL;DR
According to our new pageview definition (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Page_view) about 10% of pageviews come from clients w/o much javascript support. But - BIG CAVEAT- this includes bots requests. If you remove the easy-too-spot-big-bots the percentage is <3%. 

Details here (still some homework to do regarding IE6 and IE7) 


Thanks, 

Nuria