On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/9/27 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
The existing system correctly plays back for an overwhelming majority of users (I posted some stats on this two years ago or so)
Could you give a link, just for reference purposes?
Ugh archive searching.
Here is one: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-March/028210.html
"The last weeks data of 143,530 unique IPs shows that 79% of the IPs hitting the Java audio player on toolserver have a Java Virtual Machine. However, of those only 78% (61% of the total) have a JRE new enough to use Jorbis. I believe Cortando has a resampler in it to permit it work on the old MSFT JVMs, so it should do better. The number is skewed a bit by the fact that people without java are unlikely to vist again soon since it didn't work, and are somewhat better than my initial numbers, but I've also improved compatibility dramatically since then."
(In the months that post the player was changed to something with dramatically more JVM compatibility.)
We should basically expect the current success rate to be the total number of people with a working Java install, which should include all recent Macs, plus perhaps a percent with support from other supported modes (Firefox 3.1alpha, Opera alpha, VLC, QT+XiphQT, totem plugin). If it's not that high then there is something that we've done wrong.
Once Firefox 3.1 is released we should expect a non-trivial boost: Firefox users upgraded to 2.0 very quickly, and firefox is a larger share of Wikimedia's traffic than most of the published broswer penetration numbers.
[snip]
Things should improve significantly with Firefox 3.1, so we may want to hold off any new tests until it has gained some adoption.
It's always worthwhile to test, you can just discard the results if they are not yet useful. If nothing else some recent information might help eliminate some Wikimedia induced lowness... It's only fair to do measurements which reflect a little bit of "trying to make it successful".