Are there any studies or reports on the acceptance of plug-ins for Rich Internet Applications (RIA)? Are there any statistics available? Or any Gartner or Forrester reports?

These are some questions we hear quite often. I tried to find out if there is an independent report on this. But most reports I found so far are based on vendor statistics.

Adobe Flash

Adobe claims over 750 million connected PCs and mobile devices worldwide have the Flash player installed. There’s a Adobe stats page that shows the current percentage of penetration for each version. Mike of RIApedia.com points to this same web page and concludes that 90% can view Flex 2 applications. The latest Flex framework requires Flash Player 9.0.

Java Runtime Environment

The Sun Microsystems website reports that over 91% of internet-connected PCs have Java enabled.

Java Desktop

Over 91% of Internet-connected PCs have Java enabled (Source: Omniture, April 2007).
This includes over 63% of Sun JRE in the US, and over 65% of Sun JRE in Italy/Spain/UK (Nielsen//NetRatings, January 2007)

92% (and growing) of JRE installs (Java.com, J.S.C.) are now Java SE 6 (April 2007, Sun)

Estimated Worldwide Java SE penetration per Operating System and VM vendor (Source: Sun estimate, April 2007)

• Sun JRE (Windows): 65%
• Microsoft VM (Windows): 21%
• Apple VM (Mac OS): 3.5%
• Other (including Java SE on Linux and other OS: 1.5%

PC OEMS representing over 60% of all shipped PCs in Q4 2006 have signed Java SE redistribution agreements with Sun. (Sun, based on IDC #206152, March 2007).

9 of the top 10 PC OEM vendors have a JRE redistribution agreement with Sun. (Sun, based on IDC #206152, March 2007).

Silverlight

I would expect Microsoft’s Silverlight to be a lot lower (being newer to the market). Techcrunch reported in January 2008 that NBC will be streaming the Beijing Olympics using Silverlight.

So far, all I have found are statistics on the number of downloads. I would be interested in how often the plug-ins are accessed per week and for what kind of applications (gaming vs. work-related applications).

JavaScript

For completion’s sake, let’s have a look at the stats for JavaScript, which is part and parcel of all standard web browsers and does not require a separate download. JavaScript needs to be enabled for AJAX applications.

Javascript 1.2+: 3048722 (93%)
Javascript <1.2: 5587 (0%)
Javascript false: 214683 (6%)

The Counter lists that 93% of all web browsers have JavaScript enabled.

Nevertheless, statistics can often be misleading.

Before deciding on a technology, consider the target audience. How often will a person use the application? Regular users will probably be more inclined to download a plugin if the corresponding web application improves their work experience or productivity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 11:15 am by admin and is filed under General, Rich Internet Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.