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Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

Interesting.

A good explanation IMHO is that mibbit is an app with a very techie audience and these people tend to use non-IE browsers and non-Windows OSes.

I like your explanation of valuing time and I know a lot of techies that use OSX as "unix without the hassle". A lot of them are web devs, which again fits with the mibbit having techie audience again.

Did you check for correlation between Safari and Mac? That is, is the fact that Safari scores tops because people use Macs? What is the revenue of a Safari/Windows and a Safari/OSX user?

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Amongst Safari users, the split is 8% windows, 92% not windows, so the vast majority of Safari users are indeed using Macs, I haven't drilled down in more detail yet though.

The thing that really surprised me was the low revenue from Opera users. Whether that's because of the type of people who use Opera, or some technology built into the browser etc, I don't know fully yet.

Opera has some content blocker built in. Rightclick on a website and select "Block Content". It supports wildcards. I guess most people who use content blocking have Adsense blocked. You can disable it per-site too (rightclick -> site preferences).

I too suspect a high number of Opera users to be very technical experienced.

Also I think Opera users are more prone to be quite cautious about being tracked online. I know several guys who stopped using Firefox and went to Opera since Firefox so prominently bundles Google with it.

Last but not least, choosing to use Opera is an active decision. IE/Safari/Firefox (Ubuntu etc.) are default browsers. Opera is not. So there is a high chance that the user uses it for a specific reason. Not something "John Doe" would do for "his internet".

Perhaps not as techie as you may think. It's superior in ease of use to the Java and native IRC clients that preceded it. I was part of a site that used it to provide new users easy access to the IRC room; in that case, it would be less technical visitors using the mibbit (iframe) interface. Many of these sites were previously using Java applets, but the only one I generally see has poor usability and can be quite slow. Mibbit is a very strong alternative for non-technical users in this case. I haven't even addressed the case of people using it to get into IRC in general, which is also probably going on to some level.

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