July 9-10, 2013
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Today, data analytics company Chartbeat released the latest creation from its company-wide hackathons: the Percent of the Internet tool. The tool shows you how many people, according to Chartbeat’s data, are using a certain browser or computer type at that moment.

It built the page in two hours and shows how many people at a given time are using Google’s Chrome browser, FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and it also looks at whether people are using a Mac, PC, or Linux device. It is based on an application programming interface Chartbeat created by pulling all of its client data and making the client anonymous.

“We’ve already received some awesome feedback, so we may decide to expand on it and spend more than two hours on it in the future,” said Chartbeat brand manager Lauryn Bennett in an e-mail to VentureBeat.

When you click on a the browser icon, a new page will open with the percentage of “active browser sessions” using that browser (see the image to the right). The same goes for types of computers. At the time of writing this post, over 5 million people, 22 percent of Chartbeat’s customers, are using Firefox.

Chartbeat holds week-long hack events for its employees every six weeks. It’s kind of like Google 20 percent rule, where 20 percent of the employee’s time is spent on building personal projects. During this past hack week, three of Chartbeat’s employees — Daniel McGrath, Tom Germeau, and Tadas Vilkeliskis — put together the Percent of the Internet page. They used JavaScript and HTML 5 to build it.

“There are loads of estimates on browser usage that so many companies put out there, but we know it’s constantly changing, so we wanted a real-time data point on what the breakdown is,” said Bennett. “Internally, it’s helpful for us to keep an eye on … how we build our products, and since we work with so many sites, we thought it would be a great (really just a quick, fun) real-time breakdown for the Internet at large.”

Disclosure: VentureBeat uses Chartbeat’s products.