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We’ve got backups of data that go back to January 2011, so we can provide a historical report for any of the top sites back to this time. You can use this information to find leads that you might have missed out on or fill gaps in your technology research.

You can filter your result set by almost any combination of information you can think of. For example, do you want leads for customers using a particular hosting provider? Or websites that are only located in United States? Or maybe you only want to target websites which end in .com.

Checkout the new TrendsPro and sign up for a free account.

Introduction

jQuery is the most popular javascript library in use on the web today. Its growth has increased on a monthly basis since 2008 based on our  tracking. Today, jQuery is in use on more than 50% of the top 10,000 sites on the Internet and on 30% of the top million¹.

jQuery History

John Resig launched jQuery on approximately the 16th January 2006 – John wrote on his blog – “Making it to both del.icio.us popular and the front page of digg just shows how badly Javascript programmers want a better library for writing code with.”²

Just over a week later Michael Geary had written the first third-party jQuery plugin, a JSON manipulation function which would later be added to the main jQuery library.

Version 1.0 of jQuery was released on August 26th 2006 and since then there have been 33 increment releases, with the current version at 1.6.4, released on September 12th, 2011.

Trends

BuiltWith.com has been compiling weekly trends of website technology usage since 2008. The following chart shows jQuery usage in the top 10k sites on the Internet -

jQuery Usage in the Top 10k Sites since December 2008

jQuery Version Usage

In the top million sites as provided by Quantcast, 311,654 sites report using jQuery, 60% of those use 5 different versions of the jQuery library.

Top 5 Versions of jQuery in use in the Top Million Sites

Version 1.4.2 is the most popular version of jQuery in use, shortly followed by version 1.3.2. The release cycle of jQuery is typically quite short, ranging from a few days (bad build fixes) to a few months. Version 1.3.2 was the stable version of jQuery until 1.4 was released  11 months later. Version 1.4.2 was also the latest released version for 8 months. The amount of time these were the latest versions of jQuery may be a contributing factor in their increased usage.

291 sites out of the top million reported using version 1.6.4 which was available 7 days after the report was generated.

jQuery Version Changes over 2011 (large version)

The area chart above shows the changes in version usage since January 2011 to October 2011 in the top million sites. It shows how version 1.3.2 and 1.4.2 are being replaced by more fragmented versions of jQuery versions 1.4.3 and above.

Popular jQuery Plugins

jQuery plugins provide additional functionality off the back of the jQuery library. Plugins build on jQuery functionality to provide many different functionality aspects, such as widgets, validation, fixes for older browsers and many more functions.

Popularity of the Top 10 jQuery Plugins in the top million sites³

jQuery UI is the most popular plugin for jQuery. Developed by the jQuery team, it extends jQuery by providing tabs, sliders, calendars many other widgets and a themeing framework.

Mike Alsup’s Cycle plugin, the slideshow plugin, is the second most popular jQuery plugin followed by the Form plugin developed by the same author.

Conclusion

BuiltWith found over twenty thousand different jQuery related files used in the top million sites showing jQuery has a very active third party developer following.

jQuery is helping to shape the next generation of websites. As web sites move into HTML5, CSS3 development and uptake of modern web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox and IE9 continues, jQuery is an indispensable tool and is the de facto tool for website development.

Methodology

The research for this report was carried out by looking for jQuery related javascript files embedded into the homepage of the top million sites. jQuery related files were any which contained the word jquery. From those, if a version number could not be detected in the filename (such as jquery.js) the file was then downloaded to find the version number in the javascript file itself. The historical JQuery usage chart is based on version numbers in JQuery file names only.

The coverage does not include sites which embed jQuery in files which are not named jQuery and also only reported entries where the version number could be identified.

The plugin detection was found in a similar way, this report does not cover any jQuery extensions that do not use the word jQuery in the filename.

References

1. jQuery Usage Statistics
http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/jQuery

2. John Resig – Announcing the jQuery Blog
http://blog.jquery.com/2006/01/24/jquery-blog/

3. Quantcast Top Sites
http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1

4. JavaScript Usage Statistics
http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript

There are other traffic reporting companies that make their top million sites available, such as Alexa and Google go as far as making the top 1000 available based on their AdPlanner data.

Some people prefer Alexa’s top sites, others prefer Quantcast. We merged the Quantcast Top Million and the Alexa Top Million hoping to find most of the sites the same, the results were unexpected as the overlap was only around 400,000 sites. So from today, website lists will be offered in two varieties “Top Sites” and “Rest of Web”. Top Sites is an amalgamation of Alexa/Quantcast and some other sources of websites that make up the Internet’s top sites. This makes up a list of about 1.8 million unique websites we now track every week (we also track another 128 million less often).

The trends charts on BuiltWith Trends will still use the original Quantcast data as the million URLs in this list is a large enough dataset to provide an accurate trend of web technology usage on the Internet today.

This information lets you find out the general target market of a technology, so for example you can find out what the biggest category for users of Twitter API is at the moment (it’s entertainment). Or, who is the biggest segment of Optimizely Analytics (it’s shopping and business) and who is the biggest customer base of Amazon CloudFront CDN technology (it’s shops again).

BuiltWith Trends Pro users will soon have this category information added to their reports (for free) and also be able to purchase reports based on Technology+Category. At the moment these reports can be requested by sending us an email at support@builtwith.com.

You can download this report as a PDF or as standalone HTML.

Introduction

The growth of the mobile web is staggering, with approximately 726 million people having access to a 3G mobile subscription1. With a forecasted increase in growth it seems logical that website owners would begin to offer a mobile alternative of their websites due to the different in experience between using the web with a desktop computer and a mobile device.

Mobile and Web History

At the start of the 21^st century screen resolutions were increasing as graphics cards became more sophisticated and cheaper, LCD monitors provided higher resolution and lower prices for consumers. In January 2000, 56% of visitors to w3schools.com were using 800×600 as their default browser resolution, by January 2011 hardly any of them were². This trend meant that web designers started using 1024×768 as the de facto minimum website resolution over 5 years ago³.

The recent growth of mobile has seen the production of devices such as the Apple iPhone, Google’s Android Stack, Microsoft Windows Phone and BlackBerry all supporting resolutions below the 1024×768 desktop standard, as well as new methods of interaction with a website, such as dragging and clicking with your finger, over the desktop standard of using a mouse.

The mobile internet is a paradigm shift from how the web has been built over the past few years and website designers, developers and owners are beginning to see the benefits it can bring.

Trends

BuiltWith.com has been compiling weekly trends of website technology usage since 2008. The user agent for these requests appears to the website as a normal desktop browser and not as a mobile device. The trends below show how even without requesting content as a mobile device trends in mobile technology have been increasing.

Meta Viewport

The viewport meta tag was originally designed by Apple to resize the layout viewport of a website, a requirement for the mobile device to understand how the website designer has defined how the content should be displayed to the end user. Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and iPhone all support the viewport meta tag⁴.

The graph below shows the growth of the viewport meta tag usage within the top 10,000 sites between November 2008 and July 2011 whilst serving content supplied with a desktop usage agent –

Unearthing the Mobile Web

BuiltWith.com visited the websites of the top million sites using a mobile device user agent signature to determine which websites are displaying mobile specific content to these users by comparing the technologies found against the same website visits with a computer desktop user agent.

Top 100 Sites

Of the top 100 sites most visited on the internet⁵, 71 of them have content specifically designed for mobile devices. The remaining 29 either do not support mobile devices or, depending on the device, prompt the user about a device specific application.

Top Million Sites

Approximately 39,000 sites (3.9%) within the top million most visited sites on the Internet report the content as non-scaleable, a strong indicator that the content is designed specifically for a mobile device. 6% of the sites report a viewport meta tag, which suggests the sites are at a minimum, aware of mobile users.

Mobile Technology Usage

On the latest mobile devices desktop technologies can be reused due to mobile browsers having fully capabale JavaScript and CSS rendering engines, however, some JavaScript libraries and frameworks have been developed that provide explict functionality for mobile devices.

jQTouch is currently the most used Mobile JavaScript library in the top million sites, shortly followed by JQuery Mobile, both of which are extensions of JQuery, the most popular JavaScript library used on the web.

Conclusion

The current evolution of mobile devices provide us with low/medium resolution devices with simple easy to use finger based gestures. The human body is the weakest link in the evolution of mobile, the hardware resolution may improve but a website designed for 1024×768 pixels will still look small to our eyes on devices designed to fit in the palm of our hands.

With mobile device usage increasing the the prevalence of data technologies such as 3G it is predicted more websites will support mobile devices in the years to come as websites owners see a shift in their visitor traffic to mobile.

References

1. Google Think Mobile 2011 Kleiner Perkins -http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//events/thinkmobile2011/pdfs/10-mobile-trends.pdf
2. W3schools Browser Display Statistics
   http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_resolution_higher.asp
3. Jakob Nielsen Screen Resolution and Page Layout
   http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html
4. Quirksmode – a tale of two viewports part two
   http://www.quirksmode.org/mobile/viewports2.html
5. Quantcast Top Sites
   http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1

Trends Pro Alerts provides a clear and reliable way for you to keep up to date with who has added and removed a web technology from their site.

How it works

We check every website in the Quantcast Top Million for changes in technology usage. If we detect they have added or removed a technology that is being tracked, we will added it to your alert report which you can easily export. We also do an additional double check to make sure the site has actually added or removed the technology.

Every week we send a reminder when the process has finished running with an overview of which of the technologies you are tracking have added and removed sites/customers.

Screenshots -

Here’s an example of the report that shows what sites have been added to a technology -

and here’s the example weekly email you get telling you what has changed -

How to get started

Head on over to BuiltWith Trends Pro and setup an account, alerts is available in the top tabs.

See the new charts at BuiltWith Trends now.

So we downloaded the HTML for all of them! That was a fun learning curve for us, we used Amazon EC2 to help us out, without it we’d be waiting months for the results!

We then run some statistics on that and came up with this nice infographic -

click to enlarge

We’ve also done some redesigning and will be continuing to stream-line all of the BuiltWith sites. The website optimizer has had a fresh lick of paint and so has Trends Pro. We’ve removed all of the parts that no one used and focused on what you actually want.

We’ve also achieved some good speed improvements on these sites. If you’d like to know what these sites have been (re)built with we used some awesome new technologies that really speeded up development, most important to this process was Modernizr, 960.gs, JQuery and .NET 4.

We’ll keep you updated on whats going on and if you have any new features you’d like to see let us know!

We’ve picked some of the more interesting bits and have rounded them up below.

Remember you can always see the latest web trends for free at http://trends.builtwith.com.

Twitter / TweetMeme Show Down

In August, Twitter announced the Tweet Button, the defacto button up until that time had been TweetMeme’s very popular button.

It took two weeks for Twitter to get to the same market share that TweetMeme took a year to reach which is a telling signal for anyone competing with Twitter as a third party.

Tweet Button vs. TweetMeme Top 10k

The Tweet Button rise in usage was very quick and looks to have started to cut into TweetMeme’s share of the “Tweet This!” market with the TweetMeme button now in decline.

Google Buzz more a wimper

Google Buzz‘s “Share This” feature, that lets users share information about the website they are on via Buzz, has failed to gain any traction, with only about 300 of the top 1,000,000 sites having a Buzz button or follow link on their homepage. It’s usage is actually increasing but at a very slow rate, with only a handful of sites implementing the technology each month. This evidence along with Leo Laporte’s recent problems with Google Buzz lets us to believe this could
be another recent Google feature not gaining traction. Facebook and Twitter’s social implementation are doing very well in comparison.

Google Buzz Usage Statistics

Google are already top of nearly every other category on BuiltWith Trends (analytics, advertising, content delivery networks), they have a little way to go before reaching the top of social, maybe Google Me will be their breakthrough!

Getting old browsers to behave

Modern web browsers are supporting more and more cool features, making it easier for developers to build exciting websites, but what about all those older browsers that don’t support this new functionality, how are they supposed
to work? Traditionally a developer would spend days, weeks, months writing hacks to get their website working in multiple browsers. Conditional Comments are now in use on a third of the top ten thousand sites and a fifth of the top million, and new frameworks like modernizr are being developed to make cross-browser compatibility easier and easier, it’s easy to see why these technologies are taking off.

Chartbeat an analytics player

Since the start of August, Chartbeat, an analytics provider, has really started taking off. It fills the gap that Google Analytics (the biggest analytics player on the internet) left in its product by not providing a “real-time” aspect to analytics reporting. Will the growth continue into the future and will Google improve its analytics product to complete with Chartbeat?

Goodbye 8 bit

8 bit is sooooooo 1975! When we started tracking trends over two years ago ISO/IEC 8859 encoding, an 8 bit set of encoding series, was in use by nearly half of websites on the internet, it’s now in use on less than a third.
The encoding group looking after ISO/IEC 8859 ceased operating in 2004 in favour of concentrating on universal character sets such as UTF-8 and UTF-16. UTF-8 has now skyrocketed and is well on the way to being the defacto standard for the internet.

ScreenGrabber in Action

Most of the examples that do exist are Internet Explorer based solutions. We’d rather not use Internet Explorer as the automated system might come across a website that exploits vulnerabilities in IE, so we wanted to use Firefox/Mozilla or a Chrome based solution. There are plenty of screenshot widgets for Firefox which is a great place to start.

So to give something back to the community we’re offering up some code we use in-house for a new project we are working on and we believe it may be the only XUL based automated screen grabber available at the moment.

Issues we had to Overcome to create an Automated Screen Grabber

1. Browser vulnerabilities – we didn’t want to use an Internet Explorer based solution so we opted for a Mozilla based solution using XULRunner.

2. Prompts – alert boxes, confirm boxes all sorts of modal dialogs can stop the automated process in its tracks and require a user to push a button. Using XULRunner and a modified version of Selenium’s promptService.js we managed to overcome this problem.

3. Flash – Typically flash will appear as a white box when the screenshot render happens if it’s “wmode” is not set to “transparent” so we actively change this when the page loads.

Flash does not render unless there’s an active window running, which is annoying especially it you run this on a remote desktop session (if you close the RDP window flash will not render on the screenshot grabber). To get around this is not too difficult and is explained later.

4. Events not Firing – Waiting for the page load to complete is not always accurate, we’ve got around this by waiting a maximum amount of time for a page to load and then just skipping to the next entry if no page load event fires.

Overcoming Flash not Rendering

Flash requires a “screen” to render, if there’s no active session, such as disconnected remote desktop session, Flash will appear as white boxes in your screenshots. To get around this install VNC Server and VNC Viewer, connect to a remote desktop session on your server and then open VNC Viewer to the local machine and run the application in the VNC Viewer window. The VNC Viewer application will keep alive when you disconnect the RDP session and continue to render Flash.

How to Install and Licence Details

The code for this application is far from perfect, it is basically built from a trial and error process so don’t expect the source code to be amazingly formatted and documented. You will need to do the following to get the application to work -

1. Install Firefox (not sure if you actually need to do this but we do it anyway to Install Flash for Firefox)

2. Install Flash for Firefox (or not if you don’t want Flash to render)

3. Install XULRunner

4. Register XULRunner with – xulrunner -register-global

5. Create a directory at c:\imgout \

6. Create a list of domains you want to screengrab, seperate them each with a new line and save to c:\domains.txt, for example-

7. Run xulrunner application.ini -file c:\domains.txt

8. Watch as c:\imgout\ starts filling up with PNG’s.

Note this guide is for Windows, however the code should be cross-platform with a bit of modification to file paths in the mybrowser.js file in the package.

Download ScreenGrabber-1.0.zip 10KB

This is released under Apache 2.0 License.