Highlights of web technology surveys, January 2011: Top 10 rising web technologies in 2010

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 2 January 2011 in News, CentOS, Google Analytics, JQuery, Nginx, PHP, Ubuntu, UTF-8, Windows, WordPress, XHTML

For each technology, we compare the number of sites using it on Jan 1, 2010 with the corresponding number on Jan 1, 2011. We use the difference of these numbers, rather than a percentage, because that would favor technologies with a tiny user base at the beginning of the year. As in all our surveys, we restrict the numbers to the top 1 million sites, see technology surveys for more details.

These are the technologies that gained most top 1 million sites in 2010:

1. UTF-8
   
   The character encoding of choice for almost 60% of all sites has increased by 92,000 sites. Looking at the usage broken down by rank, we see that the top sites use this encoding even more. This is likely to be an indication that this trend will continue.
    
2. XHTML
   
   XHTML gained 79,000 sites. One reason for that could be the increase in the usage of content management systems. In the breakdown report, we see that most CMS, particularly the most popular ones, tend to use XHTML rather than HTML. This trend could be reversed in 2011 by the movement towards HTML5.
    
3. WordPress
   
   WordPress increased the user base by 51,000 sites and continues to dominate the CMS surveys with over 50% market share.
    
4. Windows
   
   It is a bit of a surprise that Windows gained 41,000 of the top 1 million sites. One reason is the popularity of Windows in a fast growing market, that is China.
    
5. CentOS
   
   CentOS lost a bit in the last few months, but compared to the beginning of 2010 it is used by 35,000 more sites now. It continues to be the most popular Linux distribution on web servers.
    
6. Google Analytics
   
   It is not easy for a tool with 80% market share to keep growing. The Google web analytics tool added 34,000 new top 1 million sites last year.
    
7. PHP
   
   29,000 more sites use PHP now. Again, the increasing use of content management systems contributes to this trend, as the majority of these are written in PHP.
    
8. Nginx
   
   Nginx is the shooting star in the web server market, gaining 21,000 sites, which is an impressive increase of over 50% of its user base.
    
9. Ubuntu
   
   Ubuntu has been a popular desktop Linux distribution for a long time. It is now also gaining as web server system, 13,000 additional sites in 2010.
    
10. .com
    
    The .com top level domain can hardly be said to be an "emerging technology". Nevertheless, a move of 13,000 new .com sites into the top 1 million gives it a place in our top 10 list.

Please note, that this list obviously does not contain technologies that we started monitoring only during 2010. The best example of a missing technology is JQuery, which currently gains around 10,000 new sites a months. At that rate, it is quite certain to make it in the 2011 list.

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