Flash and other multimedia statistics
Macromedia Flash surges to become second most installed plug-in. The installed base of Macromedia's Flash application rose nearly 23 percentage points last year and now ranks as the No. 2 plug-in* among Netscape users, StatMarket.com is reporting. Flash had an installed base of nearly 68% as of Jan. 10, 2000, ranking it just ahead of AVI, which had a 67% installed base. LiveAudio had the largest installed base at 74%.

Flash, which displays Web-based graphics and animation, began 1999 with a 45% installed base, and has made large strides since then. Also of interesting note are the LiveAudio stats. Although LiveAudio and the back-end server it uses have been discontinued for some time, the plug-in still ranks No. 1, probably because it was shipped with the Navigator 4.x browsers. AVI, which allows for Web surfers to watch video over the Internet, started the year with a 66% installed base and rose as high as 76.52% on Aug. 2, before falling to its current level.

Overall, multimedia applications dominated StatMarket's list of top Netscape plug-ins. Only Adobe Acrobat, which had a 36.04% base on Jan. 10, does not qualify in that category. Following AVI in the top 10 was QuickTime with a 48 percent installed base, Beatnik (45.18%), RealPlayer G2 (40.74%), Acrobat (36.04%), Shockwave Director 34.5%, Media Player (22.13%), and QuickTime 4.0.3 (16.62%). QuickTime, which plays video, sound and animation over the Internet, has dropped nearly 30 percentage points since the beginning of April. A newer version, QuickTime 4.0.3, has risen nine percentage points since debuting late last year.

* It is important to note that the plug-ins statistics reflect what percentage of Netscape surfers have a particular plug-in installed. StatMarket does not yet report on plug-ins for Microsoft Explorer users, as ActiveX plug-in information is not easily distinguishable from other ActiveX controls. Still, examining the most popular Netscape plug-ins shows the direction of multimedia on the Web.

(close this window)