How many users have Flash, Java, Unity, or other plugins installed?

Question

Is there a good source of data for the install percentages of popular plugins?

Answer 1

No, there is no "good" source for this data. You'll probably be able to find several not-so-good sources for browser statistics, including plugins, but such statistics suffer from several problems.

One major problem is Selection Bias. Anyone collecting and sharing statistics can only collect data from the browsers that visit their site. An example is browser share; more technical sites report a higher percentage market share for Firefox when compared to more general sites. That's because the more technical people use Firefox more than others, and they are the people most likely to visit the technical site.

An example for Unity - Linux users are much less likely to visit a site that uses the Unity plugin because there isn't one for Linux, so you're not counting true share of people that have the Unity plugin installed.

Kdoto's links are fine for getting a basic idea of usage, but any statistics are likely to overstate the percentage-of-users-with-X — if you decide "I can live with excluding 5% of the users that don't have X" you are really excluding a higher percentage than that.

Answer 2

For flash: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/ and: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/PC.html

Note that talks about PCs, and therefore omits devices like phones.

For Unity, have a look at this: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/39362-Web-player-adoption

There are 1 or 2 billion internet users, and a little over 1 billion internet enabled PCs. There are only a few dozen million unity plugin users (maybe ~20 million). It's difficult to interpret that data without some context for what you're trying to understand.

The Unity plugin allows you to create things that the Flash plugin cannot easily create, if at all.

Which plugin you want to use, depends greatly on what type of application you want to build.

Minecraft runs in Java in a browser. It would be difficult to build the same application in Flash (and see it run efficiently enough).