abab
WHATWG spec-compliant implementations of window.atob and window.btoa.
Deprecated on npm. The maintainers' message: “Use your platform's native atob() and btoa() methods instead”
npm says
26,489,888
per week
Every tarball fetch: mirrors, scanners, CI and people.
real installs
high confidence≈ 26.5M
per week
Mirror spikes and crawlers removed. CI and dependency installs still count, so this is not a head count.
noise under 1% of npm's count, so nearly all of it counts. noise real installs
Why this estimate
With JavaScript on, this lists what the filter found for this package.
Snapshot from the daily build of Nov 6, 2026, last 7 days of npm data. With JavaScript on, this page recomputes it live from the npm API.
How many people use abab?
npm counted 26,489,888 downloads of abab in the last 7 days. Nobody can count people exactly, npm included: it does not record who downloaded what. After removing mirror spikes and crawlers, about 26.5M look like real installs. At this scale most of them come from CI, builds and other packages that depend on abab, so the number of people behind them is far smaller.
Is abab still maintained?
No: the latest version is marked deprecated on npm, with the message “Use your platform's native atob() and btoa() methods instead”. The latest version, 2.0.6, came out on Apr 17, 2022. There were no stable releases in the last 12 months. It was first published on Sep 1, 2015. npm lists 1 maintainer.
Is abab still used?
Downloads with publish spikes removed are up 11% over 3 months and up 33% over 11 months. For scale, the median of the 269 packages we track, which lean towards today's most downloaded, is up 157% over 11 months, so this one is behind that. Last week, 97% of downloads above the crawler floor were on major version 2, the latest one; the most used single version was 2.0.6, with 89%. Weekdays get 1.6× the downloads of weekends, which fits people at work, though CI follows the same rhythm. Crawlers account for about 1,214 downloads a week, roughly 101 per version.
Where do the downloads of abab come from?
Probably mostly through other packages. Each package below requires the one above it, and their weekly downloads on the matching versions line up within about 30%. This is an inference from download counts, not something npm records.
Past jsdom the trail splits or we can't follow it. These are still real installs, but the people running them may never have chosen abab. How a package ends up like this.
How the estimate works
- Cut the spike every new version gets from mirrors in its first days.
- Subtract the flat floor robots download from every version each week.
- Show what is left as a range, with a confidence level. It still includes CI and dependency installs, so it is not a count of people.