whatwg-encoding
Decode strings according to the WHATWG Encoding Standard
Deprecated on npm. The maintainers' message: “Use @exodus/bytes instead for a more spec-conformant and faster implementation”
npm says
96,015,780
per week
Every tarball fetch: mirrors, scanners, CI and people.
real installs
high confidence≈ 96M
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.
Most used major version: 3, the latest one, with 63% of last week's downloads above the crawler floor. Most used single version: 3.1.1.
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 whatwg-encoding?
npm counted 96,015,780 downloads of whatwg-encoding 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 96M look like real installs. At this scale most of them come from CI, builds and other packages that depend on whatwg-encoding, so the number of people behind them is far smaller.
Is whatwg-encoding still maintained?
No: the latest version is marked deprecated on npm, with the message “Use @exodus/bytes instead for a more spec-conformant and faster implementation”. The latest version, 3.1.1, came out on Nov 12, 2023. There were no stable releases in the last 12 months. It was first published on Oct 16, 2016. npm lists 6 maintainers.
Is whatwg-encoding still used?
Downloads with publish spikes removed are up 32% over 3 months and up 128% 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, 63% of downloads above the crawler floor were on major version 3, the latest one; the most used single version was 3.1.1, with 63%. Weekdays get 1.6× the downloads of weekends, which fits people at work, though CI follows the same rhythm. Crawlers account for about 471 downloads a week, roughly 47 per version.
Where do the downloads of whatwg-encoding 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.
- whatwg-encoding 3.1.1 96M a week
- jsdom 26.1.0 153M a week
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 whatwg-encoding. 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.