Blu-Ray wins the format war

For years the two competing formats of Blu-Ray and HD DVD have battled over the market to replace DVD's. Both offer high-definition resolutions so movies look fabulous on that new high def TV. Unfortunately the consumers have been the looser in this war and they have stayed away from purchasing anything until a clear winner emerged.

Within the last month, however, a number of announcements dramatically and decisively shifted the balance in favor of Blu-Ray. For a long time the studios were split with some offering only HD DVD movies, some offering only Blu-Ray movies and some offering both. But with Warner's departure of the HD DVD camp, Universal letting their HD DVD exclusivity contract expire, only Paramount remains in the HD DVD camp and even then there are many rumours of Paramount's departure. To top it off, Netflix announced today that they are dropping HD DVD. Clearly the writing is on the wall and Blu-Ray's win is ensured. Consumers can now start purchasing hi-def drives without fear and we can see the adoption rate increase. The real question is whether this is really all too late and whether consumers will skip hi def drives entirely and go straight to downloadable movies. Only time will tell.

A Year of Browsing Stats

I always like looking at stats to see where we've been and where we are going and the beginning of a new year is a great time to do that. Since I work in web development, I've pulled a bunch of stats for the last year from Market Share and The Counter. These represent numbers seen at a wide variety of web sites across the world in 2007.

Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2007 was all about the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 for most PC users. The rate rose quickly at first and then leveled off and then as Microsoft added it to the critical upgrade list the rate of growth has increased again. 2008 should see IE6 virtually disappear as a mainstream browser.

At the same time both Firefox and Safari continued their slow climb in market share with 2.6% and 1.4% increases respectively. These gains came at the cost of Microsoft, which lost 3.6% for all versions of Internet Explorer during the year.

For web development one of the most exciting trends is the dramatic rise of web standards compliant browsers. This very loosely defined term means the browsers follow a generally accepted HTML and CSS standards that allow developers to develop sites in a standard way without a lot of hacks and browser specific CSS. I include Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category. While IE7's support is not perfect it is dramatically better than IE6 and the adoption of IE7 has accounted for most of the growth in the standard compliant browsers category.

Browser	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
Internet Explorer (all versions)	79.6%	76.0%	-3.6%
Internet Explorer 7.0	18.3%	40.6%	+22.3%
Internet Explorer 6.0	60.7%	35.2%	-25.5%
Internet Explorer 5.0 & 5.5	0.8%	0.2%	-0.6%
Firefox (all versions)	14.2%	16.8%	+2.6%
Safari (all versions)	4.2%	5.6%	+1.4%
Netscape (all versions)	0.9%	0.7%	-0.2%
Opera (all versions)	0.9%	0.6%	-0.3%
Standards Compliant Browsers	38.4%	64.3%	+25.9%

Operating Systems
Operating Systems are always a mater of intense, and often near religious, debate and the numbers are interesting to see. Old versions of Windows continue their slow decline into obscurity. And despite all of the talk of Vista users "downgrading" to XP, we've see Windows Vista grow to over 10% of the web audience since its release in January. That growth came at the expense of Windows XP, however, and Windows as a whole dropped 2.1% over the the year as more people bought Macintoshes.

Apple's OS X had a good year, increasing their market share 1.6% over the year and they are now up to 7.3%. What is particularly interesting is that most of that growth happened in the late in the year. Whether this trend continues into early 2008 or tappers off until the next Christmas buying season will be interesting to see.

Linux still struggles to make much impact on the desktop and only had a 0.2% increase to 0.6% for the year.

While the numbers are still very low at 0.1% its interesting to see the iPhone has grown from nothing to the 4th most popular operating system since the end of June, surpassing all other smart cell operating systems for web browsing.

Operating System	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
Windows (all versions)	93.8%	91.7%	-2.1%
Windows Vista	0.2%	10.5%	+10.3%
Windows XP	85.3%	76.9%	-8.4%
Windows 2000	5.0%	2.7%	-2.3%
Windows NT	0.7%	0.6%	-0.1%
Windows 95/98/ME	2.7%	1.1%	-1.6%
Mac OS X (all versions)	5.7%	7.3%	+1.6%
Linux (all versions)	0.4%	0.6%	+0.2%
iPhone	-	0.1%	+0.1%

Screen Resolution
It's virtually impossible to buy a new computer today that doesn't have a resolution of at least 1024x768 and that is born out in the numbers for the year. Now almost 91% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2008.

Resolution	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
800x600 or better	99.8%	99.9%	+0.1%
1024x768 or better	85.6%	90.8%	+5.2%

Netscape is dead

AOL announced today that they will be dropping support for the Netscape browser on Feb 1, 2008. Netscape used to be main competitor to Internet Explorer and the two browsers fought for market dominance for many years. Netscape finally lost that battle and has been fading into obscurity for many years with current market share figures for Netscape at a minuscule 0.6%. With this announcement AOL has finally pulled the plug on the browser and is recommending remaining Netscape users to adopt Firefox. The Netscape.com portal web site will continue to operate.

IE8 on Acid

Microsoft announced that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test. The Acid2 test was created by the Web Standards Project as a standard test that makers of web browsers could use to test if their browsers had achieved a high degree of standards compliance.

Until that time there was some variance on what "standards compliant" browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari would display for a given page. Worst of all Internet Explorer 6 had many standards compliance issues, but it was hard to define an authoritative list of what they should fix in the next release. The Acid2 test provided a target for everyone to use and easily test.

Internet Explorer 7 came much closer, but still failed the test. Opera and Safari soon released versions that passed the test and the upcoming Firefox 3 will also pass the test. With today's news on Internet Explorer 8, all major browsers will pass the test. This means we should be entering a world where pages look the same on all browsers (at least whenever IE8 is released and widely adopted) and that is a great thing for web developers and the Internet.

Web 2.0 - Bah Humbug!

Jakob Nielsen just released and article entitled Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous that shows all is not perfect in the world of Web 2.0. There are downsides to rushing to implement Web 2.0 features in your site without thinking it through.

1024 is the new 800

For a long time the common wisdom has been that web sites should be designed to fit on a screen with a resolution of 800x600. Most new computers have higher resolutions and as of November the places we check for global Internet statistics show that 90.3% of users have a screen resolution of 1024x768 or higher.

While we have been doing some sites designed for 1024 already, 90% is the threshold where I feel you can always design for that size. Those with smaller screens are still able to use these sites. They may just need to scroll horizontally a little bit.

These are global numbers. You may find the numbers are higher or lower for your particular industry. As always the best option is to utilize a site analytic program on your own site to see what people are using.

Email Standards Project

Anyone who has developed HTML emails of any complexity will tell you its an incredibly painful process. The email may look completely different depending on whether the recipient views the email in Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, or any of the dozens of other programs and email websites. While web development is moving swiftly to web standards that work the same on all browsers, it's the wild west when it comes to emails. As a result we are forced to go back to 'old school' table-based HTML with font tags just to get any kind of consistency in how they look. With that in mind the folks over at the Web Standards Project are starting up the Email Standards Project to try and bring the same level of standards to HTML emails that we see on the web. Here's hoping that they are wildly successful.