Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Firefox 3.5 Released
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5 today. You can download it for free. Firefox 3.5 ads some new features and some HTML 5 tags, but the most important improvement is speed. They claim it is twice as fast as Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2. With Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari claiming dramatic speed improvements its good to see Firefox improving their performance as well.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Oracle to buy Sun
Oracle announced today that they will buy Sun for 7.4 billion dollars. Oracle wants an end to end enterprise set of solutions.
Amongst the other assets will be the Java programming language. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the development arena. While many had been pushing for Java to become an open source language, this move would seem to further segment the development environments into three camps:
Amongst the other assets will be the Java programming language. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the development arena. While many had been pushing for Java to become an open source language, this move would seem to further segment the development environments into three camps:
- Java / Oracle DB
- Microsoft .Net / SQL Server
- Open source languages (PHP/Python/Ruby) / MySQL (or other alternatives like SQLite)
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Another Year of Browsing Stats
Last year I put together some web stats from Market Share and The Counter showing the trends in browsers stats for the previous year. With another year passed its time to look at how 2008 shaped up.
Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2008 continued the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. This year the rate was much slower with only 6.2% more IE 7 users ending the year than started it. With a 14.7% loss, IE 6 dropped much faster than IE 7 grew as many people moved to Firefox. Last year I thought IE 6 would virtually disappear as a mainstream browsers. The transition rate slowed, however, and IE 6 still has a 20.5% market share and will need to be included in browser testing of web sites for some time.
Both Firefox and Safari almost doubled their rate of growth from last year. Firefox grew 4.6% this year and Safari had a 2.3% rate for 2008. Most of the Safari growth appears to come from new Mac users whose operating system had the same 2.3% growth rate.
Google's new Chrome browser hit the charts in September and rocketed to an impressive 1% market share in the last four months of the year.
The gains in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome came at the cost of IE, which lost 7.8% last year across all versions.
For web development "web standards compliant browsers" continue to grow quickly with a 14.1 % increase for the year. Web standards compliant browsers is a very loosely defined term that 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, Chrome, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category.
Operating Systems
Windows users continue to switch from Windows XP to Vista. Vista grew at 10.6% this year which was virtually identical as the growth last year. Windox XP is still the majority of users with 65.2% of the market, but XP and older versions of Windows continue to decline. More people switched from Windows to other platforms and Windows as a whole dropped 3.1% for the year.
Apple's OS X had an even better year than 2007, increasing their market share 2.3% over the year. With a total market share of 9.6%, Macs are about to cross into double digits for the first time ever. Apple has certainly come a long way from the 2.3% market share I recorded at the beginning of 2005.
Linux on the desktop continues to grow slowly. With a 0.3% growth Linux has reached 0.9% of the market in 2008.
Even with the large number of smart phones with good browsers that were released for the year, the iPhone completely eclipses all other phones in web usage. The iPhone trippled its growth this year with a 0.3% increase. Cell phone web browsing continue to be very small percentage of the overall web browsing audience, however, and the iPhone only represents 0.4% of the overall market.
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 92.5% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2009. Now its time to start looking at when web sites can be designed for a 1,280 or higher resolution. Here in January 2009 the percentage is already 55.0%.
Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2008 continued the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. This year the rate was much slower with only 6.2% more IE 7 users ending the year than started it. With a 14.7% loss, IE 6 dropped much faster than IE 7 grew as many people moved to Firefox. Last year I thought IE 6 would virtually disappear as a mainstream browsers. The transition rate slowed, however, and IE 6 still has a 20.5% market share and will need to be included in browser testing of web sites for some time.
Both Firefox and Safari almost doubled their rate of growth from last year. Firefox grew 4.6% this year and Safari had a 2.3% rate for 2008. Most of the Safari growth appears to come from new Mac users whose operating system had the same 2.3% growth rate.
Google's new Chrome browser hit the charts in September and rocketed to an impressive 1% market share in the last four months of the year.
The gains in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome came at the cost of IE, which lost 7.8% last year across all versions.
For web development "web standards compliant browsers" continue to grow quickly with a 14.1 % increase for the year. Web standards compliant browsers is a very loosely defined term that 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, Chrome, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category.
| Browser | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| Internet Explorer (all versions) | 76.0% | 68.2% | -7.8% |
| Internet Explorer 7.0 | 40.6% | 46.8% | +6.2% |
| Internet Explorer 6.0 | 35.2% | 20.5% | -14.7% |
| Internet Explorer 5.0 & 5.5 | 0.2% | 0.1% | -0.1% |
| Firefox (all versions) | 16.8% | 21.4% | +4.6% |
| Safari (all versions) | 5.6% | 7.9% | +2.3% |
| Netscape (all versions) | 0.7% | 0.6% | -0.1% |
| Opera (all versions) | 0.6% | 0.7% | +0.1% |
| Chrome (all versions) | 0.0% | 1.0% | +1.0% |
| Standards Compliant Browsers | 64.3% | 78.4% | +14.1% |
Operating Systems
Windows users continue to switch from Windows XP to Vista. Vista grew at 10.6% this year which was virtually identical as the growth last year. Windox XP is still the majority of users with 65.2% of the market, but XP and older versions of Windows continue to decline. More people switched from Windows to other platforms and Windows as a whole dropped 3.1% for the year.
Apple's OS X had an even better year than 2007, increasing their market share 2.3% over the year. With a total market share of 9.6%, Macs are about to cross into double digits for the first time ever. Apple has certainly come a long way from the 2.3% market share I recorded at the beginning of 2005.
Linux on the desktop continues to grow slowly. With a 0.3% growth Linux has reached 0.9% of the market in 2008.
Even with the large number of smart phones with good browsers that were released for the year, the iPhone completely eclipses all other phones in web usage. The iPhone trippled its growth this year with a 0.3% increase. Cell phone web browsing continue to be very small percentage of the overall web browsing audience, however, and the iPhone only represents 0.4% of the overall market.
| Operating System | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| Windows (all versions) | 91.7% | 88.6% | -3.1% |
| Windows Vista | 10.5% | 21.1% | +10.6% |
| Windows XP | 76.9% | 65.2% | -11.7% |
| Windows 2000 | 2.7% | 1.5% | -1.2% |
| Windows NT | 0.6% | 0.3% | -0.3% |
| Windows 95/98/ME | 1.1% | 0.4% | -0.7% |
| Mac OS X (all versions) | 7.3% | 9.6% | +2.3% |
| Linux (all versions) | 0.6% | 0.9% | +0.3% |
| iPhone | 0.1% | 0.4% | +0.3% |
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 92.5% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2009. Now its time to start looking at when web sites can be designed for a 1,280 or higher resolution. Here in January 2009 the percentage is already 55.0%.
| Resolution | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| 800x600 or better | 99.9% | 99.9% | +0.0% |
| 1024x768 or better | 90.8% | 92.5% | +1.7% |
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The Rise of the Real Mobile Internet, part 2
Over a year ago I wrote about how people want their mobile phones to render web pages just like their computer browsers. At the time the iPhone was pretty much the only phone doing a good job of this. Other cell phone manufacturers were delivering a huge range of mobile browsers that were often very limited and varied widely from phone to phone.
What a difference a year makes. Now virtually every smart phone has a competant web browser built in, most of which are using the same rendering engines as desktop browsers. Gizmodo recently tested the major cell phone brands out there including the iPhone, Android, LG Dare, BlackBerry Bold, Nokia E71 Symbian S60, Samsung Instinct, and Samsung Epix Windows Mobile 6.1 (with IE and Opera). While there was variations in speed and some rendering problems all of the phone did a good job rendering pages with one exception: Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6.1. Gizmodo gave IE a failing score on every test and a score of "Utter Fail" on four of the seven tests. Hopefully Microsoft will rectify their poor performance with Windows Mobile 7.
These testing result are a big win for web developers who can now focus on make pages that work on major desktop browsers and not worry about the chaotic mobile browser environment that characterized the industry last year. It's also a huge win for mobile phone users who can surf the web from the phones with confidence.
What a difference a year makes. Now virtually every smart phone has a competant web browser built in, most of which are using the same rendering engines as desktop browsers. Gizmodo recently tested the major cell phone brands out there including the iPhone, Android, LG Dare, BlackBerry Bold, Nokia E71 Symbian S60, Samsung Instinct, and Samsung Epix Windows Mobile 6.1 (with IE and Opera). While there was variations in speed and some rendering problems all of the phone did a good job rendering pages with one exception: Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6.1. Gizmodo gave IE a failing score on every test and a score of "Utter Fail" on four of the seven tests. Hopefully Microsoft will rectify their poor performance with Windows Mobile 7.
These testing result are a big win for web developers who can now focus on make pages that work on major desktop browsers and not worry about the chaotic mobile browser environment that characterized the industry last year. It's also a huge win for mobile phone users who can surf the web from the phones with confidence.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Amazon Launches Content Delivery Network
Amazon launched its CloudFront content delivery network today. This is alternative to services such as Akamai at a lower price.
Content delivery networks are a great way to serve up large files such as videos and downloads from your site that might overwhelm your servers or exhaust your bandwidth otherwise. Viral marketing campaign materials are also a great choice for content delivery networks as they can have huge spikes in demand and these services can scale up to handle the demand much easier than your web server. Your files are served up from Amazon's servers instead of your own and you pay for the bandwidth at a rate of 9 to 17 cents per gigabyte.
Content delivery networks are a great way to serve up large files such as videos and downloads from your site that might overwhelm your servers or exhaust your bandwidth otherwise. Viral marketing campaign materials are also a great choice for content delivery networks as they can have huge spikes in demand and these services can scale up to handle the demand much easier than your web server. Your files are served up from Amazon's servers instead of your own and you pay for the bandwidth at a rate of 9 to 17 cents per gigabyte.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Turning bugs into marketing opportunities
Electronic Arts (EA) had a bug in the latest Tiger Woods golf game that allows Tiger to walk on water to hit a ball sitting on the top of a pond which became known as the “Jesus Shot”. EA took a creative approach on how to respond and created what is sure to be a viral video bringing more attention to the game. Joystiq has an article talking about it which includes the video.
Engadget's switch: The case for iPhone formatted pages
Engadget, the immensely popular tech blog, had followed the standard best practices and created a mobile version of their site for all cell phone users. They had many requests for iPhone optimized versions of the site, but stuck with the concept that they shouldn’t have separate versions of the site for different mobile devices.
Then they ran the numbers... They discovered that 95.8% of all of their mobile web traffic is coming from iPhones and the similar iPod Touch. That changed their mind and they just released their iPhone optimized version.
It’s certainly something to keep in mind when considering building a website with a mobile version.
See their posting about it which includes the breakdown of their mobile traffic.
Then they ran the numbers... They discovered that 95.8% of all of their mobile web traffic is coming from iPhones and the similar iPod Touch. That changed their mind and they just released their iPhone optimized version.
It’s certainly something to keep in mind when considering building a website with a mobile version.
See their posting about it which includes the breakdown of their mobile traffic.
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