Lacisoft's » Desktop software

Romanian browser usage trends 2010

lacisoft — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:39:28 +0000

Following the success of my last year study about browser usage in Romania i decided to repeat the study this year, around the same time (June – middle of the year). The methodology is the same , i took browser data from trafic.ro for a few sites (the most visited in Romania) and made an average of them.

The numbers gave me the following chart which covers the period from November 2007 to June 2010

This chart covers all browser versions that have more then 0.25 percent market share in Romania. As you can see, from December 2009 Internet Explorer 6 started to loose market share rapidly and i put this on the account of Google. Last December i think was the time when Google announced that they won’t support IE6 on many of their apps anymore. Also since my last study IE8 is steadily taking share from her older siblings IE6 and IE7 while Firefox 3 was taking share also from IE6 and IE7 claiming the title of the most used browser version in Romania.

My last year’s prediction that Google Chrome will reach 10% by the end of the year didn’t become a reality, now Chrome being somewhere over 7%. This is understandable because Google Chrome failed to deliver its initial promises as i recently pointed out. Still i think that because of the aggressive promotion conducted by Google it will reach well over 10% this year. Opera is steadily at 4% while Safari being under 1%. Firefox 1 is the least used browser in this study with an average of 0.29%. I guess next year we can ignore it and we can also ignore his younger sibling FF2 which is below 1% and is dropping fast.

This time i made another chart that covers browser market share by vendor. More specifically i didn’t break up specific versions so all Internet Explorer versions appear as IE and all Firefox versions appear under FF.

It is well pointed out in this chart that IE took a serious hit last December and the main gainer of this hit was Firefox. Chrome’s rapid ascension can be observed too.

I will not come up with any predictions this year. But i can say this. 2010 will enter in browser history books as the year of demise for IE6. By the end of the year i think everyone will drop support for this ancient browser. It is time.

Fatality: Google drops IE6 support in 2010

lacisoft — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:58:19 +0000

Just received it on email from the Google Apps team:

“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.”

The text continues explaining the drop of support for IE6 on the 1st of March 2010 in the case of Google Docs and Google Sites and “later” in 2010 for Google Mail and Google Calendar. Also users will see a warning message if they using some of the older browsers. The warning message will be displayed starting this week and will urge users to upgrade their browser.

This day should have come earlier. But finally someone is taking a side on this matter.

Apology letter to Firefox

lacisoft — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:17:06 +0000

I must apologize to you for my thoughtless action to embrace Google Chrome so swiftly. I was wrong. I admit that now.

I never had any issues with you besides your appetite for memory. You really like eating all the memory you have available. But after all i bought 4 gigs of RAM for you. I should have just let you eat as much as you could.

But you know some new guy named Chrome (from Google) came and he was full of promises. He promised me that when he will crash he will do that only with one of his tabs, the faulty one. So my other work won’t get lost. He promised that he will be the fastest browser i’ve ever seen. And he promised many other things. He managed to fulfill some of his promises. But he failed miserably with others.

Just minutes ago i was writing my weekly article batch, and opened up a pdf document in another tab. And Chrome froze … needless to say that all his tabs froze. And after waiting 30 minutes he didn’t recover. I had to kill it. But he took away all my tabs!! Even that one with the article being written. So my work got lost (no recovery). This wasn’t the first time that Chrome hang on me with a pdf file (i cannot even count how many times he did that), but this was the first time when he managed to loose about one hour of my work + half hour waiting after him. And this was the thing i was always afraid of. Yeah… maybe is Chrome somewhat faster then you … but if he looses my work and wastes my time that doesn’t matter anymore. I will come back to you.

But there is a good thing about me using Chrome. Did you know that Chrome managed to raise my blog’s number of visitors to new heights ? Yeah, remember when i complained that Chrome’s popup blocker sucks ? Well it seems that many people think that.

That article become the most popular post on this blog, on daily basis people end up here using queries like: chrome popup blocker, disable chrome popup blocker, chrome popup blocker sucks. Well i guess the guys from Google should focus more on fixing bugs and implementing basic browser features before they roll out new versions every few days.

I can’t promise you that i will uninstall Chrome, after all i have to test sites in it from time to time. But i will be using you more to do my work.

I cannot rely on a browser that

is having issues with opening a pdf file or running some heavier flash
displays the popup blocking notification for like 3-4 seconds and then hide it when i try to allow it.
is just refusing to log me in with my current password on some sites that work perfectly on other browsers
for some weird reason runs Plesk in slow motion compared to other browsers
and countless other little annoying things

Sincerely yours

The user

Bye bye Adobe Reader! I need no bloatware!

lacisoft — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:02:48 +0000

I’ve just uninstalled Adobe Reader and hopefully i won’t have to install it again. I was very annoyed with this piece of bloatware. I’ve made a full reinstall of my computer and i needed a PDF viewer to read some e-books. Right away i went to Adobe’s site and tried to download Adobe Reader.

But downloading it wasnt so easy as i remembered. First they insisted i get a Firefox plugin, then when i installed the plugin i had to restart Firefox, save every tab and then the install process started. The worst thing is that it lasted almost half an hour to install Adobe Reader. The Nosso software wich takes over the installation is very slow!. And no, its not my computer, it has a very powerful CPU, 4GB of RAM and a performant hard drive, also my internet connection is broadband 20 mbps so you can’t blame any of these. It is Adobe and Nosso’s technology to blame for a half hour install process for such a simple thing as a PDF viewer.

Needless to say that even on this powerful machine the program performs poorly. It is slow and bloated. So i looked for alternative solutions.

A colleague recommended Foxit Reader. I downloaded it (it is 3.5 MB in size) and installed it in under 30 seconds. It performs very well, its fast, very fast and even has Firefox plugin to view PDF’s in the browser. So i uninstalled Adobe Reader and i will certainly won’t install it again.

I hope more and more people will do this, until Adobe realizes that usability and user friendly software are not only terms in the dictionary.

Default browser in Windows. What is it for?

lacisoft — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:06:17 +0000

I don’t know why Microsoft invented the concept called default browser if they aren’t using it anyway. Let’s make this clear. My default browser is Firefox. Almost any application knows this and it is used by default to open html files and web addresses.

But not Microsoft applications. For example the bloatware called Live Messenger doesn’t respect this. When i click to open a web address or my hotmail inbox, Live Messenger opens it in Internet Explorer disregarding my default browser preferences.

So i ask again, Microsoft, what is it for this default browser thing ?

Too much evolution vs get left behind

lacisoft — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:35:26 +0000

Users behaviors change over time and software developers are trying to keep up with the trends and with the technology. But sometimes they just overdo things. Or sometimes they are left behind by technology. To do nothing is risky but to do too much is a risk too. I will present you 3 software packages that sometime ago where my favorites in the areas they were used. Today i no longer use them, either because they became bloatware either because they just being replaced by evolution with other forms of the software.

For example Thunderbird was my email client of choice, i used it for a long time and i was happy with it. But in time my preferences shifted because i needed to access my email from a lot of places and i needed to have my emails accessible from everywhere. I started to move towards web based email. I had my personal mail on my own domain and i was still using Thunderbird for that, the only thing that annoyed me with the software itself was that sometimes it was very slow. But after moving my email hosting to Google’s Web Apps i had no longer a reason to keep Thunderbird. Web based email is my choice and the question that i asked some time ago is being answered. Desktop email apps are on the go. This is a case where the software cannot keep up with the evolution of users behavior.

The other case where perfectly usable programs were developed way beyond what is their main mission is represented by Acdsee and Azureus (now Vuze).

I used Acdsee only for viewing pictures and saving them in different formats. Acdsee was awesome for saving image files for web. It compressed very well. No other software that i knew of could compress images this small size, keeping good quality. The antique version 3 of Acdsee was in use on my computer 4 months ago. But as i changed my PC and installed Windows XP 64, Acdsee 3 won’t run anymore on it. The newer versions are not for me. I don’t like the way the software tries to do everything but manages to do much less. Usability is worse then for earlier versions and the package that tries to be an universal photo manager is becoming a bloatware. I started to use IrfanView instead, which is better, smaller, faster more usable and it is FREE.

About Azureus i didn’t made a final decision yet, i am still using it as it become Vuze and tries to be an offline player for online videos, community stuff and everything. I need the software just for the torrent downloads, i am not interested in watching the latest videos of some short lived emo band or promotional stuff from all kinds of enterprises. So Vuze might be on my PC for a while but i am having doubts about its future.

Do you had any programs that you really liked but you quit using ?

Two annoying Chrome issues

lacisoft — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:42:03 +0000

I’m using Chrome heavily lately for work and for regular browsing. I’ve come accross two annoying issues that just ruin my Chrome experience.

1) When i type a domain name without “www” and the particular domain is not configured correctly it will give me an error. Firefox just ignores this and tries the domain with “www” too. I have to type always with www in front of the domain name to get the correct domain.

2) The lack of the RSS icon from the navbar, so i am forced to find the rss icon on the page or to scavenger hunt for it in the source code to be able to subscribe to the RSS feed with Google Reader.

I’m wondering if these things are as annoying to other people as they are for me. Hope they fix them soon enough.

Google Chrome after one month of use

lacisoft — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:56:14 +0000

It is more then a month from the moment when Google Chrome went live. I use it since then and i love its speed and its simplicity. It crashed on me only once and it took all the tabs with it. But that was a minor incident, it can happen. But what is worse is that i found that Flash and Chrome are having problems when used together.

When i open flash heavy sites, or flash streaming sites it starts to become unresponsive. And some of the streaming sites don’t have sound (checked with Firefox and worked well).

I was thinking that memory is a bottleneck but i tried it both on my home machine with 4GB of RAM running XP64 and at work with 1GB of RAM running XP and the result is the same. Chrome and Flash won’t work well together.

Later update: I found out that this is a known bug and it is somewhat fixed in latest development release.