Lacisoft's » browsers

Browser wars again

lacisoft — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:44:16 +0000

We’re in the middle of a war. A war of the browsers. I’ve found today very good post (episode one, episode two) about the renewed browser wars on the Avencius blog. Fortunately these wars will only benefit the users and not some bloodthirsty ruler.

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

Google Chrome in Internet Explorer!

lacisoft — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:04:49 +0000

Most modern web browsers support HTML5, a standard that allows web sites to have features that previously only desktop applications had. Also most modern web applications use heavy javascript code to create the functionality of the site. Unfortunately Internet Explorer isn’t supporting HTML5 yet. And developers can’t ignore this, because IE is used by a large number of users. So most often developers need to use all kinds of hacks, workarounds and tricks to make their application work on IE as it should be.

But no more. Google announced today that it would release an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Chrome Frame that will allow developers to take advantage of the new technologies like HTML5 and modern CSS layout handling. And this inside Internet Explorer.

Developers will be able to place a small javascript code that detects if the user has the plugin and if not prompts him to install it. Sure not all users will install it, but in any case more of them will install the plugin if they can get away with this instead of replacing their browser. And if they really want to use a good website then they will install it. Especially if the install is easy and straightforward as Google products are. After installing the plugin it can be easily tested adding cf: in front of any url typed into Internet Explorer.

As for developers they only need to place a html tag into their application:

http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“chrome=1″>

This will force IE to use the Webkit based Google Chrome rendering engine from the Google Chrome Frame. This way developers are fully in control to force IE to use or not to use the rendering engine so existing websites won’t break on this. Other browsers will simply disregard this tag and render the page as normal.

This is a really smart move from Google. They don’t ignore IE because they can’t do that, and they can’t do anything to force Microsoft to move on this matter because Microsoft prefers it this way. Except they did the only thing that will force Microsoft to react. They started to improve Internet Explorer.

Opera and Typo3 ? Thanks but no thanks.

lacisoft — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:33:58 +0000

I’ve downloaded a while ago Opera 10 and once in a while i open it up just to see how it works and how it evolves. But a few days ago i decided that i try to work on it for a full day to get a more comprehensive image of what can this browser do. Beeing a Typo3 developer, i work with Typo3 CMS on a daily basis, so this was my first task. I’ve opened up Typo3′s backend and started working. Or i should have started. Because Opera 10 has just crashed.

Ok, i restarted it and tried again. This time it let me open up the pagecontent element i wanted to edit. I did some modifications, click undo and Opera crashes again. Another restart, open up another page, do some quick copy-paste of content, Opera crashes again.

This was just the beginning, i tried several hours to work but from time to time Opera was just keep crashing. And most of these crashes i can reproduce, so this is a very serious issue. But i quit trying.

So for now i won’t open Opera again until another version gets out. And i suggest if you want to work with Typo3 backend avoid Opera for that task. This browser needs more work to be able to be used in production environments. Sure for home use, opening mail and stuff maybe its good. But not for any serious stuff where loosing your work matters.

I’m not a Microsoft fan, i use Firefox and Chrome for daily browsing and work, but i suggest Opera fans and supporters who are complaining to the EU about Microsoft bundling IE with Windows to take a look at their own garden first and then into others.

Popup management in the new Google Chrome

lacisoft — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:29:09 +0000

I’ve upgraded today to the latest version of Google Chrome available on the dev channel and finally popup management is available in Google’s browser. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I even made a post about how much i hate the lack of popup management in Chrome.

Theme support also has been added but the link for downloading themes for Google Chrome does not work yet.

Romanian browser usage trends

lacisoft — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:16:04 +0000

I’ve recently made a study about the browsers preferred by romanians. I don’t claim this study to be 100% accurate but it can be useful in some situations.

The methodology was simple. I took the browser data for a few of the largest romanian sites listed in Trafic.ro (a web statistics system which provides browser usage data) and i made from those numbers the following chart which covers the period between November 2007 and June 2009

What is clear from this chart is that:

the days of IE6 as the leading browser are numbered. It may take approximatively 2 months and Firefox 3 market share will pass beyond that of IE6
IE7 would have been the leading browser but as we see around April 2009 when IE8 appeared IE7′s market share started to fell. IE8 is cannibalizing her older sister.
Google Chrome is steadily climbing. Now it is around 2% and it gains market share month by month very rapidly (2% is very fast if we take into consideration that Opera is at 4% for about 4 years)
Opera is stuck at 4% and it does not seem to grow beyond this number in the near future.
Safari is growing but at a very very small pace
There are still about a combined 4% of Firefox 1 and Firefox 2 users

One thing is sure. Internet Explorer’s domination is coming to an end. The browser market is very competitive and there are quite a few options to choose from.

What the study doesn’t show but i’m predicting now is that by the end of the year Google Chrome will pass 10% and it will take market share both from IE and Firefox.

HTML and Javascript code to crash IE6

lacisoft — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:16:10 +0000

I’m a declared adversary of IE6. I even wrote about it a while ago. Now i saw that Cats who code wrote an interesting post with the title 6 HTML and Javascript codes to crash IE6.

My favorite is this one :