Lacisoft's » firefox

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.

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

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.

Opera 10 looks good aka browser wars are back on

lacisoft — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:53:59 +0000

I’ve just tested Opera 10 with its new Presto 2.2 rendering engine and it seems that Google Chrome has some competition on the speed factor. Opera 10 loads somewhat slower then Google Chrome but much faster as Firefox. It renders pages faster then Firefox but i couldn’t decide wich one is faster Chrome or Opera 10 (need some benchmarks on this). Opera 10 also has an Acid 3 score of 100/100!

Still neither Opera neither Chrome will take Firefox’s place in my navigational behavior. That is because neither of them has something like Firebug. I’ve just come to the conclusion that i cannot use a browser without a good inspecting tool like Firebug. Sure you could argue that they have something like that. Yes, but it is far behind Firebug!

Opera 10, Chrome 1, Firefox 3.1, IE 8 and Safari. So who said that browser wars ended ? They just starting.

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 ?