Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

We realized that we’ve never really done an article diving deep into the history of browser stats even though we have shown you screenshots of browsers from long ago. Thanks to Net Applications we have about a year and a half worth of data to look at, and it is interesting to see the rise and fall of the different browsers.

We had aggregated so much information that even the most severe stataholics would probably start to feel queasy. Below we’ve got an overview of all the browsers wrapped up into one, and then we dive even deeper by breaking the stats down into the popular versions of each browser. To try and ease the nauseous feeling we decided to hide the actual numbers that were used to generate the graphs, but they are still available by clicking on the Details link located at the beginning of each section.

We’ll start by comparing the market share of each major browser, and then we’ll break it down into Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Netscape usage.

Note: The timeline for each graph is the exact same, but the market share percentages are scaled differently for each chart to make it easier to read. You can click the Details link to see what percentages make up each graph.

–All Browsers (Details)–

From this graph you can see that Internet Explorer still owns a huge chunk of the browser market share, but over the duration of the graph it has changed quite significantly. In the next month or two it will likely hit a 10% drop since August 2006, and about 5% of that has occurred in the last 6-months.

–Internet Explorer (Details)–

It wasn’t until December of 2007 that Internet Explorer 7 actually took over Internet Explorer 6 in usage, which is rather surprising. Maybe it is because so many people are sticking with Windows XP and not making the upgrade to IE7, but it looks like things are finally starting to pickup for IE7:

–Firefox (Details)–

When Firefox 2 came out in October 2006 it didn’t take long for users to make the jump from Firefox 1.5, and ever since then it has been rocking the house.

–Safari (Details)–

This obviously proves that Safari users enjoy playing with Beta versions of the browser, but don’t really adopt it until the stable version is available. In June 2007 Safari 3.0 Beta was made available by Apple, and in October it shipped with the OS X Leopard operating system. While in Beta it didn’t really affect the usage of other versions, but people made the upgrade rather rapidly once it was released. It’s been a hit ever since.

–Opera (Details)–

The Opera 9.x browser was first introduced in June 2006 shortly before these stats started to be collected. You can see from the chart that Opera 9.x usage has been increasing quite steadily even though the market share is still small. Considering the fact that until September 2005 you had to pay for Opera (or suffer with a built-in ad banner) I would say that they are doing pretty good.

–Netscape (Details)–

Late last year Netscape announced that they would no longer be developing the Netscape 9.0 version of their browser. Well, this might give us some indication as to why that is. The service we got our stats from didn’t even have anything on Netscape 9.0 presumably because the market share was so low. While Netscape 6.0 is currently the champ of all the versions available.

–Overview–

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed taking a look at all of the charts to see how your favorite browser has progressed over the last year and a half. If you haven’t gotten enough be sure to checkout our history of web browsers where we provide screenshots of browsers over the last 10+ years.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummarySafari Browser Stats for March are…April Browser Stats: Safari Triples its Windows Market ShareOS & Browser Stats for BloggersFlickr Stats for Pro Users

This article was written on January 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

The Internet Explorer team is at it again pointing out that Internet Explorer 8 is looking to closely follow the web standards we’ve all become accustomed to in other major browsers. Earlier they demonstrated that IE 8 currently passes the Acid 2 test, and the IE blog actually admitted their lacking of compliance with the standards in the past:

I’ve been on the IE team for over a decade, and I’ve seen us apply the “Don’t Break the Web” rule in six different major versions of IE in different ways. In IE 6, we used the DOCTYPE switch to enable different “modes” of behavior to protect compatibility. When we released IE 6 in 2001, very few pages on the web were in “standards mode” (my team ran a report on the top 200 web sites at the time that reported less than 1%) – few people knew what a DOCTYPE was, and few tools generated them.

By default Internet Explorer 8 will render sites the same way that IE 7 does, but there will also be a “super standard” rendering capability that developers can take advantage of. To make any particular website render with the standards-compliant engine developers will have to specify this META tag in the HEAD section of the site:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

I think this is a good way for Microsoft to handle the issue of standards while maintaining maximum site compatibility, but I think this will give little motivation for non-standards sites to update their code. Is this the right route for Microsoft to go?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

IE 8 to Enforce Standards Mode by DefaultOpera Fights for IE Web StandardsIE 8 Passes Acid 2 TestInternet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta Download Coming SoonPost to Evernote via Twitter

This article was written on August 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

At the Black Hat conference this week Mozilla announced a new tool called jsfunfuzz that was developed by their very own Jesse Ruderman. This is something developers can use to test the JavaScript engine for both stability and vulnerabilities. Here’s what Mozilla had to say about it:

The responsible sharing of security tools is an important way to contribute to the overall health of the web. We worked with Microsoft, Apple, and Opera to reduce the possibility that this tool might adversely affect users of those browsers. All of these browser vendors reviewed the tool and let us know that they were okay with the release.

The great news is that Mozilla isn’t the only one benefiting from it! Opera posted version 9.23 Beta today that fixes four bugs that caused crashes, and one that could have compromised the security of the browser. All five of those problems were found using the jsfunfuzz tool that Mozilla announced and released to the public.

Of course the tool was developed by Mozilla, and so you would expect it to help them the most…and it has. Using it they’ve found 280 bugs in Firefox’s JavaScript engine with about two-dozen of those that could have been exploitable. More than two-thirds of those bugs have already been fixed, and their working on nailing down the rest.

So even if you aren’t using a Mozilla-based browser, I think we all owe Mozilla a big thanks for making this tool available to the public!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Opera 9.23 Released – Mum’s the Word on Opera 9.5Built-In Opera Features That Firefox Needs Extensions ForOpera 9 Will Now Have Weekly Builds Offered To The PublicTake A Look At Opera 8.5 On A Pocket PCFirefox Experiences Continued Growth With More than 15% of the U.S. Market

This article was written on June 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One thing that Microsoft did a good job of in Internet Explorer 7 was making it easy for users to read feeds. They provided a feed reader that was so simple, yet it does exactly what most casual users want, and that is to keep up on the latest news from around the Web.

Despite doing many things right, there are some things that it doesn’t do, but for those things, there are work-arounds which you might find useful. This includes adding a notifier so that you know when there are new items, and synchronizing with an online service so that your feeds are up-to-date both at work and at home. Here are some tips that you might find helpful if you use the feed reader in Internet Explorer…

–Synchronize with NewsGator Online (Homepage)–

This is one of my favorite add-ons for Internet Explorer because it focuses on the fact that not everyone sits in front of the same computer all day. Many of us go from being at home, to work, and then back home again which is where the NewsGator Desktop Sync comes in handy.

This small, lightweight program installs in a matter of seconds on your computer. Once setup, it will synchronize with an online NewsGator account to keep track of which feeds/posts that you have read. You can choose to have IE override all feed settings, have NewsGator’s online service override all settings, or have the application merge the feeds in the browser and what’s available online.

The System Tray icon gives you easy access to synchronization, and in just a few clicks you can sync up before you go to work or come home. Or, if that seems like too much of a hassle you can actually customize the duration between syncs so that you never even have to think about it.

–Feed Folder (Homepage)–

This add-on doesn’t do that much, but it does make your feeds a little more accessible outside of just Internet Explorer. By using the Feed Folder add-on all of your feeds will be placed in your Favorites bookmarks folder in addition to the normal feed location within Internet Explorer 7. This means that your feeds will quickly be accessible from Windows Explorer as well as the Start Menu (if configured to show Favorites in the Start Menu properties).

–MS Feed Icon (Homepage)–

This is simply a notification system and System Tray icon for the feed reader in IE7. Basically, it adds the most critical thing that Microsoft never put into their browser, but this one does a terrific job of going above and beyond the call of duty. Check out everything it can do:

• Icon in the system tray indicating status of you feed subscriptions
• Displays notifications when a feed contains new posts, and you can customize which feeds receive the notification.
• Can automatically marks a feed as read
• Force an update on all feeds
• Star a notification for later reading (essentially pinning it so that the notification doesn’t close)
• Mark as read without viewing the feed
• Unsubscribe from a feed within the notification window
• Search new posts for specific Tags so you can select which posts are interesting to you. Then any matching posts can be starred to ensure that the notification window does not close until you manually close it.
• Feed statistics
• Presentation mode aware (Windows Vista only)
• Customizable background color

–Feeds Plus (Homepage)–

Feeds Plus makes it possible to read all of your feeds on the same page. This is a really nice feature as long as you don’t have a large number of feeds, but you can always organize your feeds into folders. That way you can just read all of the items on a folder by folder basis.

It also has a built-in notifier that pops up near the System Tray when a feed has new posts, but it isn’t nearly as extensive as what the MS Feed Icon has to offer. Luckily you can disable this notifier so that it doesn’t conflict with MS Feed Icon.

–Summary–

As you can see, there are several tools available that all enhance IE7’s Feed Reader. None of them really make it a full-fledged application like FeedDemon or RSS Bandit, but they help make it a lot more useful.

If you have any other tools that you use with Internet Explorer 7’s feed reader be sure to let us know. We’ve also written two other posts, here and here, on other great add-ons for Internet Explorer 7.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Fwicki RSS Reader To Master Your FeedsGoogle Reader Goes MobileNewshutch: Top-Notch RSS Feed ReaderFirefox Changes The Way We Use RSS Feeds

This article was written on June 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Mozilla has definitely made a name for themselves with Firefox, and have done such a great job of developing the browser that other people want to create their own browsers based on Firefox. To create their own browsers…they use Gecko, Firefox’s rendering engine as the core of the browsers that they create.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with what a rendering engine is I’ll try to explain that real quick. It is basically the aspect of the browser that takes the HTML code from a website and turns it into something that is organized the way that the developer intended it to look. It’s safe to say that it is the core of the browser, and since Firefox has gained a lot of popularity, other browsers can safely use Gecko knowing that most websites will look and function as they were intended. Similarly, the name of the Internet Explorer rendering engine is called Trident, (which even Google Talk uses to render the content of chat windows) and Opera’s is called Presto.

Today we’re taking a look at 6 other browsers, some you’ve probably heard of while others you haven’t, that use the Gecko rendering engine:

–Wyzo (Homepage)–

Wyzo is the Web browser offered by the same people who create the FireTorrent extension that we recently reviewed. You would think that it would come with the extension already integrated into the browser, but instead you have to download the extension separately. It also has a custom start page which can be found here.

Both the FireTorrent extension and the start page can be used in Firefox, so the only thing that sets it apart is the skin. It is probably one of the best Firefox skins that I have seen, and is the only thing that isn’t offered to current Firefox users.

Click to Enlarge

–uBrowser (Homepage)–

uBrowser is unique in the sense that it isn’t meant to be a dedicated browser that you use everyday. Instead, it was made as a way to implement the Gecko rendering engine into the popular 3D virtual world called Second Life.

Once you startup uBrowser, your first impression will probably be poor because of the simplistic interface, but the real goldmine is playing around with the settings in the right-sidebar. That’s where you’ll be able to transform the websites you visit into something that can be manipulated. The images speak for themselves:

Click to Enlarge

There is no installation necessary to try out uBrowser, just download the Windows ZIP file (the first file on the page), extract the contents, and run the uBrowser executable file.

–XeroBank (Homepage)–

You may not recognize this browser right away by its name, but that’s probably because they had to change their name. Previously XeroBank was called TorPark, and despite the name change, it still offers all of the same features that we previously pointed out.

This browser is completely portable and doesn’t require any installation, but it is essentially just a version of Firefox that comes with a bunch of extensions pre-installed. Nevertheless, it is a great tool for those of you who are concerned with privacy.

Click to Enlarge

–Flock (Homepage)–

I’m not going to say much about Flock because I recently wrote a heavy review on the next upcoming version that is due out in a few weeks. To sum it up in one sentence: Flock is a browser that is well integrated with social networks like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and MySpace.

Click to Enlarge

–Maxthon (Homepage)–

I always knew Maxthon as being the browser that works off of Internet Explorer. Little did I know that there is actually an option in the File Menu that you can enable for all new tabs to use the Gecko rendering engine. I tried it out and it worked like a charm.

The disappointing news is that the new Maxthon 2 that should be available soon (currently on Release Candidate 3) doesn’t have this feature because they don’t have anyone on the team that is handy with the Gecko rendering engine. I’m sure a lot of people would love to see this implemented later on, but it’s definitely not going to be ready at launch.

Click to Enlarge

–K-Meleon (Homepage)–

Now this is one cool browser! It is among the slimmest that I have mentioned here, and after running it for just a few minutes it reminded me of the early Firefox days. I had a hard time getting the memory usage to break the 40MB mark, and that was with almost 10 tabs open!

Besides that, it has the standard tabbed browsing (although they don’t call them tabs, instead they’re layers), mouse gestures, and a popup blocker. Oh, and you can use the Internet Explorer or Opera bookmarking systems in place of, or in addition to the Mozilla bookmarking system that it incorporates.

If you’re missing the old days of Firefox, I highly suggest that you try this browser out!

Click to Enlarge

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryYour Week In Review With Sunday’s SummaryWill Google Services Be Compatible With Other BrowsersCyberNotes: Acid3 Browser Results