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

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This article was written on May 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

Opera Dragonfly is here, and as expected it is a new set of tools to help developers create functional websites. It’s obvious that the Opera team wanted to develop something to draw developers to their browser, much like how Firebug has become an irreplaceable tool for the developers that use Firefox. The real question is whether Dragonfly is the tool we’ve been longing for?

I was pretty pumped when I went to try it out in the latest snapshot build of Opera 9.5, and didn’t know quite what to expect. It turns out that Dragonfly (currently Alpha) is pretty much written entirely in JavaScript, and so the performance wasn’t the greatest. This also means that you must have JavaScript enabled in your browser to even start Dragonfly.

To get started with Dragonfly go to Tools -> Advanced -> Developer Tools and a new window should popup. The first time you load the tools it might take a little while since it has to download the necessary files onto your machine, but each subsequent launch should be much faster. Well, that is until you clear your browser’s cache which will also wipe out Dragonfly, and the files will once again be downloaded the next time you launch the developer tools.

In terms of functionality Dragonfly is decent, but doesn’t quite stack up to what Firebug can deliver. In Dragonfly you can do things like set breakpoints that make debugging JavaScript code a lot easier, but since it all operates in another window I found it to be a pain to use. Firebug, on the other hand, will display itself immediately below the website you’re trying to debug. From what I gather support for something like this is coming in a future version of Dragonfly.

Here is the documentation on using the JavaScript debugger, DOM/CSS inspector, and more in Dragonfly. I’m interested in hearing what everyone thinks of it, but I don’t see it pulling me away from Firebug anytime soon. I guess this is an Alpha release, and maybe they have some tricks up their sleeve?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I subscribe to feeds all the time, but many of the browsers are different in the way they handle feeds. Firefox has a pretty nice interface for choosing an external application as the default subscription handler while Internet Explorer (IE) and Opera are both a little more tricky. IE and Opera are setup to handle feeds from within the browser itself so they don’t offer many options for subscribing to feeds using external applications.

When you install an external application to handle your feeds on your computer, such as FeedDemon or RSS Bandit, it registers the “feed://” protocol with the operating system much the same way that your browser registers the “http://” protocol. This means that anytime a URL begins with feed:// it will actually try to launch your external feed program.

This bookmarklet doesn’t work for Firefox (at least I don’t think it does), but that doesn’t really matter because in the options you can choose a default program to handle the feeds. So if your using Internet Explorer or Opera the first thing you need to do is drag this bookmarklet into your bookmarks:

• Opera (if you’re in Opera just click on this link): Subscribe2RSS
• Internet Explorer: Subscribe2RSS

Now anytime you click on the bookmarklet it will take you directly to your external RSS feed application so that you can add the feed in there, instead of in the browser. The first time you will probably see some sort of warning like this one giving you a heads up that the browser is trying to pass a URL onto your default feed program, but you can just check the box to permanently allow this action:

Don’t worry, if a site has more than one feed available the bookmarklet is designed to ask you which one you want to use before sending it to your feed program:

All you have to do is enter in the corresponding number of the feed you want to subscribe to and press OK.

Then I thought to myself that there had to be a better way to subscribe to the feeds…and I remembered Chris R. telling me about AddThis. It is a service that I could setup much the same way I setup the bookmarklet above, but for some people it is a little nicer. It will display a website that lists all of the feed URL’s associated with a specific site instead of having to use a popup window to select which one you want. With the way I had the bookmarklet setup it was easy to modify it to work with AddThis.

Internet Explorer and Firefox users just drag this link into your bookmarks:

AddThis

Opera users can click on this link if they want to create an orange RSS button to add to any toolbar:

Subscribe2RSS

I tested it in Firefox, IE, and Opera and it works in all of them from what I can tell. If you create an account with AddThis.com you can set it up so that you’re never asked for your feed subscriber preference again, although it can be changed later on should you decide to switch what program/service you’re using.

One quick thing that I wanted to mention is that in Firefox if you use the “Google Reader” option for subscribing to feeds you’ll be presented with an option to add the feed to your Google Personalized Homepage or to Google Reader. Most of you probably use one or the other and you can configure Firefox to automatically bypass that screen and go to your favorite service by following these instructions that Chad posted in our forum.

So that’s it…the first of the bookmarklets that I actually made myself and they came because I had received a few questions about changing how Opera handles feeds by default. If you have any ideas on how I can make it better or another service you would like it to work with just let me know, and I’ll do my best to fulfill your requests!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

There was a lot of excitement when we wrote about the Greasemonkey script that could be used to switch between multiple Gmail accounts. At that time Thilak commented about a Firefox extension that basically accomplished the same task. With it you create user profiles that you can switch between, and it uses a different set of cookies for each of the profiles.

Since most sites store session information in cookies this is a good method for switching between multiple accounts, whether it be for email, shopping, or just about anything. That’s when it hit me that you can manipulate cookies using JavaScript as well, and I figured there had to be a way to create a bookmarklet to do almost the same thing as the extension.

Before we dive into the bookmarklet lets take a look at the Firefox extension more in depth:

–Firefox Extension–

The extension is called CookieSwap, and once installed you can create multiple profiles that can be used to manage different identities from around the web. They are all controlled from the Status Bar where you can select which identity you want to use.

This is great for switching between multiple email accounts without needing to login to each one, as well as making it easier for several different people to all use the same browser. For example, each person in your family could have their own profile, and then each of them wouldn’t have to constantly bother with logging in and out of websites.

The good news is that all of your information is stored in a cookie, which ensures that no one can see your password in plaintext. Well, that’s at least the case for sites that are designed properly.

One downside that I’ve found to using this is that there’s no way to restrict the cookie swapping to a particular site. The first time you create a new profile you’ll start with a blank slate, and you’ll need to go login to all the sites you want enabled for that particular profile. So it may not be the optimum solution if all you want to do is switch between several different accounts on one particular site.

–Bookmarklet–

Huh?: A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program that can be stored as a URL within a bookmark in most popular web browsers, or within hyperlinks on a web page.

We figured there had to be a way to create a bookmarklet to swap between cookies as well, but on a per site basis. As always we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel if we didn’t have to, so we searched around to see what we could find. Jesse Ruderman came to the rescue with a bookmarklet that he wrote to transfer cookies from one browser to another. We took that bookmarklet, modified it a bit, and created something that we think you’ll enjoy.

Here’s how it works. First you’ll need to drag this link into your bookmarks, or right-click on it and select the bookmark option:

Backup Cookies

Now head on over to the site you want to “backup” the cookies for. Click on the bookmarklet you just created, and you should see something like this:

Bookmarking that will store your existing cookies for that site in the form of a bookmarklet. To restore the particular cookies for the site just run that bookmarklet.

Important: You must be on the site corresponding to the bookmarklet before running it. Otherwise your the cookies will not be updated. For example, if you backed up your Yahoo! cookies make sure you are on the Yahoo! website before running the bookmarklet.

In the example pictured above I was logged into Yahoo!, I ran the “Backup Cookies” bookmarklet to save my existing cookies. I was then able to logout of Yahoo! and run the new bookmarklet to restore all of my login credentials. It’s really that simple.

It’s pretty cool how something as simple as cookies can be used to restore your login status, but it’s something you also want to be careful with. Doing this would also mean that if the information ended up in the wrong hands that it could do some severe damage. For security reasons I recommend that you be especially cautious if you synchronize your bookmarks with a third-party online service.

Hat tip to Thilak for pointing out the Firefox Extension!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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A week ago the world went wild over CERN’s tentative claim that it could make neutrinos travel faster than light. Suddenly, intergalactic tourism and day trips to the real Jurassic Park were back on the menu, despite everything Einstein said. Now, however, a team of scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands reckons it’s come up with a more plausible (and disappointing) explanation of what happened: the GPS satellites used to measure the departure and arrival times of the racing neutrinos were themselves subject to Einsteinian effects, because they were in motion relative to the experiment. This relative motion wasn’t properly taken into account, but it would have decreased the neutrinos’ apparent journey time. The Dutch scientists calculated the error and came up with the 64 nanoseconds. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s almost exactly the margin by which CERN’s neutrinos were supposed to have beaten light. So, it’s Monday morning, Alpha Centauri and medieval jousting tournaments remain as out of reach as ever, and we just thought we’d let you know.

Remember those faster-than-light neutrinos? Great, now forget ’em originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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