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Tag Archives | Web browsers
The Ten Most Popular Browsers on Technologizer
Internet Explorer may remain the world’s most popular browser by most measures, but StatCounter is reporting some numbers that put Firefox on top. One particular version of Firefox, that is: 3.5, which StatCounter says is now the single most popular browser version in the world.
Doing the math by version number rather than for all versions of a particular browser radically shifts the result, since IE users as a lot are clearly the browser users least likely to promptly upgrade to a new version: IE 8, IE 7, and IE 6 are all still in wide use, presumably because IE remains the default browser in the Windows world, and plenty of folks who find themselves with a default never bother to change it. Which is why Microsoft must still go out of its way to urge people to upgrade from IE 6--an eight-year-old browser that dates from an era before there was a Firefox, a Safari, or a Chrome.
So how does browser usage by version break down among Technologizer visitors? Glad you asked. Here are the top ten browser versions–Firefox 3.5 has a humongous lead, Safari 4.0 is in second place, and IE doesn’t show up until third place. The numbers below are percentage of visits to the site over the past month…
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Chrome: Faster Than Safari?
Now that the first beta of Google’s Chrome browser for OS X is out, Google is telling Mac users about it. At the moment, it’s doing so via a promotional dialog box which I’m seeing near the upper right-hand corner of the Google home page in both Safari and Firefox. One that’s about as splashy and pushy as anything Google ever puts there.
Faster than what? The logical assumption is that Google’s saying it’s faster than the browser you’re using now. I haven’t seen any browser benchmarks from the company–comprehensive or otherwise–but when I ran the SunSpider JavaScript test on all the major OS X browsers, Safari performed best. As I said in that story, it was essentially a wash with Chrome (Firefox 3.5 was considerably slower). The test only tells you so much about browser performance. And maybe Google, like Microsoft, is saying that “fast” is about more than traditional speed tests.
But I remain curious: Is Google specifically saying that Chrome for OS X is a faster browser than Safari? (Apple still touts Safari as “the world’s fastest browser,” although as far as I know, it hasn’t compared Safari to the Chrome beta.)
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Which Browser Would You Vote For?
More news about monopolies and governmental action against them: The European Union has ended its antitrust case against Microsoft over Internet Explorer after Microsoft agreed to give European Windows users a ballot screen which will let them choose between IE and eleven (!) other browsers.
A hundred million Europeans will get this feature next year, and at least a few of them are reading this post. But even if you’ve never set foot in an EU country, how about taking this quick poll? The browsers listed are the ones that Microsoft will offer when the ballot screen rolls out.
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Chrome on OS X=More Chrome Users
Over at Computerworld, Gregg Keizer is reporting on new browser stats from Net Applications that show Chrome overtaking Safari as the #3 browser last week, presumably as a result of the launch of the first beta of Chrome for OS X. For last week, 4.4 percent of people in Net Application’s pool used Chrome, a leap of .4 percent. That puts it above Safari’s 4.37 percent, but it’s a squeaker.
To satisfy my own curiosity, I checked out the same numbers for Technologizer visitors.
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Chrome for Mac–Finally!
After what seems like a lifetime of waiting–but was really a little over fifteen months–Mac users can finally get their hands on a beta version of Google’s Chrome browser. Many of us have been running various rough drafts of OS X Chrome and its open-source cousin, Chromium, for months. But this is the first one that Google deems to be finished enough for wide use. And it’s part of a big Chrome news day that also includes betas of a Linux version and Firefox-like extensions.
But Chrome for OS X is missing some of the key features that make Chrome’s Windows version such a distinctive browser, including App Mode and built-in Gears offline technology. It also doesn’t yet support Chrome’s new extensions feature. And the user-interface doesn’t match the delightful minimalism of Chrome for Windows. It’s partially OS X’s fault, since Mac apps are required to have a traditional menu bar with several obligatory menus. But I still pine for the way Chrome for Windows brings the tabs up to the very top of the screen, and tucks all options into a grand total of two menus.
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Goodbye, Gears (Sniff!)
Earlier today, I wrote about the almost-here beta of Google’s Chrome browser for OS X, and mentioned that it doesn’t support Google’s Gears technology for making Web services such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Remember the Milk work without the Web. Turns out the bad news may have less to do with Chrome and more to do with Gears.
The L.A. Times’ Mark Milian has blogged about the lack of Gears in Mac Chrome, and the fact that the upcoming, still-unfinished HTML5 standard will feature Gears-like offline features. Milian got a quote from an unnamed Google spokesman:
We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites.
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Faded Chrome: Google’s Incomplete Mac Browser
If you use a Mac and have been looking forward to an OS X version of Google’s Chrome browser, your patience is about to be rewarded. As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler reports, the Chrome team is stomping out the final handful of bugs it’s planning to eradicate before it ships its first OS X beta. I’ve been waiting for the beta for fifteen months, since the arrival of Chrome for Windows and the first word that a Mac version was in the works.
But MG’s story left me feeling kind of glum about Chrome for OS X. He details some of the features that the first beta will lack, at least in complete form:
- The bookmark manager
- App Mode, which lets you launch Web apps such as Gmail in streamlined browser frames from a desktop icon
- Gears, the Google technology that lets Gmail, Remember the Milk, and other Web services work even when you’re disconnected from the Web
- Full-screen mode
- Bookmark syncing
- Extension support
And I’ve already grumbled about the fact that Chrome for OS X inexplicably needs nine menus to accomplish what Chrome for Windows does in two of ’em. Basically, it looks like multiple things that I thought made Chrome Chrome will be missing from its Mac incarnation.
I don’t mean to be too churlish–especially since some of the missing stuff may get added back in before Mac Chrome leaves beta status and becomes an officially shipping project. I’d love to see Chrome reach feature parity on both platforms soon, in the way that Firefox is just Firefox, whether you’re in Windows, OS X, or Linux. Or at least to get the word that parity is the long-term goal.
For now, Chrome is my main browser when I’m in Windows (which I am the majority of the time at the moment) and I’ll still reach for Safari when I’m on a Mac. I’m okay with that, since I tend to be a promiscuous browser user anyhow. (I’ve also gone through Firefox and Flock periods recently, and dabble in Opera from time to time.)
But if you’d told me fifteen months ago that it would still be unclear in late 2009 when Mac users would get all of Chrome’s goodness, I would never have believed you…
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Thoroughly Modern IE9?
As expected, Microsoft began talking about Internet Explorer 9 in public yesterday at its PDC event in Los Angeles. So far, it’s only talking about its guts–but it’s working on two of the items from my personal IE9 wishlist, faster JavaScript and the beginnings of HTML5 support. Microsoft browser honcho, Dean Hachamovitch, has a blog post up in which he talks about what this means for developers. (It’s a nicely straightforward one, with a chart that shows just how slow IE8’s JavaScript is compared to the competition, and which even discloses that Microsoft has only succeeded in getting IE9 back in the pack so far–it’s still the slowest, but by a lot less.)
Hachamovitch also says that IE9 will utilize hardware acceleration to render graphically-rich sites faster and better. Sounds like a good idea, and like an example of Microsoft attempting to make the fact that IE only runs on Windows into an asset rather than a liability. (Browsers that run on multiple platforms are presumably less likely to get a thorough tweaking to run especially well on one particular OS.)
Still no word on what the company is thinking about interface changes, or when it intends to release the browser. I’m still rooting for a major facelift, but we’ll see…
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Here’s My Internet Explorer 9 Wish List. What’s on Yours?
According to Neowin’s Tom Warren and Cnet News’s Ina Fried, Microsoft will have something–maybe just a little something, but something–to say about its plans for Internet Explorer 9 at its Professional Developers’ Conference in Los Angeles tomorrow. The company often briefs tech reporters in advance about major announcements, but it hasn’t told me a darn thing about IE9. So I’m just as curious as anyone else to know what the upgrade is going to involve.
And for the next few hours, at least, I’m free to ponder the features that would get me excited about a new browser from Microsoft…