The Browser Den

The end of year stats have shown a growth in IE 7 usage recently. This can be explained by a growth in readership. At the begining this site was primarily visited by Firefox users.

1. Firefox - 65.94%
2. IE - 18.88%
3. Safari - 6.04%
4. Mozilla - 3.43%
5. Opera - 3.06%
6. Konqueror - 1.09%
7. Camino - 0.87%

Of all the Firefox users 59.28% use version 2 and the majority of the rest use 1.5.x. IE currently has 59.6% of users still use version 6 while 39.23% have upgraded to IE7.

On the operating system front we have a higher than usual readership using Linux or Mac OS X but Windows still takes the lead:

1. Windows 68.5% (XP 88.01%, 2000 6.86%, Vista 1.72%)
2. Linux 17.64%
3. Mac OS X 13.09% (PPC 58.75%, Intel 41.25%)

It’ll already be 2007 in Australia as I write this, but we’ve still got over 12 hours to go in the UK. Wherever you are in the world have a great new year and let’s hope 2007 is another interesting year in the browser space.

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Blake Ross has recently blogged about Google Tips and whether it’s a sign that Google are starting to care less about offering an unbiased view and more about pushing their own services.

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Mozilla Thunderbird 2 beta 1 has been released. The release of Thunderbird and Firefox are not synchronised and currently Thunderbird 2 should be released in the first half of 2007.Beyond Thunderbird 2, future Thunderbird releases will benefit from contributions from Qualcomm’s Eudora team. Although Thunderbird and Eudora are planned to remain separate products at this time, being based on the Thunderbird code base will mean that both clients will benefits to improvements on common features. (more…)

Microsoft have made mention of the ‘IE7 optimized for Google‘ which was recently brought to my attention through a posting on Blake’s blog.

Yahoo was the first company I spotted doing this, also USAtoday and web.de also have their own customised versions of the browser. (more…)

The first Firefox Flicks TV ads are now ready to be broadcast. The Firefox Flicks website shows the chosen 4.

It’s currently only in Boston and SF, but if successful could be spread to other countries. More details on the Firefox Flicks blog.

To make this campaign possible they asked for 72 sponsors and managed to get them in a matter of hours.

Gran Paradiso alpha 1 has been released. It’s the first alpha release of Gecko 1.9 which will form the basis of Firefox 3.

The main changes in this release have been to the Gecko backend and very little has changed in the browser front end.

The release is intended for testers and developers only and not intended for the general public.

The IE team have written their interpretation of the file:// URI specs. With most operating systems the file: URI is simple, due to the common root used by most non-Microsoft operating systems. For example on Linux /home/dave/index.html would be file:///home/dave/index.html on Mac /Users/dave/index.html would map to file:///Users/dave/index.html but Windows with drive letters and UNC paths had made this more complicated and caused a lot of people using technically invalid URI’s.

One disagreement between Microsoft and Mozilla developers is their interpretation of UNC paths on Windows. These look like \\servername\content\index.html in the blog posting they state:

Incorrect: file:////applib/products/a%2Db/abc%5F9/4148.920a/media/start.swf
Correct: file://applib/products/a-b/abc_9/4148.920a/media/start.swf

However, Mozilla treats the ‘incorrect’ form as the valid form and IE accepts both forms. There’s a reason for this, Mozilla considers all file: URL’s as local even though a UNC path is residing on a different machine it is dealt with by the operating system filesystem layer rather than Mozilla’s network layer.

However, this really doesn’t matter as there’s very little use of file: URI’s for most applications. But it does show how one standard can have different interpretations to different people.

Firebug 1.0 beta 4 was released to the public on the 9th December. Created by Joe Hewitt, a long time Mozilla contributor, has decided to release his work under the same tri-licence as Mozilla Firefox.

Joe Hewitt is working on a new venture called Parakey with Blake Ross, one of the first Firefox developers. This means that Joe will not be able to spend much time on Firebug in the future. He had considered selling Firebug in order to fund the employment of another developer to carry on development while he concentrates on Parakey, but in the end he decided open source was the best option. So if you’re benefitting from this product then they’d appreciate anything you’re willing to donate.
Firebug is an essential tool for web developers offering debugging tools for HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It’s particularly useful for debugging apps that heavily rely on JavaScript such as AJAX apps. It’s only a 288KB download and works with Firefox 2.0. There’s also Firebug Lite, a piece of javascript that provides a basic Firebug console in other browsers including IE, Opera and Safari.

A while ago I mentioned Yahoo’s customised IE7. Now a blog posting linked to from Slashdot is mentioning that Yahoo is promoting IE7 at the bottom of search pages if you view the site in Firefox or an older version of IE (see here).

I still don’t see how promoting IE7 can be in the long term interests of Yahoo, with Microsoft pusing their Windows Live Search promoting IE is just supporting a feirce rival. Then again some people would say if they’re supporting Firefox they’d support Google but that’s not quite the same. Both Yahoo and Google are in the search drop down list in Firefox. Google may be the default in Europe and the US, but Yahoo is the default in most of Asia. For each Firefox localisation they pick the most popular search engine for each area and it happens to be Google in most of the west and Yahoo in most of Asia.

Even if they felt unsure of Firefox then they could partner with Opera, it’s a much smaller download and a more trustworthy partner than Microsoft. Their special edition of IE7 is almost 17MB to download (even though according to the system requirements you need 12MB of disk space - is this the first app that takes up less space than its installer?), why encourage Firefox users to download that massive browser when to get them to default to Yahoo all they need to do is select Yahoo on Firefox’s drop down.
What’s also odd is the ads don’t appear if you’re using Opera or Safari but appear on Firefox even if you’re using Mac or Linux.

UPDATE: What are Google thinking?  Thanks to Blake for spotting this.