Tag Archives: ie

My Blog

The Browser Wars II

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About three and a half years ago I took a look at the browser usage statistics here in The MKX®. A lot has happened since: Safari came out for Windows, mobile browsing finally became usable with the iPhone, and Google released a fast new browser called Chrome. I think it’s about time we take another look:

Browser Internet Q4 2009
(by Net Applications)		 The MKX®
April 2006 		The MKX®
December 2009
Internet Explorer 64% 59.32% 38.57%
Firefox 24.44% 27.12% 34.84%
Safari 4.40% 9.32% 18.55%
Chrome 3.82% No data 5.68%
Opera 2.25% 2.54% 0.49%
Netscape 0.31% 0.85% No data

pie

Conclusions:

  • Firefox, Safari usage keeps climbing.
  • Internet Explorer use is declining.
  • Chrome came out of nowhere and in a few months has a respectable number of users (myself included).
  • People who don’t use Internet Explorer are smarter and better looking. Thus, in average, our readers are smarter and better looking than the rest of the world.
  • Opera is dying a slow, painful death.

As an interesting not, now 2.75% of all our visits are from an iPhone or iPod touch. Thanks for reading.

Democracy, Reality Distortion Field, Tech

Browser comparison

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Safari 4 just came out of beta. I gave it a try at my work computer (a Windows XP machine) just to go back to Chrome shortly after. Now I’m back with Safari. The main reason? Text rendering. See, in Safari you can configure the browser to render its text like Mac OS X does. In my opinion, text looks a lot better in Mac OS X than it does in Windows. Sure, it’s a matter of taste; my excellent taste versus other people’s terrible taste.

To illustrate my point, I took a screenshot of the Facebook homepage. Why? Because it shows text in the English, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabet. You’ll see how Safari’s text looks much better. From left to right: Apple Safari 4, Google Chrome 2.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0,and MS Internet Explorer 7.0:

browser-comparison
Web browser comparison on Windows XP: Safari 4, Google Chrome 2.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, and MS Internet Explorer 7.0 (click to zoom)

What do you think? Which one do you like better?

n

Reality Distortion Field

Safari 4 beta

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overview-hero-image3-20090217

The good people at Apple released Safari 4 beta yesterday. For those not in the know, Safari is Apple‘s web browser. According to the traffic analysis for The MKX® (more on that sometime next month), a large amount of readers are still using Internet Explorer.

At home, I’ve been using Safari for years. Before that I used Camino. At work, I had been using Firefox, but switched to Google Chrome a few months ago and liked it very much. Now I’m giving the new Safari 4 a spin both at home and at work. Call me a browser slut if you’d like, I’ve been known to use iCab and the now free Omniweb in the past, and even IE for Mac back in the Mac OS 8 days.

I like it so far. For example, on Windows I can make the fonts look like they do on the Mac: much better – but perhaps a personal preference… from someone with better taste. I also like the new tabs (heavily borrowed from Chrome) and the fact that it will sync my bookmarks with my home computers and iPhone through my MobileMe account.

You can download it and test it here.