Paul O'Flaherty

Browsers, OS, Mobile, Resolution – The Top 10 Of Everything

I’m sure you’ve all heard me boasting lately (probably to the point of wanting to stab me in the eye with your pen) about how happy we’ve been with the traffic that our fledgling humor site, Daily Shite is getting.

Daily Shite is a very interesting site to me, not just because I own it, but because it is an ” every man” site. Our demographics and audience are not the tech crowd. Nor are they of any one particular niche. We’re a bit of everything for everybody, something which has come about by the fact that we don’t post anything with a  visual over roughly PG 13. In other words, no T&A, so you can browse at work, or school or with your girlfriend and not worry

This universal appeal makes the statistics gathered by tools such as Google Analytics (which is where all the stats in this post come from) incredibly interesting because it gives a more real world view of browser and OS usage than looking at the statistics for this blog or TechCrunch would. Niches tend to be skewed one way or the other and Daily Shite manages to avoid all that.

Anyway, the graphs below are based on our Google Analytics for the past 30 days (February 5th 2010 – March 7th 2010) and cover 1,427,403 unique visits (not page views, that’s a far higher number but useless here, all we want is actual user statistics).

The Top 10 Browsers:

Firefox is way out in the lead with a massive 74.77%

The big surprise here is that Chrome (11.28% of traffic) is seriously outpacing Internet Explorer (7.72%). Another surprise is that IE only makes up less than 8% of our traffic.

The break down of IE usage is also interesting with almost 72% using Internet Explorer 8 and just 3% still back on the archaic IE6.

The Top 10 Operating Systems:

Does Linux matter anymore?

No surprise that Windows in the big leader here. I am surprised to see Mac OS at nearly 23% and I’m also wondering how long it will be before iPhone and iPod (and iPad) start to eclipse Linux.

Vista is the dominant Microsoft OS at the moment with at over 40% but a big surprise is the Windows 7 adoption which is already making up over 24% of our windows based users. I expect to see both XP and Vista numbers decline over time as Win 7 adoption continues.

Top Ten Browser & Operating System Combinations

Firefox is the browser of choice

Mac users must not like Safari all that much. Firefox is getting more than 4 times the love than Safari does on it’s native system and Chrome is making decent inroads with 1.27%. Of little surprise however, is that regardless of what operating system you use, Firefox is the browser of choice.

I thought that in 2010 Java support would be almost ubiquitous, however 8.62% or 123,001 or our visitors didn’t have Java support enabled.  This can’t be accounted for by mobile visits because mobile traffic only made up 0.56% of our visits ( a number which we are definitely working to improve.).

Over 8% of users don't have Java enabled

Top 10 Mobile Operating Systems

iPhone and iPod dominate

No real surprises here as the iPhone and iPod dominate with over 78% of the traffic combined. Android puts in a good showing at almost 12% and I wonder if it’s not time to say “bye bye” to PalmOS?

Top 10 Screen Resolutions

1024x768 isn't going away any time soon

While these numbers probably aren’t that interesting to most folks, to developers they are key as we get some idea of what kind of screen real estate we have to play with and what kind of resolutions we need to be targeting.

The most telling resolutions here are the dominant 1280×800, which is probably due to laptop owners and people who purchased early TFT’s, and 1024×768 which is still in use by over 9% of our visitors so I don’t think developers will be able to drop support for that resolution anytime soon.

So, that’s out roundup based on the past 30 days of traffic and 1,427,403 unique visits according to Google Analytics.

There’s a lot of interesting information to be gleaned from this and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. I’ll do another post like this in a month or two in order to see how the landscape has changed and what we can learn from it.

Windows 8 To Support 128-Bit?

128-bit Windows 8?

The Windows 7 launch parties are soon to be kicking off but Microsoft is already looking to the future and working on 128-bit architecture compatibility for Windows 8 and 9.

While the stomping boots of progress cannot be halted in their relentless path, am I the only one who believes that this is premature? Perhaps the effort should be spent on getting everybody onto 64-bit platforms first and fully exploring the potential of the 64-bit space.

We have to have a cut off point. When will Windows 8 come out? 3 years? I believe they’re aiming for 2012. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that everybody, especially the notoriously slow to upgrade corporations will have abandoned their 32-bit hardware. Are vendors and developers going to have to support 3 versions of their programs?

Or will things still be like they are today, except instead of people running 32-bit applications on 64-bit machines they’ll be running 32-bit apps on 128-bit machines?

What XP Netbook Manufactures Aren’t Telling You?

Your XP Netbook that you just bought isn’t secure. Nor will it ever be. It’s running an 8 year old operating system for which support has been discontinued since April of 2009. There will not be any new security patches or updates for your XP netbook. Not from Microsoft at least.

Microsoft announced on April 3rd last year ( 2008 ) that it had bowed to demand of manufacturers and would allow them to sell Windows XP Home for ULCPCs (ultra low cost personal computers or netbooks) will be until June 30, 2010, or one year after general availability of the next version of Windows.

Michael Dix, General Manager of Windows Client Product Management, also made it very clear in the same interview that just because OEMs could sell netbooks with XP on it, did not mean they were going to be supporting it beyond April 2009:

I should also note that there will also be no impact on our technical support plans—mainstream technical support will continue to be available until April 2009 and extended support will continue until April 2014.

Now I know some of you are baying for Steve Ballmers blood at this point and ready to blame Microsoft for this apparent “injustice” or trickery, but step back and think for a minute about who really is to blame on this occasion. Here’s a hint: It’s not Microsoft.

This all came to my attention today when I read that Microsoft would not be patching a bug in XP that it had already fixed in Vista, citing the age of XPs code as making it unfeasible and I ended up in a lengthy discussion on Twitter trying to explain why it was not Microsoft people should be mad at, but the manufacturers, the OEM’s.

The fact of the matter is that when the manufactures approached Microsoft, due to consumer demand, they entered into the arrangement knowing Microsofts support lifecycle and exactly when support for XP was due to end. Microsoft have never hid or even glossed over the fact that support for XP would be ending last April and I would hazard a guess that the OEM partners involved got a pretty good deal on XP due to that fact.

Yet, this knowledge in hand, the netbook manufacturers have sold and continue to sell and advertise machines that are running an operating system that will not be receiving an more support, bug fixes or security upgrades.

On the whole XP is a dead horse to Microsoft and their only interest in providing any support for it is at business level, which means businesses with XP Professional (and even they would like to bump those up to Windows 7 ASAP ). These are the only licenses that may qualify for extended support as XP Home is a consumer product and does not qualify as business or development software.

Microsoft are more interested in the imminent release of the excellent Windows 7 and erasing the memory of Vista while moving on to the next project.

So where does this leave you? It leaves you with a bone to pick with the company that produced your netbook and quite possibly with your retailer as well.

Questions have to be asked of both. Why weren’t consumers informed when purchasing these machines that the operating system was going, or at this point, is out of date and no longer supported?

Of course, I’m sure that the OEM’s and retailers alike will push the responsibility back on the consumer, stating that if they’re savvy enough to be looking for a netbook they should be savvy enough to do some research on the product they’re about to drop a lot of hard earned cash for.

Frankly I agree with the manufactures and retailers on that score, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that they should have actively informed customers that this was the situation when they were purchasing the netbooks and included it in the advertising literature. After all, it’s a serious thing and a big deciding factor to know that the operating system is no longer supported.

One last thing, considering the OEM’s decided to go with XP knowing that the OS was about to end it’s support lifecycle, should they be held accountable to move into an paid support arrangement with Microsoft similar to what they have in place for business software?

Opera, the whiney spoilt kid that only a mother could love

The numbers speak for themselves.

Microsoft are due to defend their IE policies to the European Commission after Opera lodged complaints about Microsoft’s IE bundling policies with Windows.

Opera (you know them, they’re the guys with the web browser that nobody’s heard of except for them lodging antitrust complaints) are simply being a bunch of whiney little bastards.

Their argument that Microsoft bundling IE with Windows hurts consumer choice is quite simply the wailing of an untalented spoilt brat who hasn’t been picked for the football team.

Lets be clear here. Anybody who has any idea how to use a PC is capable of downloading and installing a new browser. Don’t believe me? Just go look at the statistics of browser usage. Firefox is the dominant browser and doesn’t come pre-installed on a windows machine.

Further to that, forcing naive first time users to choose between browsers that they’ve never heard of is more damaging to the user experience that not giving them a choice. You may as well be asking most of them to touch their assholes with their elbows. They won’t have a clue how to do it, but will eventually end up installing any browser out of sheer frustration.

Regardless of Opera’s charges against Microsoft, am I the only one who thinks that government should stay the hell away from telling companies like Microsoft what they can and can’t bundle with their operating systems as along a it’s possible to install alternative software afterward?

They wouldn’t get away with this in the hardware world. If Panasonic wanted Sony (or vice versa) to offer all it’s stereos with the choice of a Panasonic CD player, do you think it would happen?

Finally, lets look at the statistics again. Firefox had 46.5% of the market in March, that’s more than all versions of IE combined. Opera had 2.3% percent.

I do believe that the people at Opera should take note of that.

Instead of wasting time, energy and money to force Microsoft give them market share, maybe they should get their thumbs out of their asses and deliver a killer browser that wins market share because it rocks.

Firefox did it, Google is doing it with Chrome! Why can’t you?

(Photo by Jill Greenberg)

Everybody’s talking – right?

An IM conversation with Sara from Suburban Oblivion about the new Microsoft ad campaign with Seinfeld and Bill Gates.

The conversation says it all really!

[15:50:12] Paul O’Flaherty says:
[15:53:21] Paul O’Flaherty says: Did you see this yet?
[15:53:21] Paul O’Flaherty says: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/windows/default.aspx
[15:54:31] Sara says: the ads? no
[15:54:43] Paul O’Flaherty says: Don’t know what to make of it
[15:54:49] Sara says: let me see
[15:54:53] Sara says: hang on
[15:55:00] Paul O’Flaherty says: Take your time
[15:55:03] Paul O’Flaherty says: I’m not going anywhere
[16:00:28] Sara says: just watched
[16:00:34] Sara says: drugs..very heavy drugs
[16:01:08] Paul O’Flaherty says: LOL – am still undecided as to wether or not this is drugs as you say, or the beginning of a series (which it will be part of) that may broder on the edge of genius
[16:01:13] Paul O’Flaherty says: er.. border
[16:01:19] Paul O’Flaherty says: will need to think about it for a bit more
[16:01:26] Paul O’Flaherty says: btw.. my mouse mat burst
[16:01:30] Sara says: well, it’s off-beat, but smart
[16:01:41] Paul O’Flaherty says: sure is
[16:01:46] Sara says: shows Gates in a different light than you usually see him
[16:01:54] Sara says: a bit humanizing
[16:02:02] Sara says: able to laugh at himself
[16:02:08] Sara says: which is not how most people view him
[16:02:13] Paul O’Flaherty says: And how did they make BillyG seam more normal and cool and “fluid” than Seinfeld
[16:02:21] Sara says: Seinfeld, everyone knows and relates to
[16:02:50] Sara says: so I don’t know if there’s going to be a point to it, or its just a PR thing
[16:02:55] Sara says: but I’d go with genius
[16:03:02] Paul O’Flaherty says: Yeah me too
[16:03:08] Sara says: its going to get everyone talking
[16:03:14] Sara says: “wtf is it about”
[16:03:15] Paul O’Flaherty says: Already has
[16:03:20] Sara says: just like us now
[16:03:29] Sara says: so it’s working either way
[16:03:38] Paul O’Flaherty says: yep
[16:03:51] Sara says: I love it

Judge for yourself.

What’s $25 dollars between stores?

A hell of a lot if you ask me!! While in the U.S. recently I picked up a Microsoft LifeChat ZX-6000 wireless headset for my laptop (which has been performing exceptionally well!) in Best Buy for around $43 before tax.

A few minutes later I was in Circuit City and the exact same headset (and bear in mind that I was less than five minutes away from where I bought the original) for a staggering $69 (also before tax)!!

What gives? How can their be such a disparity in prices between two stores which are very close together, in the same town and for the same product?

I suppose I should not be surprised.

If you visit Microsofts site to view the prices they give a recommended retail price of $69.95 yet their "price compare" feature quotes prices from $39.95 (Amazon) all the way up to $69.99.

While I’m talking about prices, let me have a minor gripe about the fact that in Europe we advertise the price of products in store (and elsewhere) with taxes included. Airlines and U.S. retailers please take note that this is much more convenient for customers.

How would you handle this?

Okay so looking back on this site I noticed a post which I wrote in the middle of February called "Proactive Security" which bemoaned the fact that little had changed with respect to end users attitude towards security since I had written a post 4 years earlier.

Well that post got me thinking about an email I received a while back (which has had the senders name removed to protect the deluded) and spawned the question: "How would the readers of O’Flaherty deal with this"?

After all it’s a common problem that I’m sure most of us have to handle fairly regularly for friends and relatives.

So, answers please as trackbacks or comments.

The best answer will be promoted to a full post complete with link love back to your blog.

Please bear in mind that the sender of the email was running Windows Vista and did NOT want their hard disk reformatted.

Here’s the email:

Sorry to bother you with such a trivial matter,

but who can you recommend as a reliable and economical alternative to Norton (Symantec)?

Long story short, both home computer and laptop have been bloodly well riddled with adware spyware and a bloody worm ( can’t remember the name of the worm but lets just say the fecking thing is tenacious).

It all just managed to slip right through Norton 08 without sending up any flares.

Got onto their virus support team on Sunday night and they said it was 100% cleared, but damn it after start up last night it was there again but this time it fecked me about from pillar to post, redirecting and everything, so Norton got a second call – and this time they reckon they have it beat.

Needless to say I no longer trust my home pc to do any of the usual emailing banking etc.

How do I manage to keep it cleared and who do I get instead of Norton?

You who are all powerful and great and know everything there is to know about the www – please help?

Best of regards,

(Name removed to protect the insane)

So remember guys and gals that the best answer gets promoted to a full post which means some nice linky love sent to you own blog.

Can you help this obviously insane person?

Free 2GB USB Bracelet from Microsoft

I just signed up to get a free 2GB USB bracelet from Microsoft which is being handed out in commemoration of their partnership with Novell.

The ground-breaking collaboration between Novell and Microsoft is delivering solutions that will reduce the complexity and increase the ROI of your mixed-IT environments. Solutions that will enable you to create a dynamic data centre with bi-directional virtualisation, allowing you to increase performance, savings and simplicity and build your data centre without compromise.

Finally, a way of making Linux and Windows work better together!

For once these giveaways do not appear to be limited to just the U.S. as the form allowed me to register form here in Denmark and I managed to make it to the confirmation page telling me the bracelet will be shipped within a few business days.

Have you signed up for yours yet? Something for nothing is (almost) always good!

What ever happened to ION Linux?

Back in June of 2004 I wrote about Element Computers who had developed ION, a Linux desktop OS, which was supposed to run all windows executables at top speeds?

Element Computer has overcome the final barrier for Linux adoption
on desktops by mainstream businesses.

The company has unveiled the worlds first Linux desktop OS, called ION, which can run all Windows executables at top speeds, using a new WinLauncher technology powered by Win4Lin from Netraverse.

As of July 1st, all Element Computer laptops, tablets, and PCs will
become Win enabled, and allow users to copy and paste between Linux and Windows applications on the same desktop, combined with filesystem integration and common “My Documents”, drives and printers.

I know this OS was only ever supposed to be released with the hardware from Element Computers, but what ever happened to it?

Was it Element Computers bought out? Did it fold? Was their code merged into another distro and if so why do we still not have seamless Windows applications integration in Linux?

Windows Live Writer Beta 3

I’m a big fan of Windows Live Writer, so Rebecca Pezely (from the WLW team) just put big smile on my face when she emailed me to let me know that Beta 3 WLW Final will be coming out later today.

Some highlights of this release:

• Insert videos using our new ‘Insert Video’ dialog
• Upload images to Picasaweb when publishing to your Blogger blog
• Publish XHTML-style markup
• Use Writer in 28 additional languages
• Print your posts
• Justify-align post text
• Better image handling (fewer blurry images)
• Resolved installation issues from last release
• Many other bug fixes and enhancements

Also coming today is are new beta versions of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Toolbar, and OneCare Family Safety.

Find more information on the Windows Live Writer blog.

Updated 7-11-2007 06:57 am: I’ve got my information all backwards on this one. Please ignore – anything that I’ve struck out. It’s actually the full release of WLW and not Beta 3.

There’s a lesson to be learned here. Never post when you’re over tired

Access to drives from Vista / XP start menu

This little tip is great if you have multiple drives on your system and want to get to them with the minimum of fuss.

If you want to access a particular drive from the Start Menu you normally have to do the following:

• Click on the Vista Orb
• Click “Computer”
• Wait for Explorer to open
• Click on the drive that you want to access.

Thankfully there is an easier way to have all your drives appear on your start menu as shown in the image above.

• Right click on the Vista Orb and select “Properties“
• Click the “Customize” button in the “Start Menu” tab. (The “Start Menu” tab opens by default)
• When the tab opens select the “Display as Menu“  under “Computer” (It’s at the top).

That’s it, you now have all your drives available from the start menu.

This tip is probably most useful for folks who, like me, have turned off desktop icons so can’t double click on the “Computer” icon.

This also works in Windows XP if you take the following path:

• Right click Start Menu select Properties
• Click the “Customize” button in the “Start Menu” tab. Select the “Advanced” tab in the window that pops up
• When the tab opens select the “Display as Menu“  under “Computer” .