2005-04 - Weblog - Xiven.com

Into the Fire

Mozilla Firefox has now been downloaded 50,000,000 (50 million) times since it was released in December last year!

Just to show how much of an impact Firefox is making, here's some browser statistics for this month from a couple of websites that I maintain:

Browser usage statistics for April 2005 on www.printedmusic.net
User Agent	Usage
MS Internet Explorer	86.6%
Firefox	8.7%
Unknown	2.6%
Safari	0.9%
Mozilla	0.4%
Netscape	0.2%
Opera	0.1%

Browser usage statistics for April 2005 on www.spartanpress.co.uk
User Agent	Usage
MS Internet Explorer	81.0%
Firefox	11.4%
Netscape	2.7%
Safari	1.7%
Unknown	1.1%
Opera	0.7%
Mozilla	0.6%
Camino	0.3%

Keep in mind that (unlike this site), these are not the websites typically visited by a large proportion of early adopters where Firefox percentages have been seen to be much larger.

The days of IE6 holding back the development of the web will last for a while longer yet, but the success of Firefox means it'll be years rather than decades. This is good news for all alternative browsers out there.

Posted: 2005-04-29 20:09:09 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Prophecy

…and a thousand geeks gasp as a web browser successfully draws a smiley face.

Posted: 2005-04-28 22:55:58 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Politics

Who Should You Vote For? (via The LambCutlet Disorganisation)

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour	-8
Conservative	12
Liberal Democrat	44
UK Independence Party	8
Green	30

You should vote:

Liberal Democrat

Posted: 2005-04-27 22:02:23 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Smoke & Mirrors

About a week ago Opera Software released Opera 8 to the masses. Being that I'm a web developer I should really give my impressions on this browser.

Unfortunately there's a slight problem with this. I currently connect to the Internet via Satellite (which incidentally is less than ideal for playing World of Warcraft), and something about this satellite connection causes major problems with HTTP Pipelining. I know this because I tried enabling it in Firefox once (it is not enabled by default in Firefox) and saw the results.

Opera 8, in its infinite wisdom, uses pipelining by default. This is the result:

Well no problem, surely there must be a way to disable it in the preferences? Well, if there is, it's far too well-hidden for me.

Posted: 2005-04-26 00:25:37 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (1)

Show and Tell

Some concrete details about some of the rendering changes in Internet Explorer 7 were announced a few days ago.

Mostly this seems like positive stuff: full PNG support will be nice, I've used alpha transparency in several recent website designs myself and I've had to resort to using Javascript hacks to make it work in IE (no use if Javascript is disabled, and with a few odd side-effects).

The CSS consistency problems being addressed is also very welcome. I've had the pleasure of trying to deal with the Peekaboo bug on several occasions. Calling these bugs inconsistencies is somewhat laughable though.

The real tests will be:

How much of CSS2.1 will it support? (eg. will we get such useful things as min- and max-width, position: fixed, CSS2 selectors, etc.
Will we get any CSS3 features? (opacity springs to mind)
Will there be proper XHTML support? (understand application/xhtml+xml and treat it as XML)

I won't bet on it.

Posted: 2005-04-25 00:22:48 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Revisions

Voidwars Game 9: Revisions is almost ready to go. The 64 places are filling up very quickly this time around. This round I have decided not to play in the game as such; I shall instead take on a different role, that of a reporter for the new Galactic Broadcasting Corporation regional Void news network…

Posted: 2005-04-24 02:53:00 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

The Gamekeeper

So, what have I been doing lately? Well, this month I have been mostly playing: World of Warcraft.

I had been playing EverQuest II for several months, but the gameplay really started to drag, and since GwieF, Kamakaze and Cosmo were already playing WoW, I decided to join them. Since then I've been playing catch-up as they were all around about level 40 when I started. Fortunately they decided to slow down their playing for a few weeks, and I'm now only 5 levels away from them (and, more importantly, I have a horse).