Category: OS

More stats on OS and browser share

At the beginning of May I wrote an article with some stats on OS and browser share and, perhaps labouring under the misapprehension that some people found it interesting, have decided to revisit those stats after roughly three months have passed.

The figures are taken from the period 27th April to 27th July, and are the mean average of two different sites I manage. For more details on audience and traffic I refer you back to the previous article.

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Some stats on OS and browser share

Last week on Twitter I shared some browser and OS statistics from a site I manage. These turned out to be quite popular, so I’ve decided to expand on them a little further, and also add the stats from another site I manage, to broaden the base numbers a little. I’m not trying to make any point here, just sharing a little bit of analytics data. If there’s any interest in my doing so, I’ll provide further updates in the future; leave a comment if there’s anything in particular you’d like to know.

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Firefox 3.6 uses the W3C File API

Last month the W3C released a working draft of the File API, which defines the basic representations for files, lists of files, errors raised by access to files, and programmatic ways to read files. The Firefox team have already implemented much of it, and have released a series of impressive demos on hacks.mozilla.org, which you can see if you have a recent beta of Firefox 3.6 (or a nightly trunk build).

The four demos shown to date display different (although related) aspects of the API, showing first multiple file uploads, then a drag and drop upload interface, next adding progress information (although this doesn’t work for me), then reading EXIF data from a JPEG image. You can imagine how these combined would be used for native drag and drop uploading to Flickr, for example.

The File API plays a big part in integrating the browser more tightly with the OS, particularly when combined with the drag and drop functionality, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the other browsers implement this. Congratulations to the Firefox team for their work on this, and hacks.mozilla.org for some great demos.


Where is Safari 3?

Why hasn’t Safari 3 come out of Beta yet? Leopard was released weeks ago, and Safari 3.04 was included in that; presumably that was a full release version and not a Beta, so why hasn’t a full release happened for other OS’s yet? I understand the Windows version might be delayed a little, but the Tiger version?


Mozilla Prism: Am I missing something?

Although they didn’t create the concept, Mozilla popularised tabbed browsing with the release of Firefox. Tabbed browsing is, of course, a very good thing; the old IE model of having a separate window for every instance of a site you open became unmanageable when computers got more powerful and websites no longer slowed down the whole machine. Now all of the major browsers feature the tabbed interface.

Which makes Mozilla’s latest invention, Prism, seem a bit of a weird step backwards;

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Bringing out the GIMP

As an Ubuntu user at home, I don’t have the option of installing imaging software such as Photoshop. Luckily, the best free and open-source alternative, GIMP, has just released a new version – and it’s fantastic.

While it doesn’t perhaps have quite the myriad of features that Adobe’s product does, it does have every tool I’ve ever needed (and a few more besides). Like Photoshop it’s equally good for photo manipulation and web graphics creation; this introduction gives a good overview of its functions, and there are more detail in the features and release notes pages.

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Aside

I’ve updated my Speaking page to include more conferences, more videos, and a little on my speaking requirements and preferences. I’m planning to cut down on the number of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to interesting offers and opportunities, so please get in touch if you’re organising an event.

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