September Google Zeitgeist

Discuss how to use and promote Web standards with the Mozilla Gecko engine.
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mbrubeck
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September Google Zeitgeist

Post by mbrubeck »

Google's stats for September are now online at:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

This shows a small but noticeable increase in Gecko browser usage:
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y3k
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Post by y3k »

thats really hard to see
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dakboy
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Post by dakboy »

Yeah, a larger version would be nice. I blew it up to fit on my screen to get a better idea of what's doing there. Moz is definitely climbing, NS4 on a decline, and the IE6 increase seems to be at the expense of IE <6 and "Other" - unfortunately "Other" is likely composed of Mozilla allies like Opera & Safari.
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Post by jrobbio »

dakboy wrote:Yeah, a larger version would be nice. I blew it up to fit on my screen to get a better idea of what's doing there. Moz is definitely climbing, NS4 on a decline, and the IE6 increase seems to be at the expense of IE <6 and "Other" - unfortunately "Other" is likely composed of Mozilla allies like Opera & Safari.

Remember that Opera doesn't do itself justice by making itself appear as IE a lot of the time. I'm happy as long as the Mozilla line keeps increasing though and I predict exponential usage in the next two years .

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Post by moronicbajebus »

jrobbio wrote:...I predict exponential usage in the next two years.
I hope you are right.
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jareha
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Post by jareha »

What happened to cause a sudden jump (between February/March 2003) in IE 6.0 usage while that of IE 5.0 simultaneously dropped?

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schapel
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Post by schapel »

dakboy wrote:...IE6 increase seems to be at the expense of IE <6 and "Other" - unfortunately "Other" is likely composed of Mozilla allies like Opera & Safari.


I won't shed a tear for Opera because they don't promote web standards. It allows the use of IE's proprietary DOM such as document.all, and by default uses the filename extension instead of the MIME type to determine what to do with a file just like IE does. Additionally, it's just a lot buggier than the other browsers. Opera 7 was rewritten from the ground up recently, and tons of bugs were introduced. Opera's usage share has always been under 1% and is likely to stay there.

Safari, on the other hand, is like Mozilla in that it enforces web standards. And because it's been shipped as the default (only?) browser on new Macs for several months and should continue to be the default browser for years, its usage share is going to increase to 2-3% within the next couple of years.
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RABID FANBOY WARNING

Post by d_ralphie »

schapel wrote:I won't shed a tear for Opera because they don't promote web standards. It allows the use of IE's proprietary DOM such as document.all,


give the damn browser war a rest - especially when you are an ignorant fanboy making a complete fool of yourself. did you know that gecko supports lots of msie dom? innerhtml was added to gecko before it was supported by opera. apparently you had no idea, being a rabid fanboy and everything.

maybe it's time to remove your head from your ass and foot from your mouth.

and by default uses the filename extension instead of the MIME type to determine what to do with a file just like IE does.


because very few servers send the correct mime type. and msie does content sniffing actually. opera does very little actual content sniffing to my knowledge so it is very predictable in what happens. besides, you can change the option if you want (but you would just end up breaking half the web).

you are just a rabid fanboy who lives in a fantasy world. the rest of us want to use the real web and unfortunately, we haven't quite reached utopia yet.

Additionally, it's just a lot buggier than the other browsers. Opera 7 was rewritten from the ground up recently, and tons of bugs were introduced. Opera's usage share has always been under 1% and is likely to stay there.


what a useless comment. typical braindead fanboy.

Safari, on the other hand, is like Mozilla in that it enforces web standards. And because it's been shipped as the default (only?) browser on new Macs for several months and should continue to be the default browser for years, its usage share is going to increase to 2-3% within the next couple of years.


safari uses khtml, which is inferior to both gecko and presto when it comes to standards compliance and handling badly coded pages.

ignorance is bliss. you must be in extacy, schapel.
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Re: RABID FANBOY WARNING

Post by dtobias »

d_ralphie wrote:maybe it's time to remove your head from your ass and foot from your mouth.


Maybe he could've been nicer to Opera than he was, but you certainly won't make many friends around here with comments like that.
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Re: RABID FANBOY WARNING

Post by dtobias »

d_ralphie wrote:
and by default uses the filename extension instead of the MIME type to determine what to do with a file just like IE does.


because very few servers send the correct mime type. and msie does content sniffing actually. opera does very little actual content sniffing to my knowledge so it is very predictable in what happens. besides, you can change the option if you want (but you would just end up breaking half the web).


It looks like it's time for me to drag out my test suite again...

http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.txt
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.html
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.gif
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.exe
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.zip
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.rar
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.au
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.wav
http://webtips.dan.info/cgi-bin/plaintext.pl/test.wmv

ALL of these should display as plain text in a standards-compliant browser.

Last time I tried it, several of them fail spectacularly in Opera (in its default configuration)... and they're DIFFERENT ones than the ones that fail in MSIE. So much for consistency.
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dakboy
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Post by dakboy »

schapel wrote:
dakboy wrote:...IE6 increase seems to be at the expense of IE <6 and "Other" - unfortunately "Other" is likely composed of Mozilla allies like Opera & Safari.


I won't shed a tear for Opera because they don't promote web standards. It allows the use of IE's proprietary DOM such as document.all, and by default uses the filename extension instead of the MIME type to determine what to do with a file just like IE does. Additionally, it's just a lot buggier than the other browsers. Opera 7 was rewritten from the ground up recently, and tons of bugs were introduced. Opera's usage share has always been under 1% and is likely to stay there.
I'll start with: all software has bugs. Get over it.

As far as "allowing use of IE's proprietary DOM", Mozilla has done this as well, in particular with innerHTML. Sometimes you have to make concessions to make progress. If Mozilla didn't support innerHTML, a lot of things would break, and that doesn't help the cause at all.

For the record, I'm developing an IE-only app at work right now but it's about 80% DOM-compliant - every time I ask a co-worker about doing something he says "you're doing this with innerHTML?" My response is "hell no, DOM methods". If I get a free weekend sometime I plan on changing my IE-only stuff (window.event mostly) to something more compliant. It is such a pain in the ass developing using the standard DOM stuff then going back to my books to find the bastardized IE version when I find the DOM method doesn't work - but I never bothered learning the IE-proprietary stuff, I always looked to the W3C in my self-education.
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Re: RABID FANBOY WARNING

Post by MORA »

d_ralphie wrote:give the damn browser war a rest - especially when you are an ignorant fanboy making a complete fool of yourself. did you know that gecko supports lots of msie dom? innerhtml was added to gecko before it was supported by opera. apparently you had no idea, being a rabid fanboy and everything.

maybe it's time to remove your head from your ass and foot from your mouth.

... said the man who has posted only Opera plugs in a Mozilla forum! Talk about double standards... Well, judging from that impressive post history, you certainly seem to have some issue with 'rabid fanboys'; most likely because you are one yourself. Dear troll, could you please do us all a favor, and get a life? Thanks a lot.
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Re: RABID FANBOY WARNING

Post by schapel »

d_ralphie wrote:
schapel wrote:I won't shed a tear for Opera because they don't promote web standards. It allows the use of IE's proprietary DOM such as document.all,


give the damn browser war a rest


We're in the Evangelism forum, and Mozilla is all about promoting web standards. The truth is, Mozilla and Safari both promote web standards by not supporting certain proprietary IE extensions, in particular, document.all. Yes, Mozilla does support innerhtml and marquee, but that's just two rarely used features that have turned out to be useful and practical to implement.

What matters is which browsers people use and whether they promote web standards. Mozilla and Safari both do, and both are gaining users rapidly. On the other hand, Opera tries its best to be an IE clone. The latest versions even support colored scrollbars. It's a good thing for web standards that Opera has lost users over the past year or so.

<b>Update</b>: Added one word to clarify a sentence so it won't be misinterpreted when taken out of context.
Last edited by schapel on November 22nd, 2005, 8:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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jgraham
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Post by jgraham »

Anyway, to get this vaugely back on topic, remember that the google stats are likely to be just as unreliable as any other set of web stats and possibly moreso. In particular, it's not clear:
<ul>
<li>What is counted. Is it homepage hits? Is it total searches? Does it filter by IP address?</li>
<li>Whether searches from the various search bars are counted</li>
<li>How the count is affected by the IE-only google toolbar, which is known to communicate with the google servers for every page visited</li>
<li>What effect tabbed browsing has on the statistics. Tabs mean less navigating back and forth so maybe less google hits</li>
<li>That the average search behaviour of IE and Non IE users are comparable. Maybe IE users need more searches to find the same thing (on average). Maybe all the technologically-clueless people use IE and so contribute to it's position by using google as a surrogate bookmarks service. Maybe Mozilla users use the internet more and so search more.</li>
<li>How sophisticated the browser detection employed is</li>
<li>Google is used by a representative sample of the web using population*</li>
</ul>
I'm sure there are many more reasons why this data may be less than reliable. So although the trend is probably correct, I wouldn't put too much empahsis on either the absolute value or on the gradient at any one time, even though google is clearly one of the most used sites on the web.

*The problem is here is more general - what is a representative web user and what is the relevance of such an entity. Is a Linux/Mozilla user who visits 100 pages per day worth 100 Windows/IE users who visit 1? Or are the Windows users worth 100 times the Linux user? The only statistics relevant to a particular site are those for the site itself, and even then interpreting raw access logs is a difficult business.
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Post by Sailfish »

jgraham wrote:<snip lots of interesting and valid assertions ... but />

Even taking all of that into consideration, their combined variance wouldn't be more than 5%, or less.

Let's not kid ourselves, IE is still the undisputed leader by a huge margin. Perhaps when Gecko gets within 10% of IE's lead then we can rightfully revisit these other issues.

fwiw
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