Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

it's really not that hard

Chrome is unique among the current field of browsers in that there are three ways to run it — the default, which is simply the latest stable release (currently 1.0), the beta channel, which offers monthly updates and could have bugs here and there, and the developer channel, which will give you the latest bleeding edge builds and is almost guaranteed to have bugs.

Except that it's not unique at all.

Is it really too much to expect that if you're writing for a popular online tech publication that you be careful about making claims of uniqueness without, you know, actually checking first?

I understand that with "blogs" and all, there aren't really any editors or other staff doing any kind of proofing or "editing" but it's just not that difficult, especially when making absolute claims, to check first to see if they're factually true.

For the record, Firefox has had release, beta, and nightly update channels for years. There's absolutely nothing new or novel about Chrome's program there. Nothing at all.

It's really not that hard. Please try to do better.

kthxbye.

update: Oops, left off the link. Sorry. Just an oversight while I was cleaning up the post to be less inflammatory. Also, Chris Blizzard has a nice blog post up explaining how to follow the different channels and Myk, in the comments here, links to the Channel Selector add-on.

new firebug release

If you're a Firefox 3 user and you do any kind of web development, from blog template adjustments to application development, you're gonna want to get the brand new Firebug 1.3.0.

magic bullets?

Over the last couple of months there's been a lot of talk on the blogs about how Google's homepage promotions of Chrome along with the upcoming OEM bundling deals is going to mean huge user numbers for Chrome in very short order.

I'm not so sure though.

One reason I'm skeptical is that for a time Google distributed Firefox with its Google Pack, advertised Firefox on the Google Search page, and even paid people $1/download through its AdSense Referrals program and all of that together never amounted to more than a few percentage points of Firefox's total user acquisition.

Another thought is that if OEM bundling was a magic bullet, then how did Microsoft lose 8% of the browser user share last year while shipping bundled as the default on 300 million new computers.

Here's how we grew ~22% of the Web browser market:

Average daily downloads for each new version of Firefox. Firefox 3.0 is averaging just over 1.2M dl/day.

It didn't come overnight, but we've developed a substantial distribution channel with simple downloads from the Web. Where just a few years and a few versions ago, we were getting a few hundred thousand downloads of Firefox every day, we're now seeing well over a million.

We will have more Firefox downloads this year than there will be new PCs shipping with IE. Or, to put it another way, if one were to compete with Firefox's downloading distribution via PC OEM distribution, it would take shipping on pretty much every single new machine.

I'd go a step further and say that shipping on a new machine isn't likely sufficient. It would take being shipped as the default browser on most new machines to be competitive with what we've built in Web downloads over the years.

What do you all think? Will Chrome distribution at the Google websites and through OEM bundling lead to massive success this year?

we can always do better

Innovating matters.

microsoft's sagging browser business

One paragraph in a CNBC article on Microsoft's cost cutting really stood out.

One of the units already seeing cutbacks is Microsoft's sagging browser business. A report in the Seattle Times says 180 contract workers were told last month that their services would not be renewed.

Wow. We're really in a different place than we were just a few years ago.

Anyone out there know if there's any credence to Microsoft's IE team seeing personnel or other cutbacks?

update: well, it looks like the (not linked) story that Jim Goldman referenced was about the MSN Homepages team and had nothing at all to do with the IE team. Perhaps Jim misunderstood the Seattle Times article. Maybe he'll post a correction.

crafty little hack

Akkana just blogged a crafty little hack for Firefox.

It hadn't occurred to me that you could use user.js to keep a pref set the preferred way while using about:config for the occasional in-session flipping.

Nice hack, Akk!!

ie6 on the way out

Thousands of Web developers will soon be able to breathe a big sigh of relief. Microsoft's IE 6 really is on the way out.

In really rough numbers, IE 6 has been losing about 20 points per year. That's freefall! Just take a look at that line and what it represents and then ask yourself, "what can I do to kill off IE 6?"

data for this chart is courtesy of Net Applications browser market share report.

The only question is how quickly this will happen. I think it will definitely fall under 10% by the end of this year, and it's not at all unreasonable that it would fall to low single digits if Firefox has a really good year.

There is a floor considering that IE 7 and 8 won't be available for pre-XP SP2 users, but fortunately that's a very small percentage of the global market. (Hey Opera, how about seriously targeting those users since you guys are the only modern browser left supporting ancient versions of Windows?)

So you've got my prediction. Now it's your turn. How low and how quickly do you all think IE 6 will go?

browser market share for december and for 2008

2008 was a pretty awesome year for Web browsers, the Web itself, and for everyone using the Web.

The major factor in all of those, I believe, is the increase in browser competition and the choice and innovation that came out of that. 2008 saw the "performance wars" heat up. It saw the "standards wars" heat up. And it saw new vendors joining the fray. It really was an awesome year for the Web.

So how did the year wrap up? Net Applications has just released their December monthly browser market share report so here's a look at what it says.

First, it looks like Firefox picked up over 1/2 of a point to put us at 21.34%. That's not quite as good as our November growth, but still a solid month for Firefox and probably puts us out of danger of ever dipping under 20% unless something pretty dramatic happens. (I mention this just because there's a lot of month to month wobble and it's nice to not be right on that edge :-)

After three months of availability, Chrome broke out of the sub-1% club, landing at 1.04%. That's a healthy gain of 0.21 points for them over November, and it may get some press attention for being above 1%, but it's worth keeping in context that it was only about 1/3rd of the growth that Firefox had in the same month, so not really too exciting for them. It was also their coming out of beta month so with that "bounce" and having transitioned ~99.9% of their beta users to 1.0, not as good as what they were hoping for, I'm sure.

Safari had its best month of the year in December, growing just over 3/4ths of a point to 7.93% share. Like us, they've consistently had strong months for November and December. As with previous months, that's all on Mac. Safari for Windows is basically dead in the water.

Opera didn't see any change in December, locked in at a measly 0.71% I suppose it's better than slipping lower, but it can't be encouraging.

The big looser, again, is Internet Explorer which dropped more than 1.5 points to land just above 68% share for the month of December. The good news here, for everyone (including MS?) is that while IE7 growth is leveling off, IE6 continues it's swift downward spiral.

Because this will be NetApp's final report of the year, here's my quick 2008 summary based on their numbers.

Firefox is unquestionably the biggest winner in 2008, gaining approximately twice as much as its closest competitor and taking more share from Microsoft than all other browsers combined. Adding more than 4.5 points (a ~25% improvement) to where it started the year, Firefox couldn't be better positioned for 2009 and the upcoming round of releases from all the major vendors.

Safari had a decent year too, adding about 2.3 points to their share of Web browser usage. That's a bit better than 40% growth for them and I'm sure the Apple OS X folks will be pleased. All of that is growth of the Mac OS against Windows, though, and none of it at our expense. (Mac Firefox has actually gained about 3 points against Safari and others on the Mac in 2008.) So what you're seeing here is not so much the effect of browser competition, but the advantage of being bundled with the OS. Safari is rising with Mac OS X, though not quite as fast as Mac OS X -- thanks to Firefox :-).

Chrome obviously had a short year and during that time really only did just so-so. It grew just over 1 full percentage point of the market in only 3 months which isn't bad. But that all came during the "good months" for not-IE browsers, and Chrome was easily outpaced by Firefox in those same three months. Not the greatest browser launch of all time that so many predicted.

Opera was mostly stable in 2008, just like they were in 2007, 2006, 2005, etc. I think they're pretty much dead on the desktop. My guess is they're mostly using it as their "real Web" testing platform so that their engine can continue to be strong on Mobile. Mobile-only browsers just don't get enough usage to be well tested enough to stay current with real Web content but a few million desktop users can get you plenty of testing. It can also be a decent source of revenue for a medium sized company like Opera (which, incidentally, is up to ~600 employees.) But stable or falling and well under 1% market share for year after year can't really be called competitive.

And finally, as with the month of December, the entire year has been bad, just awful, really really bad for Internet Explorer. IE has dropped just about 8 points!! since this time last year. That's twice the amount it lost the year before. They're not just falling, they're falling a lot faster. They've got huge advantages owning the desktop and even that isn't saving them. Consider that they've lost 8 points of the browser market in a year where 300 million new computers shipped with IE as the default browser. That can't be encouraging for them.

As I said in the opening, all of this is good for the Web. We've got increased competition, real movement towards open Web standards, and all kinds of innovation that's benefiting Web developers and end users alike.

And 2009 is going to be even more exciting.

happy new year

The clocks just rolled over in my neck of the woods and it seems like a fine time to wish you all a happy and fulfilling 2009.

My New Year's resolution is to focus on making more allies and fewer enemies. Wish me luck.

Oh, and my audacious prediction for 2009 is that it will become obvious to the world that Microsoft has finally lost the browser war it started when it bundled IE2 with Windows 95 OSR1 nearly 13 years ago.

macbook pro intermittent backlight fail

Hoping someone out there in Mac land can help me out. Last week I installed the OS X 10.5.6 (9G55) update on my MacBook Pro (2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT chipset) and within an hour or two I started experiencing a screen blanking problem.

At first I thought the machine was crashing, but then I noticed that I could still hear activity on the computer and with some futzing around with the mouse, the screen came back on. (I later discovered this was a very specific kind of futzing with the mouse that fixed it.)

Now, about once every few hours or so, the screen goes black. If the room light is right, I can see that the computer is live and the LCD is active, just with no backlight. It's identical to the situation where you've dimmed the screen all the way. The really interesting thing is that by mousing in and out of my "Sleep Display" hot corner a few times, I can wake it up.

It's possible this has nothing to do with the update, but the timing is pretty darned close. Maybe it's just a failing LED backlight, but then why would sleeping and then unsleeping the display "wake" it? Another coincidence?

I'll be back at work in a few days and can get our desktop support guy to look at it, but I was hoping to find some answers sooner than that because it's really starting to get annoying.

distribution channels

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm working on an end of the year market analysis blog post and as part of that I'm looking at the growth of the Web itself. Since that post is still a few days away, I thought I'd share another interesting data point a bit early.

Since we shipped Firefox 1.0, over one billion new computers were sold and very nearly 100% of those new computers came bundled with a not-Firefox browser.

a firefox christmas

Yesterday was Christmas.

In the U.S. Christmas is a holiday for all federal employees, most state and local government employees, and it's the most observed holiday for private business.

So, it is probably a safe bet, though I don't have any data to cite, that there are more people at home on Christmas day in the U.S. than on any other day of the year. I expect that the U.S. isn't terribly different from the rest of the West in this.

So, what does that have to do with Firefox? Well, Firefox does particularly well on weekends and evenings -- when more people are at home (and fewer people are at work using I.E.) So, as you'd expect, Christmas day is a big day for Firefox usage.

How big a day? Well, according to Net Applications' Market Share survey, on Christmas day (measured in U.S. Eastern time) one 1 of every 4 internet sessions came from Firefox users.

At 25% of Internet usage, that's Firefox's best day on record. With the weekend and the "lull" days between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day, I expect we'll see a number of additional strong days of usage as we wrap up 2008. November and December are always strong for Firefox, so I have high hopes we'll wrap the year on a great note.

I'm working on a year end Firefox market share measures post that will have more exciting information. Depending on how much or how little time I spend at the computer, I'll have it posted right before or on New Year's Day.

best looking sneaker of all time?

The first drop of the Luna Racer was pretty sweet, but the white base colorways didn't quite hit the spot for me.

But I think this might just be the best looking sneaker of all time. It's certainly on my must have list now.

Can't wait 'till this hits a local store.

What do you all think of Nike's Flywire tech? I think it's pretty huge. It's a super-sexy design addition and if it holds up well as a performance feature, I think we'll see a much cleaner direction in shoe design over the next few years. Pulling back from 10 layers of leather is gonna do wonders for cleaning up the lines of performance athletic shoes.

simple answers to simple questions

"What will happen if Google cuts off Mozilla's revenue?!"

Google and Mozilla use these very cool legal devices called "contracts" so there's no "cutting off" of anything. The current contract covers the next three years.

"Where will Firefox get new users now that Chrome replaced Firefox in the Google Pack?!"

Firefox gets approximately 1.3 million downloads per day without Google's help. More than 95% of Firefox users found it via Mozilla's direct download.

fennec alpha 2

Fennec, a.k.a. Firefox Mobile, is making great strides. The team released their second alpha today and it's a huge improvement over Alpha 1.

I've been playing with Fennec nighly builds on an n810 for a couple of weeks now and it's really starting to get usable. If you've got a device that can run it, I encourage you to give it a try and report any bugs to the Fennec team.

Stuart has more.

latest numbers from xiti monitor

XiTi Monitor, one of the premier web survey companies in Europe, has just released their November Browser Barometer report.

Of note, I.E. has dropped below 60% in Europe. It was in November that I.E. fell below 70% for the first time globally.

Also interesting is just how little change there's been in the European countries over the last 6 months. I'm not quite sure I believe that, given the fluctuations month to month, but it is what it is.

Finally, the rankings from Gemius, which covers Eastern Europe, are all positive for Firefox and nothing but negative for IE which has or is about to fall below 50% in most of Eastern Europe.

switch to firefox screencast available in ogg theora video

Right before Firefox 3 shipped, I recorded a screencast to help people make the switch. Now it's available in Ogg Theora video.

sorry, your browser doesn't yet support <video>. consider upgrading.

More Firefox screencast videos available here in both Flash and Ogg.

update:

Since I'm using a couple of new Firefox features here, I thought I'd tell you all what's going. There are three components to video in this post.

The first is the new HTML 5 <video> element. This is a new feature that's currently available in the Firefox 3.1 pre-releases and, I believe, Webkit nightlies. The idea here is that video is a lot like an image, only moving, and so it should be a part of HTML just like the HTML <img> element. If it's part of HTML, then it's easier for people to add to their Web pages, easier to manipulate with CSS, JavaScript, and other Open Web standards.

The second part is the actual video file which was encoded using Theora, or more specifically, was encoded using Theora for the video, Vorbis for the audio, and packaged in an Ogg container. The great thing about Theora video is that Firefox 3.1 supports it natively across platforms. There are also some pretty good tools (getting better) for encoding into Theora. HandBrake is one of my favorites because I already use it for ripping DVDs and it's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Finally, I've added a nice little border around the video element using the CSS3 border-image property. I'm actually using -moz-border-image because the spec hasn't been finalized so browser vendors are using their -vendor prefix with current implementations. This border-image property is super-cool. You can take an image, like one I'm using here and scale and stretch it to wrap pretty much any element. Right now we've got a bug with the <video> player controls and large borders so I've crunched down the image border quite a bit to work around the problem but I'm still excited have yet another CSS feature in my toolbelt.

update: Bug 470596 just got a fix. Yay!

congratulations to jay & the mozilla testing community

I'm really impressed with both the effort and the amazing results. Congratulations, Jay, and everyone in the Mozilla testing community.

As many of you know, QA and testing was how I got my start at Mozilla about a decade ago. It's really come a long way and thanks to great leadership it's getting easier for more people to get involved doing more good for the Mozilla project than ever before.

QA and test really is a huge success story for Mozilla and there's no doubt in my mind that it's an unmatched capability anywhere in the software world, open source or otherwise.

Again, congratulations to everyone involved and keep up the amazing work.

talk like a what?

I guess I got a couple wrong :-)

Now they just need to pair up the results with some famous speaker of that accent and some audio or video clips. I have no better idea what I actually sound like even though I have a new label for it :-)

Oh, and I was born and raised in Tennessee, and went to college there, Georgia, and Alabama. I've also lived in Texas. In 2000, we moved to California, so I guess I finally fit in :-)

yes, you really want to change

About 15% of you that hit this page are doing so with Internet Explorer. This (repeat) message is for you.

Stop using IE now. You are in serious danger.

Even if you don't like the other browsers, you just cannot afford to be using IE right now with this massive vulnerability being exploited as we speak.

Get Firefox or get Safari for Windows or even Google Chrome. Any of those browsers will import all or most of your IE settings and will keep you safe while you wait on Microsoft to fix this very serious problem.

You don't have to stay with any of these browsers and it hopefully won't be that long until MS has a fix, but you cannot afford to spend even one more minute online with IE until you've got that fix.

early word on ie8rc1

TG Daily has the early word on I.E. 8 RC1.

chrome automatic update to 1.0

It looks like the folks at Google turned on the automatic (silent) update for Chrome beta users today. They should have all of their users on the latest version in just a few days. With 1.0 finally shipping and such a quick upgrade cycle, Chrome 1.0 should break 1% market share by the end of the month.

hdtv help

Deanna and I are going to be investing in our first HD flatscreen TV sometime in the next month or two. We're upgrading from a nice Sony Trinitron 36XBR200 36-inch HDTV that we got a great bargain on used but is just too fat and heavy for the space we now have available.

Based on viewing distance, we've decided that we want a 1080p 42" flatscreen. This is right on the edge for size where 720p would be acceptable if we were a foot or two further away, but where it's going to sit puts us a bit closer than average so 1080p sounds right.

We've read a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of the different panels out there and have concluded that plasma is probably right for our circumstances but are still open to LCD.

Right now, we've got our eye on two particular models, one plasma and one LCD that meet our basic size and resolution criteria, come in at under $1,000, and received good to very good online reviews.

The first is the Panasonic Viera TH-42PZ80U 42" 1080p Plasma HDTV. This Panasonic, or its slightly newer PZ85U sibling, gets great reviews, can be had for about $850 to $950, and looks really good in the photos I've seen online. (I know, not a good way to buy, but it's not available in nearby stores.)

The second is Toshiba's REGZA 42RV535U 42" 1080p LCD HDTV. This one just came on our radar because it sits in an almost identical price range and having seen it in person, (though not in our lighting) it impressed me with limited motion blur and pretty decent blacks for an LCD.

We don't often make "entertainment" purchases this large and really don't want to get something we won't be thrilled with. So, I'm wondering if any of you have any experience with either of these models or similar models from these manufacturers and what your experience has been.

Any and all advice is really appreciated.

performance enhanced performances

The auto-tune was a very cool invention. If you can really sing, if you've got decent pitch, it can be carefully employed to help correct a slight miss in the studio or at a live show.

Real-time corrections for the occasional note that's a bit too high or smidge too low is one thing. Turning someone who can't sing into someone who can sing is something entirely different. Auto-tune is a safety net, not a pair of wings.

Cranking up a real-time effect like auto-tune ord throwing in a massive amount of reverb just doesn't make an awful vocalist sound any better. Please stop trying. Please.

ferngully: how do they do it

I was just watching the television show How Do They Do It on the Science Channel. One of the chapters in episode six was about manufacturing milk cartons and the first part of that covered the harvesting of trees for pulp.

I've lived in several regions of the U.S. with heaving logging and seen clear cutting for paper pulp all over North America, but I'd never seen the actual process up close and personal like this.

They showed this dude operating what has to be one of the most menacing looking vehicles I've ever seen. I think it was the Rottne H-20 clear-felling harvester which was described as being able to "fell, strip, and saw a 100 foot tree in less than a minute." Oh, and all from a comfortable climate-controlled cab.

What a beast. It's got these massive jaws on the end of a long boom that grasp the tree and a chain saw that swings out and cuts the tree off at the base. Then it's fed through a pair of massive grinder wheels to strip the tree of its branches and feed it through the harvester jaw where it's sawed into 13 foot sections.

It totally reminded me of the Leveller in the animated movie, FernGully: The Last Rainforest. If you haven't seen the movie, I recommend it. What I didn't realize when I saw it back in the early '90s was that "the Leveller" was actually a real machine. It seemed to be so over the top in its menacing capabilities that I thought it was pure fiction.

Boy was I surprised to see that the thing is not only real, it's even ghastlier than its portrayal in FernGully. See the Leveller in action here and here. Then take a look at this YouTube video to see the real harvester in action.

Just wow.

my gecko powered wordle

Ben Smedberg built a nifty Gecko-based wordle tool so I can participate in the meme without Java! Here's it is:

ringtones for email

I love this idea!!

It's extension is essentially ringtones for Thunderbird. I'm going to try use it for only a few special filters because I get so much mail in such large batches that it would probably drive me crazy if I set up more than a couple. But for those few cases where I really want to be able to distinguish incoming mail while I'm busy in the browser or elsewhere, this is going to rock!

update: An idea just came to me while talking with John about this extension. What if you assigned different notes of different durations to different people. You could employ a specific scale as a kind of pre-composition. The extension would also need to be able to record the email sound activity over a period of time and then play it back with the gaps between messages reduced to some range of rest durations. Then, at the end of the day you could then say to Thunderbird "play the 'music' from my email today."

We often talk about visualization tools for managing our information stream, but what about using sound, or even better, music! It certainly wouldn't have the same kind of value as visualization, but there could be something interesting there.

update2: Another idea. What if the extension knew to look in an email signature for a link to a "ringtone" on the web so that if you added someone to your addressbook, or if you created a filter from her message, Thunderbird would grab that sound resource and save a local copy of it. Then the sender could say "hey, if you're interested, this is how I'd like to sound to you in Thunderbird."

Just some ideas.

being careful isn't always enough

If you're regularly an IE user, I recommend using one of the other browsers available to you on Windows until Microsoft gets this fixed. We all know that the Web is just broken with scripting turned off so Microsoft's workaround isn't really such a hot idea. Better to just grab a copy of Firefox, Safari, or Chrome and use that until Microsoft offers a verified fix.

If you've used one of these browsers in the past and then gone back to IE, you might want to delete that old Firefox, Safari, or Chrome profile so that Firefox will re-import all your newer IE settings. And make sure you're using the latest version.

Again, even if you're not a huge fan of non-IE browsers, you really should switch over if even just for a little while. This is a real vulnerability, active in the wild, compromising computers as we speak. We all know you're not going to turn off scripting while you wait for a fix from MS, so please just do yourself a favor and take a break from IE for a bit.

congratulations

Congratulations to the Chrome team on the launch of their first official version.

theora video live streaming

I'll post a full update once I can get a public server going so you all can see, but I'm please to announce that after several days of failed attempts, this afternoon I served up my first (local) live streaming theora video and am watching it in a nightly build of Firefox as we speak.

Yay!

There are several pieces to the puzzle and none of them easy or obvious for a point and click guy like me, but after much fooling around and attempting many different tools, on three different platforms, I finally found a combination that I think will work.

I'll do a full write-up soon.