before and after

There you have it. Before and after.

tonight it all comes to an end

The grand beard experiment of 2009 comes to an end tonight. Here's one last look.

most popular browser

Firefox is rocking central and eastern Europe.

bigger, stronger, faster

The Mozilla project continues to kick ass and Mitchell's state of Mozilla report describes much of that ass kicking.

Check it out.

internet explorer 9

NeoWin is reporting that Microsoft will be revealing their Internet Explorer 9 plans tomorrow at PDC.

Here are my predictions:

Microsoft will demo an early build of IE 9 that will feature an all new and super-fast JavaScript engine. They will show an updated Office Web that utilizes JS threading, <canvas>, HTML5 drag and drop events, online and offline events, some kind of local storage, lots of CSS3, including some CSS 3 text and font additions, columns, and maybe some box styling additions.

They will commit to supporting most of HTML5, including adding at least preliminary support for <audio> and <video> tags, local storage, drag and drop, and they'll commit to most of CSS3 but not all of it in time for the IE 9 release

They will also talk about or demo some other awesome capabilities that won't get nearly the press coverage as those items listed above. I expect to hear something about ICC color profiles, and possibly even some cool device DOM APIs like geolocation and orientation.

I predict that we'll all be shocked and that the IE 9 plan will signal that Microsoft is committed to to joining the modern browsers in moving the Web forward.

Microsoft dug a huge hole when it mostly abandoned IE 6 and the Web from 2001 until 2006. Their early efforts at ramping back up with IE 7 were a big disappointment to most Web developers and while their efforts with IE 8 were much better, they're still at least a full generation behind the modern browsers.

That team has some really strong people and they're not going to let another release go by where they're still seen as badly trailing. Not with Office moving to the Web. Not with Search and other web services becoming huge revenue opportunities.

Falling short with IE 9 would be the last straw for Web developers' little remaining faith in Microsoft and so they won't miss this opportunity.

That's my prediction. What do you all think?

update: Bummer, Ina's reporting that we're not going to see IE 9 at PDC.

update: Looks like I got some of this right. Let's all hope that the rest comes to pass as they move further into the development of this next version. When any browser improves, the Web improves. It looks to me like Microsoft is getting more serious about improving the Web. This is good news and the IE team should be hearing our positive feedback and encouragement.

do you make firefox add-ons?

If you're an add-on developer, it would be good to read this post. Firefox is going to make some huge improvements to Firefox's stability and your extension might be affected.

firefox mobile coming on strong

Over at Cnet's Crave, Flora Graham's written up a great mobile browser comparison article. The take-away for me? Firefox Mobile is coming on strong.

Of the six browsers they reviewed, Skyfire , Opera Mobile, Firefox Mobile, Safari, Mobile IE, and
BlackBerry browser, the still in beta Firefox Mobile came in second place.

Here's what Flora had to say about Firefox Mobile.

Fennec was insanely fast at loading complicated pages -- the fastest of the browsers we tested. But there's no Flash support yet, and we had no trouble crashing this prototype version. Nevertheless, it may be worth a few crashes to take advantage of Fennec's slick user interface, speed and support for loading multiple simultaneous pages.

Stability and Flash support are obviously things we have to improve for the final release, but to have our first mobile product coming out of the gates with superior speed and UI speaks volumes.

The mobile browsing market isn't locked up, no matter what some of the other guys might think.

go read gandalf

The world stands on its head

seven years of firefox

Here's a set of screenshots I put together for some reporters doing 5 year articles.

The series goes from Phoenix 0.1, released September 23, 2002 to Firefox 3.6 Beta, released October 30th, 2009.

five years of firefox

Five years ago, on November 9th, 2004, we set the world on fire with the launch of Firefox 1.0 and the beginning of the modern era for Web browsers.

On that day, I was too exhausted to write a serious blog post about the occasion, but thankfully history has spoken louder than any words then could have.

Today, with somewhere between one quarter and one third of global browser usage, 330 million Firefox users have made a statement that the browser matters. That may sound uncontroversial today, but 5 years ago most people really didn't get it.

But some of you did and you not only made the choice to move to a better browser, but you spread the word to hundreds of millions of others and became the largest grassroots software community the world has ever seen.

There's a lot to celebrate today, but the people of Mozilla -- the thousands of you who made this all happen, you all are what I'm celebrating. Thank you for making such a profound difference in how we all experience the Web. Thank you for improving the lives of hundreds of millions of individual human beings.

firefox and facebook users

Just an observation: Firefox and Facebook have pretty much the same number of users.

i have a beard again

A couple of people who see me regularly in person noted that my profile photo and other photos of me around the Web are a bit misleading because I've been sporting a full beard for the better part of this year. It probably won't survive 2009, but that's no reason not to share, so here's a quick iPhone snapshot that my friend Rey took.

It's getting a little bit (some might say that's not emphatic enough) out of control but I'm kinda digging it.

is google playing dirty with logos?

A Google search for "Firefox 3.6 beta" offers this helpful result:

What's wrong with this picture?

security response time - mozilla kills it

The Zero Day Initiative has reported that Mozilla leads the industry with the fastest vendor response time to security bugs. Scroll down to Vendor Patch Time Statistics.

No surprise here, but nice to see it documented.

chrome has 30 million active users

Today the Google folks disclosed that they have 30 million active users.

Chrome shipped its first public release 14 months ago and has managed to achieve a pretty large number of users in that time.

(For comparison, it took Firefox a full 8 weeks to add its most recent 30 million new users).

I've said this before, but really does deserve repeating that Google should go back to providing browser usage statistics for Google Search. They have a very large and globally distributed user base and that data would really help us all get a better picture of the global browser breakdown.

Remember when the Google Zeitgeist rocked?!

When the two primary sources disagree as much as Net Applications and StatCounter do, (Net Applications says Firefox has 24% of usage and StatCounter says it's almost 32%) adding a third big source seems like it could have nothing but a positive impact on understanding this world a little better.

Google, if you're reading this, please return to providing browser usage share in your Zeitgeist reports like you did before you started the Chrome project.

update: Wow. "Larry and Sergey recently gave the Chrome team a Founders Award, a multimillion-dollar stock bonus" That's pretty sweet. Lest anyone forget, Google has LOTS of money.

update2: Awesome tweet from @joedrew

tour of firefox

I narrated a tour of Firefox. Check it out.

call for design/illustrator help

Hey friends. I need some help. As many of you know, we're coming up on the 5 year anniversary of Firefox 1.0 and as part of the celebration, I'm trying to get together the evolution of the Firefox brand (from way back in the Phoenix days through Firefox 3.5).

For the Firefox logos, we've got vector art, but unfortunately the Phoenix original art was lost long ago.

So, I'm hoping that someone reading this, with decent Illustrator skills, would be willing to re-create the old Phoenix logo for me.

update: Yeah, I tried Illustrator's live trace but there's just not enough data in this small bitmap to produce something that looks solid.

We're on a bit of a tight schedule so if this is something you'd be able to get to this weekend, I'd be eternally grateful. (my gratitude comes with a free classic mozilla "Hack" t-shirt if you're interested.)

net neutrality wtf of the day

OMG.

This guy is sponsoring legislation to block Net Neutrality.

WTF?

videopress supporting open video

This is good news. VideoPress supports Ogg.

children are stronger

Brilliant.

Reporter: "What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?"

Sendak: "I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate."

:D

I love Maurice Sendak.

remember that microsoft silent add-on install?

Microsoft silently installed a security vulnerability in Firefox. Not only was the install not requested by users (malware) but it opened Firefox users to a critical remote exploit flaw. Thanks, Microsoft. Appreciate that.

update Read more about this:

Microsoft exposes Firefox users to drive-by malware downloads by Ryan Naraine
Microsoft Plug-In Makes Firefox Vulnerable by Robert Evans
Microsoft plug-in for Firefox patched byPaul Mah
Sneaky Microsoft plug-in puts Firefox users at risk by Gregg Keizer

a thumb on the scale

"Nothing in the design and implementation of the Ballot Screen and the presentation of competing web browsers will express a bias for a Microsoft web browser or any other web browser...."

That's the text of of the first sentence of the tenth paragraph of Microsoft's proposed settlement with the European Commission over its illegal tying of Internet Explorer with Windows.

The same proposal specifies the actual layout and design of the "ballot screen" that will be presented to approximately 170 million European Windows PC users sometime in the next few months and probably another 200-300 million users over the next 5 years.

Unfortunately, the proposed design of the ballot expresses a huge bias for one of the 5 browsers listed. The ballot, as described, will list the browsers in a static and alphabetical order.

And. It is common knowledge among usability experts, explained in quite solid detail and well cited by our very own Jennifer Boriss, that the first item in a list of choices will receive very disproportionate attention.

It is for this reason that the ballot cannot be static, regardless of criteria for ordering, and also be unbiased. The ordering of the choices on the ballot must be randomized. Failing to randomize those choices expresses a clear and strong bias to the first item on the list leading hundreds of millions of users to favor that item over all others.

There is simply no other way to eliminate bias. Anything short of randomizing is just shifting from one bias to another.

are you safe? are your friends?

The tech savvy among you know that web browsers are no longer the number one target for malware and other online scams. Browsers are all getting much safer much faster since Firefox entered the market so the bad guys are targeting the less frequently updated and often times far less secure browser plug-ins. Most browser vendors don't control those plug-in so your browser can't completely cover that aspect of your Web safety. (Some browser vendors even knowingly ship insecure plug-ins.)

Well, at Firefox, we're not just punting and telling our users to contact their plug-in vendors. We're going that extra mile to try to help you keep those plug-ins secure.

The first step was our Flash Plug-in check that we rolled out with a recent Firefox 3.5 update.

Today, we're helping you take the second step with a much more comprehensive plug-in check.

Right now this page only works with Firefox, but we care about all of you and we're working to support those of you on other browsers as well. We're also working on integrating these checks directly into Firefox.

Outdated plug-ins are the number one source of crashes on the Web and leave more users open to security exploits than any program. Please tell your friends, family members, and co-workers about this new Plug-in Check service from Mozilla. The Web thanks you.

firefox breaks 24%

Looking at a rolling 1 week average, Firefox has been above 24% global usage share for for several days now. We probably won't break 24% for the month of September but we're going to come pretty close and I think this puts us on track to easily reach 25% of global usage by the end of the year.

That's going to be pretty amazing. This year, Firefox will account for a full quarter of all browsing on the planet. Statistically, if you approach a group of 4 people, one of them is a Firefox user.

Mozilla's global community of contributors sure does have a lot to be proud of. A special thanks to all of localizers who have built amazing communities on top of an amazing product. With more than half of our users and our usage coming from outside of the US, you all really did make this possible.

theora 1.1 crosses the finish line

w00t

Theora 1.1 has been released. This release includes huge updates to the encoder and some pretty solid updates to the decoder.

Read all about it over at the Mozilla Hacks blog.

don't dream it. be it.

If you didn't see tonight's Dancing With the Stars, you missed a magical moment.

Actually, several moments.

The first was Macy Grey's waltz. It was genuine and engaging, if not perfect.

The second was Macy's green room commentary. Brilliant!

The third was Kelly Osbourne's waltz. Kelly just about brought tears to my eyes. She really does have the most to gain from this and she obviously put her everything into it.

webgl in firefox

Check out Vlad's blog. WebGL has just landed in the Firefox nightly builds. OpenGL for Web pages!!!

half of all users have firefox?

InfoWorld is reporting on stats from exo.performance.network that Firefox is now on more consumer computers that not.

It finally happened. After years of building momentum -- and more than a few false starts -- Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has finally reached critical mass. There are now more users running some variant of Firefox (50.6 percent) than not running it, according to the latest statistics from the exo.performance.network, which tracks the actual usage and configurations of thousands of PCs globally, providing a real-world snapshot.

google chrome targets and a better web

In an interview with Reuters, Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson went on record with some usage share targets for Chrome, stating "If at the two-year birthday we're not at least 5 percent (market share), I will be exceptionally disappointed."

Chrome launched just over a year ago and jumped immediately up to 1% global share. In the year since, they've added 2 points to that total and it sounds like they're shooting for another two points in their second year.

This would put Chrome in the second best growth position behind Firefox which is gaining about 5 points per year. Safari is in third place gaining about 1 point each year. Opera follows Safari with about a quarter point growth per year.

Here's what that looks like for the last year, according to Net Applications.

The good news for Firefox and the feisty gang of niche browsers (and the entire Web) is that IE is the big loser here. In the last year, the ~8.75 points gained by Firefox and the others all came at the expense of Internet Explorer which went from owning almost 3/4ths of all web traffic to less than 2/3rds. That's a pretty positive year of change.

update: A couple complaints about the graph so here's an alternate view on the same data that might be easier to digest.

sparky the mozilla wonder dog

I learned this week that Sparky, beloved member of the Hofmann family, Mozilla icon, and all around good dog, has passed away.

He's seen as much of Mozilla as any one, from the Netscape campus, to our space on Villa Street, to the Landings buildings, and most recently, downtown Mountain View.

He was with us for the first Mozilla releases, for Firefox 1.0, and up through the most recent Firefox 3.5 release. He was known to many at Mozilla as a tenacious, and scrappy but fun terrier with a fiery (as in Firefox) personality.

We miss you Sparky, and we're thinking a lot about your human family and their loss. We love you all.

Rest in peace, Sparky.

Sparky, covering my duties at Mozilla while I take a break.

planet mozilla theme update

A big thanks to Sam Sidler for stepping up to update the Planet Mozilla theme.

The update moves Planet Mozilla forward to the style of the recently updated mozilla.org website. I really like this new look for mozilla.org. It seems to me just the right mixture of the classic Mozilla call to action style and the contemporary feel that represents of Mozilla's amazing global reach.

net applications august update

Net Applications has released their August update.

Firefox gained half a point to land a hair shy of 23%. IE dropped 7/10ths of a point to a hair shy of 67%. Chrome grew a quarter point to achieve 2.84% global share on its one year anniversary. Everything else was pretty much flat.

It looks like the summer slowdown is ending for Firefox. For as long as we've been tracking users and usage trends, summer has always been slow for Firefox. I attribute some of it to many of our European users taking their nice long summer breaks and to school being out. Once Europe returns from vacation and students return to class, we start to see solid gains.

The other interesting bit is the 1 year anniversary of Chrome. Chrome jumped right up to 1 point immediately on launch, and in the 11.5 months since then has added less than two points to their overall share. They're getting close to Safari levels and pushed Opera into fifth place so that's gotta make the Chrome folks happy, but I think that most people expected more than 2.84% share a year after the big release.

Finally, on the browser versions front, for the average of the month of August, IE was splitting its users three ways, with ~25% on 6, 21~ on 7, and 15% on 8. Firefox usage was split with about 12.5% on 3 and 8.9% on 3. Firefox 2 usage is well under 1.5% and it's probably time for Web developers to consider whether or not it makes sense to continue supporting Firefox 2.

browser usage version update

This last week was a good one for new browsers versions. In terms of global usage, IE 8 has just crossed IE 7 and Firefox 3.5 has just crossed Firefox 3. This won't show up in tomorrow's August report from Net Applications, because they average the whole month and for most of the month, the newer versions were still behind. Septeber's report should show the newer versions well ahead of the older versions (with the exception of IE 6 which still holds a several point lead over IE 8 and IE 7.)

measuring global browser share

I've recently been bad-mouthing the browser usage share data from both StatCounter and Net Applications. There remain some really strange internal inconsistencies with very serious and unexplainable spikes and dips for some of the browsers they're monitoring and I'm discouraged by that.

But until we find some better sources of data, I think it might be useful to try to figure out what we can learn from these sources, if anything. My first pass at this task was just to do some rough comparisons between the two and what I found was both surprising and I think positive.

Here's a chart comparing the last year of data for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The first thing of note is that the two sources come up with radically different shares for Firefox and IE. The difference between the two is nearly as large as the sum of all the other browsers they measure. I have no idea which of the two sources is closer to "the truth" and I don't think that just averaging them gives us any better picture of "the truth" so I don't think that's a productive avenue but maybe some statistician can show me otherwise.

The second issue worth remarking on is that there's some consistent seasonal changes. Firefox has considerably stronger growth in the winter than it does in the summer and that shows up in both data sources.

The third thing of note is the surprising and more positive bit. Over the course of a year, the two sources are in reasonably close agreement on the trends. Net Applications reports that for this time period, Firefox gained ~4.6 points of usage share and StatCounter reports a gain of ~5.4%. Looking at the IE losses during the period, Net Applications sees an 8.7% loss and StatCounter sees a 9.9% loss. That's really not too wide a gap in the trend, even if the month to month deltas are a little wackier and even if the two pretty firmly disagree on the total share for each browser.

So, my first conclusion, probably an obvious one, is that it's probably not a good idea to fret over the month to month variations but that the longer term changes are probably worth paying some attention to.

This doesn't address any of the geographic disparities, but I think that's a problem we're basically stuck with until we get more representative sources. Given the general agreement between these two sources on at least one front, are the longer term trends worth giving credence to? What do you all think?

fear of the awesomebar overblown

There are a number of articles popping up in the last few days that are making a big deal about the recent uninstall survey results showing that a decent number of Firefox 2 users who refuse to upgrade to Firefox 3 or 3.5 are concerned about the Awesomebar revealing some of their "private" bookmarks to anyone looking over their shoulder or using their computer.

Most of this coverage is overblown. Articles and blog posts that contain both "firefox" and "porn" probably get a lot eyeballs and I think that's what's going on here.

Why do I say it's overblown?

As of this week, 94% of Firefox active daily users are on Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5.

(I don't have absolute user numbers for other browsers, but usage is a reasonable proxy here and if you look at Safari, they still have about 16% of their usage coming from two versions or more behind the current release. If you look at the other browser with a significant number of users, IE, a whopping 37% of that share is two versions or more behind.)

If you didn't have any numbers, reading most of the coverage around this would probably lead you to believe that a large percentage of Firefox users were still using Firefox 2. Compared to the other two mainstream browsers, Firefox users are actually very current.

Then there's the actual survey data. If the survey is representative of all of the people still on Firefox 2, then what we're actually talking about is ~1.5% of Firefox users citing the Awesomebar as holding them back.

So Firefox has more users on the current versions than the other browsers and about 1.5% of Firefox users don't like a new Firefox feature. Is that really worthy of all this coverage?

lockheed fire fully contained

As of August 23, at 7:16 p.m. the Lockheed Fire is 100% contained.

Unburned islands of vegetation continue to burn inside the perimeter of the fire. Fire crews have contained the remaining open fire line in the southern region Threat levels remain low in the Bonny Doon and Swanton areas however, residents should remain alert to possible fire activity occurring in and around the fire area. If anyone who witnesses a large amount of smoke production in the burn area should call the Lockheed Fire Information Line at 831- 335-0378.

Major problems and concerns continue to be the, steep terrain and limited access. Lingering smoke will be present as fire crews continue to fully control the incident. We would like residents driving in the communities affected by the fire to remain cautious of the fire personnel and equipment working to extinguish the fire. Additionally, residents need to be cautious when walking in or near the burned area. Smoldering brush and stumps may be found and are still dangerous.

On behalf of the CAL FIRE Incident Command Team 9, we would like to thank the residents of Bonny Doon, Davenport and the Swanton and Last Chance areas. Your patience and understanding during the evacuation assisted the firefighters in extinguishing the wildfire that threatened the area. To date there have been no lives lost and all homes were saved. We encourage all residents to comply with the 100 foot clearances around all structures. Those interested in learning more information on brush clearance should visit the following website. http://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/communications_firesafety_100feet.php

Residents who need more information can contact the Lockheed Fire Information L0378, or go to www.fire.ca.gov.

For the last week or so I've been maintaining a Google Map of the Lockheed Fire perimeter for the good folks at the Santa Cruz Sentinal. SCS has been an amazing online resource for locals trying to get up to the minute information on the fire, thanks to the long hours of the staff and the many residents that have been checking in there with regular updates on the fire.

As you can see from the map, this was a pretty good sized fire not at all far from thousands of homes. That not a single home was lost is a testament to the 2000+ fire personnel that put their lives on hold and on the line to contain this fire. A huge thank you to everyone that played a role bringing this thing under control.

(And three cheers for a single payer government program that saves thousands of lives and untold billions in property every year.)

blog metrics update

In case any of you were wondering, this is my 3,936th post at this blog. I've written about 450,000 words here over the course of 88 months.

measuring global share is hard

Recently, Net Applications updated their methodology to weight their browser share by the Internet population of the countries they monitor. This had the effect of knocking Apple's Safari down quite a bit, presumably due to Apple's weak numbers outside of the U.S. and of lifting Opera up some, presumably due to Opera's stronger showing in Europe an Asia.

As of August 1st, we have implemented retroactive country-level weighting in our reports. This means that we adjust our reports proportionally based on how much traffic we record from a country vs. how many internet users that country has. For example, although we have significant data from China, it is relatively small compared to the number of internet users in China. Therefore, we now weight Chinese traffic proportionally higher in our global reports. This change produces a much more accurate view of worldwide usage share statistics.

That sounds like a change for the better, but it also seems to have had some unfortunate side effects. Net Applications obviously does not have equally good sampling in all of the countries it monitors. Where that sample is weak and likely to produce unrepresentative results, the effect can be either magnified or diminished depending on the Internet population of that country or region.

Before the new methodology, presumably, they just reported raw data -- their weighting was tied directly to the strength (size) of their sample. So if they had a relatively small (not likely to be very representative) sample in a particular country, that less good sample had less of an impact on their overall numbers.

Now, though, crazier and unrepresentative numbers in large Internet population countries have a quite dramatic effect on the overall global share reported by Net Applications.

Here's a good example:

Several weeks ago, I saw an odd spike in the Netscape usage share. Netscape hasn't shipped a new browser in ages and their global share has been pretty steady at around half a percentage point for as long as I can remember. Then, for the week of 07/19, their share shot up to over 1%. A doubling of share seemed a bit odd for a browser that's been out of circulation as long as Netscape but when you're dealing with half a percent or less, it's not unreasonable to imagine that it wasn't growth of Netscape so much as a slow week of usage for all the other browsers. I could sort of picture a situation where modern browser users as a cohort all did a bit less browsing for a few days while ancient browser users were unaffected. I didn't think too much about it but it did catch my attention.

Well, this week's numbers just came out and Netscape is showing a global share of almost 4% !!!

Here's what the trends look like for the last couple of months of global share.

My first thought was "this can't be right" so I looked at the U.S. share (subscribers only) and it looked stable and steady with Netscape well under 0.05% for years. So I turned next to share by continent where Asia showed a big Netscape spike. I drilled down a bit further and looked at just China browser share.

Here's what the trends look like for the last couple of months of China share.

So what's going on here? Well, it could be one of a couple of things. First, it could be some kind of spider that identifies itself as "Netscape 6.0" that's crawling the Chinese Web for search engine indexing or something like that. That's something Net Applications could dig into and if it is a spider, just add it to their list of not-counted hits. All competent stats packages can exclude that kind of traffic from their metrics.

Second, and potentially more problematic, Net Applications' sample in China, those Websites that have deployed the Net Applications site analytics package, could be just so few that it only takes a trivial number of site visitors switching browsers to have a very large impact on their measurements.

Either way, this kind of error now has a much larger impact when it happens in a country like China which happens to have the largest Internet using population of any country in the world.

I don't think there's really any good solution to dealing with small sample sizes and any commercial analytics package is going to suffer from that problem. Perhaps a second weighting based on sample size would help in reflecting more accurately the actual data, but that doesn't help us understand Internet populations any better.

I blogged a few months ago about similarly disturbing spikes in IE 6 usage in the metrics reported by StatCounter. I can only conclude that these providers simply don't have a good enough sample to describe global internet populations.

What we really need is measurements from organizations that have much more representative usage and there are only a few that I can think of. That cold come in three forms, as I see it. One, we could find the top measures for every locale and build ourselves a global picture from the bottom up. Two, we could look to a few heavy-weights for large regions (Google would obviously be really good for much of the planet, and combined with local powerhouses like Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China, we could probably get a pretty good global measure.) Or three, we could find one source that had solid global representation.

Ben Chuang, in my previous post on this topic had this to say:

I would also suggest that we don't need data from the absolute largest site in the universe, we just need data from a very-large-site-that-is-very representative. What about a more "open" site, like Wikipedia?

I think that's actually a really good suggestion. Wikipedia has articles in more than 250 languages and is regarded as the online encyclopedic authority by most nationalities. Wikipedia also has a huge amount of traffic, billions of visits every month, so it's not as likely to be swayed by the occasional odd visitor patterns.

So what do you all think? Would Wikipedia's browser breakdown be a better measure than the various analytics providers that we've all been using for the last five or six years?

google should return to providing browser usage stats

There was a time, several years ago, when Google included browser usage stats in its Zeitgeist reports. Probably some time before the Chrome project started, Google stopped including the browser breakdown in those regular reports.

Google is in a pretty special position with the breadth of their usage so their browser breakdown could give the entire industry a much better picture of the Web than what we currently get from analytics firms like Net Applications and StatCounter.

Google search is available in more than 125 languages, is in widespread use in almost every geography on the planet, and Google obviously has the resources to produce solid metrics reporting. So, why don't they? What commercial value is there in keeping that close to their chest?

We really do need something more globally representative than what we have. Google could really help out here.

lockheed fire update

The Lockheed Fire is nearly contained. Cal Fire reports 80% containment, there are no further dangers to structures, and the last of the road closures has been lifted. This has been a phenomenal effort by more than 2,000 fire personnel that really couldn't have turned out any better.

I've been maintaining the SCS fire map for almost a week now and as you can see, things are looking really good. The southern end of the fire is the last bit to come under control and I expect tomorrow's reports to show that line becoming stable.

A huge thank you to everyone who put their lives on hold to tackle this massive wildfire. Your efforts are deeply appreciated. You all deserve so much more support than you get.

mozilla creative collective

The Mozilla community finally has a solid design hub. If you're a designer interested in getting involved with Mozilla, you'll want to check out the Mozilla Creative Collective.

paul thurrott's misunderstanding

Over at Windows IT Pro, Paul Thurrott is confused about one of the points that Harvey and Mitchell brought up.

Like Baker, [Anderson] raises a somewhat nonsensical issue—that IE will somehow try to become the default browser when a user accesses Windows Update—without acknowledging that Windows Update in Windows Vista and Windows 7 doesn't require IE, and that Microsoft has already committed to changing Windows XP accordingly.

Paul, it's not about Windows update requiring IE. It's about Microsoft using Windows Update to launch a just updated IE which triggers the "Make IE the default" advertisement. That's using Windows Update to attempt to undo the user's default browser choice.

Here's the scenario: A person gets a new machine with Vista on it in the spring of 2008. He decides IE 7 isn't to his liking so he downloads, installs, and makes Firefox his default browser. A year later, Microsoft releases IE 8 which comes to the user via Windows Update. The user believes it's smart to keep all of his software, even software that goes unused, up to date for security reasons so he agrees to update his IE 7 to the new version, IE 8. At this point, Windows Update not only updates IE, but it launches the new version and the new version prompts the user to make IE 8 the user's default browser.

You've got a situation here where a user has opted out of IE, chosen Firefox as his default browser, and is now being prompted by Windows Update to return to IE as his default browser. The user didn't launch IE 8, didn't ask for it to be launched and wasn't considering changing his default browser. Windows Update did all of that.

That's an abuse of Windows Update to trigger a reconsideration of the user's defaults. That's what we're concerned about.

update: The eminently reasonable Ryan Paul also misunderstood Harvey's comment. This is tricky territory and it's easy to jump to conclusions, but I think with careful consideration, both Ryan Paul and Paul Thurrott would agree that Windows Update is a Windows feature and using Windows features to regularly re-advertise IE and pressure Firefox and other browser users to make IE the default is a bad behavior.

microsoft's ec proposal follow-up

Harvey Anderson and Mitchel Baker have both posted some responses to Microsoft's proposed settlement with the European Commission. If you care about the browser landscape, especially if you're in Europe, I highly encourage you to go give these two posts a read and offer constructive feedback.

Harvey Anderson: Thoughts on Microsoft’s Settlement Proposal in the European Commission’s Tying Investigation
Mitchell Baker: Proposed Microsoft – EC Settlement

I'll be sharing my thoughts at those two posts and that's a much better place for you all to share (rather than in comments here) if you've got something to add to the conversation. If you just want to rant or cheer, then feel free to do that here.

lockheed fire to the south of us

A few people have asked and I'm sure a couple others are wondering so I thought I'd blog a quick note to say that our home is probably safe from the Lockheed fire.

The Fire, which now covers about 8 or 9 square miles, started about 8 miles south of us and the winds have pushed it further south.

Bonny Doon, Swanton and Davenport are immediately affected and we're hoping the best for all of the people and animals down there.

update Friday @7PM the latest report from Lockheed Fire Incident Command Center puts the wildfire at more than 5,000 acres. Command Center also notes that there are 1,500 firefighters on the scene.

update Saturday AM the latest report is 6,800 acres with 30% containment. Progress!

update Saturday PM the latest report is 40% containment with 2,165 firefighters on the scene (and 295 engines, 31 bulldozers, 21 water tenders, and 14 helicopters.)

update Sunday AM, 50% containment and some strong optimism that they'll be able to pull off full containment a few days earlier than expected. The perimeter actually contracted some between last night's map and this morning's. Some great progress, thanks to the 2,165 brave personnel on the scene. Our thoughts go out to the four (presumably firefighters) injured and everyone affected down there.

update Sunday PM, at 3PM they lifted the mandatory evacuation for the Bonny Doon area. Residents returning will need IDs. This is definitely another great sign that things are getting under control. Go Cal Fire! (note: this does not include the Swanton Road area, yet.)

update For any locals in need of more specifics about where the fire is burning and where it's contained, this map from the Davenport Fire Station (via local resident JH) shows the dozer lines and the uncontrolled fire lines. Map legend here.

update Sunday 6PM update from Cal Fire confirms 65% containment. Mandatory evacuation lifted though only residents can return and must present ID. Swanton Road and Last Chance Road still closed.

update Monday PM update from Cal Fire says 80% containment and mandatory evacuations were lifted in the Upper and Lower Swanton areas, including the community of Last Chance. Awesome!!! Sounds like Warnella and Blodgett are still blocked off but great progress.

hilarious

This is just hilarious. ... and kind of sad.