BogusRed's Shared Items

See what kind of stuff I'm reading and find interesting on the internet!

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The End of an Era: Internet Explorer Drops Below 50 Percent of Web Usage

A couple of interesting things happened in the world of Web browser usage during October. The more significant one is that Internet Explorer’s share of global browser usage dropped below 50 percent for the first time in more than a decade. Less significant, but also notable, is that Chrome for the first time overtook Firefox here at Ars, making it the technologist’s browser of choice. [Ed. Note: That still hasn't happened at Webmonkey, but it's very close. See below for more stats.]

Internet Explorer still retains a majority of the desktop browser market share, at 52.63 percent, a substantial 1.76 point drop from September. However, desktop browsing makes up only about 94 percent of Web traffic; the rest comes from phones and tablets, both markets in which Internet Explorer is all but unrepresented. As a share of the whole browser market, Internet Explorer has only 49.58 percent of users. Microsoft’s browser first achieved a majority share in—depending on which numbers you look at—1998 or 1999. It reached its peak of about 95 percent share in 2004, and has been declining ever since.

Where has that market share gone? In the early days, it all went Firefox’s way. These days, it’s Chrome that’s the main beneficiary of Internet Explorer’s decline, and October was no exception. Chrome is up 1.42 points to 17.62 percent of the desktop browser share. Firefox is basically unchanged, up 0.03 points to 22.51 percent. Safari grew 0.41 points to 5.43. Opera has been consistently falling over the last few months, and it dropped again in October, down 0.11 points to 1.56 percent.

Net Applications

In spite of Android sales now outstripping iOS sales, iOS users are far more abundant on the Web. Mobile browsing is currently a much smaller market, with 5.5 percent of Web usage conducted on smartphones and tablets. This small market is also a lot more volatile than the desktop market. Mobile Safari was up by 6.58 points last month to 62.17 points. The biggest single loser was the Android browser, dropping 2.91 points to 13.12 percent. Symbian, BlackBerry and Opera Mini also registered falls, down 2.15 points to 2.55 percent, 0.64 points to 2.04 percent, and 0.27 points to 18.65 percent, respectively.

Net Applications

The trend graph says it all: Firefox’s share is flat, with Chrome driving all Internet Explorer’s losses.

Net Applications

Safari’s long-term dominance in mobile is clear. Also clear is that Android’s sales growth isn’t at all reflected in its Web usage.

Net Applications

The upgrade trends show a familiar story. Chrome users, who for the most part receive updates automatically, switch to new versions quickly and efficiently. Chrome’s “tail” is growing ever longer, though, with about 2 percent of desktop browser users—about 14 percent of Chrome users—using old versions. That number is growing every month, and it appears to be resilient.

Net Applications

Firefox retains its clean split between people on the new, rapid release versions (4-9) and those on the old stable version (3.6). The rapid release users are upgrading fairly quickly, though the cut-overs are neither as rapid nor as automated as those of Chrome. However, almost a quarter of Firefox users are sticking with version 3.6. Until and unless Mozilla produces a stable edition with long-term support, this is unlikely to change.

Net Applications

Internet Explorer, however, continues to see major usage of old versions. Internet Explorer 6 and 7, which aren’t current on any supported version of Windows, are still the version used by 25.4 percent of Internet Explorer users, 13.38 percent of desktop users as a total. These are people that can upgrade to either Internet Explorer 8 (if they’re using Windows XP) or Internet Explorer 9 (if they’re using Windows Vista), but who have, for some reason, refused to do so. Internet Explorer 8 users appear to be switching to Internet Explorer 9 at a slow but steady rate, with the former down about a point, and the latter up by about a point.

The browser usage here at Ars Technica continues to be unusual, with Firefox and Chrome over-represented on the desktop, and Android showing a much stronger performance among mobile user than is seen on the wider Web.

A compelling case can be made that the causes for these two phenomena—Internet Explorer’s decline, and Chrome’s growth—are closely related. They represent the influence of the computer geek.

Ars Technica’s unusual usage figures are not surprising when considering its audience: visitors to the site tend to be technologists and early adopters: Ars readers were among the first to switch to using Firefox as their browser of choice, and similarly they’re leading the way with Chrome. While Internet Explorer’s decline, Firefox’s flatlining, and Chrome’s growth have happened faster at Ars than the broader Web, the underlying trends are the same. [Ed. Note: Webmonkey's browser stats are roughly the same as of October 31st. Chrome has yet to overtake Firefox among Webmonkey's perhaps more developer-heavy audience, but it's gaining on Firefox every month. For the month of October 33.4 percent of you were using Firefox, 32.4 percent Chrome and only 16.0 percent Internet Explorer.]

This is perhaps not surprising. Ars has more than its fair share of IT decision-makers, both in corporate environments and home environments (I’m sure that many of us know the perils of being the “computer guy” roped in to fix the problems plaguing friends’ and family’s machine). It might be a few months before a Chrome-using Ars-reading geek starts to recommend it to friends and family, or a few years before he gets approval to roll the browser out across the company whose computers he maintains, but the migration will happen. Technology decisions are usually made by technology people—and technology people read Ars, ditched Internet Explorer for Firefox a few years ago, and are now switching to Chrome.

Firefox appealed to the geek demographic by offering tabs, a wealth of extensions, and active development: geeks enjoy new things to play with, and a browser that’s frozen in time, as Internet Explorer 6 was, holds no appeal. Chrome in turn offered a focus on performance and stability, even more active development, and the cachet of being built by Google. Chrome was also quick to offer obvious but useful things such as built-in, robust session restoration, and a useful new tab page (something Internet Explorer 9 replicated, and which is currently in beta for Firefox). Bundling Flash also removed a potential headache, by ensuring that a potentially buggy plugin was kept current and up-to-date. On top of all this, Google has been vocal in pushing its view of how the Web should work, with the VP8 video codec, the SPDY Web protocol, and most recently, the Dart scripting language.

A browser that doesn’t appeal to this demographic won’t receive the benefit of this kind of on-the-ground advocacy. Mozilla is working to bring some of Chrome’s appealing features to Firefox, with its new development schedule and future features such as tab isolation, and though this is currently causing some headaches—there are continued issues with extension compatibility—Firefox’s market share is for the most part holding steady. Once Mozilla can get rid of the annoying wrinkles and make updates as pain-free as Chrome’s, it might start to win back the attention of the techie demographic. Especially if Mozilla can come up with a viable IT-friendly long-term support option.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is strenuously avoiding this same demographic. Internet Explorer lacks small but significant creature comforts such as resizeable text boxes, built-in spell checking, and session restoration, and while it does offer certain extensibility points, they fall a long way short of those offered by Firefox, and as such, its extension ecosystem is a whole lot less rich. It’s not enough for Internet Explorer to be a solid mainstream browser: the less technically engaged users who switched to Firefox because a trusted authority told them to aren’t going to spontaneously switch back to Internet Explorer, even if it is good enough for their needs. They’re going to wait until their techie friend next fixes their PC and tells them that they should consider switching to Internet Explorer because it’s “better”. Just as they did for Firefox and do for Chrome.

Internet Explorer is still an important browser, with a userbase large enough that few developers can afford to ignore—though sites that don’t need global appeal may well be able to safely ignore Internet Explorer 6—and at current rates it will remain important for a few years yet. But until and unless Microsoft makes its browser appeal to the influential geek demographic, it looks as if Internet Explorer has nowhere to go but down.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

See Also:

• Mozilla Brings Sharing to the Browser With ‘Firefox Share’
• Mozilla, Microsoft Join Forces for ‘Firefox With Bing’
• Chrome 15 Released with… Improved Start Page
• Metro-style Internet Explorer 10 Ditches Flash, Plugins

Twitter Cup Cakes and Biscuits

A selection of Twitter cup cakes and Biscuits. Enjoy!  / Above: Twitter Cupcakes [link]

Above: Twitter Cookie Biscuits [link]

Above: Twitter Coloured Cup Cakes [link]

Above: Twitter Cake [link]

For more on Twitter, take a look at Web and Social Media Sneakers.

This post ( Twitter Cup Cakes and Biscuits ) is Copyright Design Soak Magazine, author of Andrew Kelsall Graphic Design.

Why Is Chinese Web Design So Bad?

I’d like to begin with a disclaimer. My opinions on the following topic are merely that, opinions. Opinions formed by observations and interactions with the Chinese culture over a brief period of about two years during my time living in the Henan province in Central China.

I have no formal education or training on the subject of Eastern or Western cultures, sociology or cross-cultural communications whatsoever. Additionally, I will interchange the terms “Chinese” and “Eastern”. I recognize that my generalizations are merely that, generalizations. Japan, for instance, has been heavily influenced by the West (and vise versa), so many of our affinities, in design and otherwise, overlap.

How it all Started

Upon my arrival in China in the summer of 2005, it wasn’t long before I began to notice some of the intricacies of the cultural differences between the Chinese and the West. Sure there were obvious differences like language, physical appearance, governmental philosophy, etc. But what really began to emerge were subtle differences like sense of humor, interests and artistic preference.

I noticed that I simply could not find a Chinese website that was visually appealing to me. Out of curiosity, I began to ask around and put together a list of websites that Chinese natives frequented and thought were well designed / useful.

I’m guessing if I asked this question to the common web surfer in the West I’d get sites that weren’t well designed (cough-facebook-cough-amazon-cough). So the caveat here is that I may have received different feedback had I asked Chinese web designers. Either way, the answers I received back from the Chinese were sites like the following:

• Baidu (China’s Google)
• Alibaba (China’s eBay)
• QQ (China’s AIM/Google Talk)
• Ren Ren (China’s Facebook)
• Sina (China’s Yahoo)

With the exception of baidu.com (who blatantly copied their design from Google) and renren.com (who clearly copied their design from Facebook), the common theme among most Chinese sites seemed to be ludicrous amounts of characters (e.g. text) with either a misuse of graphics or the complete omission of graphics altogether. I was baffled. How could this be acceptable? How are the Chinese able to consume all of this data, filter it, and decide what they want and don’t? Why do they even tolerate the fact that this is standard practice?

Moreover, it’s common for Chinese sites to have multiple, simultaneous animations, popups, overlays, sliders, etc… they regularly practice many of the fundamentally understood bad design principles that Western designers strive to avoid at all costs. I honestly felt like I was back to 1995 all over again.

My Reaction

Of course, being the pompous Westerner that I am, my initial reaction was “Oh, they are a developing nation and simply haven’t caught up to us yet.” Well, that could be the case. I suppose there is merit in the truth that design and artistic preference evolve over time and with prolonged exposure. An example of this could be that I personally wouldn’t hang a Renaissance style painting in my house today; though I most certainly would have during that era. As a culture, our preferences have evolved. Perhaps that is where China is currently positioned along the fabric of design evolution.

Another possibility, however (and my personal theory), is that nurture has trumped nature and Chinese web design preferences are being formed from upbringing and cultural influence rather than prolonged exposure and natural artistic evolution. Of course, artistic evolution is rooted in cultural upbringing, but my argument is that Chinese web design preference, while evolving and advancing, is not playing catch-up to Western web design. Rather, it is simply taking its own course, being guided primarily by Eastern culture and only mildly influenced by the West with basic IA concepts.

Why I Formed this Theory

I spent most of my time in China at the University where I taught. During that time I noticed that the general rule of thumb for Chinese students was to memorize information and really not be bothered with actually understanding it. They figured they had the rest of their life to spend thinking about and grasping the information they were learning in school and now wasn’t the time to actually analyze it. Quite different from our views on the University experience here in the West, huh?

I think this insight into how most Chinese learn might be a key component to how most Chinese read and interact with websites as well. As Westerners, we desire and expect enlightenment, an “ah-hah” moment, an understanding, even entertainment (whether that is the intent of the website or not). Easterners don’t operate that way. They acquire data first; they indulge in it later. The premise of my theory is that when Chinese are accessing a website, they are in data acquisition mode. It’s all about input from the site to the brain, and not nearly as much about interaction, reaction or understanding.

Another aspect of Chinese culture that became frustratingly obvious over time is that they are extremely indirect. Unlike Westerners, Chinese become very uncomfortable when people get right to the point. There is a sort of dance that occurs among Chinese during conversation. As a Westerner, this is extremely frustrating and confusing, but for Chinese this is simply the most acceptable method of communication. I don’t think it’s too much of a jump then to carry over this behavior to website interactions as well. A concise, to the point, call to action just simply is not what resonates with the Chinese culture.

Keeping it Real

Now, in the spirit of remaining the transparent realist that I am, here are a few bullet points outlining my feelings and understandings:

• This does not mean that I now see the beauty of Chinese web design. For me, it still reeks of 1995 Western design. And 1995 design practices, while tolerable at that time, are now objectively bad and should not be revisited.
• I do not believe that Chinese web design should or could catch up to the current trends we are seeing in the West.
• I do not believe the artistic preference timeline is linear across time and cultures and that all cultures pass through the same points. China is on their evolutionary path and the West is on theirs.
• We can and should appreciate that our cultures are different, but we do not and should not (currently at least) agree on best practices in web design.

Cross-cultural web design is extremely difficult if not impossible. Beyond language barriers, there exists an insurmountable artistic preference barrier. This is not a bad thing. Everyone is different. Every culture is different. Though I do believe in cross-cultural interactions and communications, there are some things that must remain accessible only within that culture. Web design is one of them.

What is ‘Internet’?

This video from 1994 blows my mind. It’s amazing how far we’ve come in just 17 years.

Why we don't have a parent selector

This is funny, but when you're actually a developer, this isn't funny at all. One can spend hundreds of hours writing great software only to have the user want it free. Devs do need food too!

20 Examples of Simplistic but Effective Logo Design

Something we hear over an over in the design world is that less is more. Even though using that statement has become a bit cliche, it is true – especially when it comes to logo design. Sometimes designers can get carried away with trying to incorporate too many complicated elements into a logo. It’s better to keep things simple and make use of clever negative space and typography. These types of marks are usually far more effective and memorable. To inspire you, here are 20 Examples of Simplistic but Effective Logo Design.

amelie() – a devious plan to get rid of IE6

IE6 must die - we all know this. Even Microsoft knows and acknowledges this (the IE9 team would love everybody to upgrade). The problem is that as a technical argument we don't get far.

The people who force their users to still use IE6 as the main "browser" don't want to change their environments as it means that they have to change thousands of computers and re-educate people who don't like computers on new systems. This is why we need to find a way to make IE6 a problem of other parts of these organisations.

This is why I dug through the IE6 toolkit and found a way to make it annoying to use the browser - the MotionBlur filter. Applied randomly every few seconds, this makes it a very strange experience to use IE6:

Here's the code, which you can also download from the homepage:

Now, applied to our web sites this will annoy users, and they will complain and this is when the devious master plan comes into action:

1. Use amelie() in our web sites
2. Fake confusion and deny any problem when people start complaining - our code is OK (show build test logs if needed)
3. Get some experts to talk about the concept of "software fatigue". This utter lie should state that software, like any other machine, deteriorates over time and starts to behave in an erratic manner. Explain parts of code as little cogs that get cracked over time or something like that. This works amazingly well - I used to tell people that when they shut down their computer they have to keep it off for 15 minutes before rebooting so "that all chips can unload".
4. Spread the rumour that IE6's software fatigue means it doesn't work well with video cards and that this could be the reason for the display glitches.
5. Get other experts to link the erratic display to deteriorating eyesight and headaches in office personnel.
6. Thus, we turn IE6 into a health and safety issue and companies are much quicker in changing these than they are in changing technical environments because of technical problems.

Hey, it is Friday :)

Made In CSS; iOS icons and more

Do you enjoy the "looks at me build something cool in pure CSS"-meme? It is kinda fun. On the one hand is shows what amazing things people can build, and on the other.... it reminds us that we need some tools to help make life easier. At least the platform is here, and tools can come later.

Louis Harboe has followed up his purchase of an iPhone 4 with iOS 4 icons made with CSS. Now only do we get to see his work, but he talks about the high level ideas behind the implementation:

In the contacts icon, I used 5 different shapes for the silhouette icon. The head is a rectangle with rounded corners, followed by another rectangle for the neck and a distorted semi-circle for the body. In order to get the curve of the shoulders to the neck, I placed two circles on top of the shapes.

The weather icon has several rays of light shooting from behind the sun. Each one of these rays is actually a long rectangle with a gradient that fades to transparent on either end. I used -webkit-transform:rotate to rotate each rectangle to a different angle. The same effect was used for the iTunes icon.

To get the cloud icon on the iDisk icon, I used two circles layered on top of each other, above a rounded rectangle. The larger circle has a gradient that cuts off just before the rectangle.

Take a full example such as calendar:

Awesome. One nice thing about this approach is that it can scale. iPhone 4 users are already talking about how glaring it is when apps have low res assets. Even the Facebook applications.... the text looks great, but the icon is blocky.

Also, some other nice CSS gradient examples were put on display.

jQuery Mobile Announced; Touch-Optimized Web Framework for Smartphones & Tablets

I have had the pleasure to start working with the awesome jQuery team on a new mobile development. Today, John announced jQuery Mobile, "a unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation."

Palm has sponsored the effort with other great folks, and I wrote about it over here:

When we heard that the jQuery team was putting a lot of effort towards supporting their great library on devices, we wanted to help. At first we started with devices for John to test on as he explored compatibility, but with the newly announced jQuery Mobile initiative, we wanted to do more.

What are we doing? We are going to sponsor some of the great work that will go into jQuery Mobile from jQuery team members such as the Filament Group who are well known for their work on jQuery UI and ThemeRoller. First and foremost, we want to allow the team to focus on making a great jQuery experience across the mobile Web.

Secondly, we will be working hard to make sure that webOS itself is a fantastic host for the product. This will mean testing help, and also some jQuery plugins that show off some of the great abilities of webOS (e.g. the notifications system) in a progressive way.

We are really excited to be working with the team as their launch into jQuery Mobile en force.

Here are some more details on the goals of jQuery Mobile from Mr. John Resig himself:

"The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI framework.

Absolutely critical to us is that jQuery and the mobile UI framework that we’re developing work across all major international mobile platforms (not just a few of the most popular platforms in North America). We’ve published a complete strategy overview detailing the work that we’re doing and a chart showing all the browsers that we’re going to support.

Right now we're working hard, planning out the features that we want to land and doing testing against the devices that we want to support — and hoping for a release later this year.

If you wish to help, please join the discussion in the jQuery Mobile Community.

Our aim is to provide tools to build dynamic touch interfaces that will adapt gracefully to a range of device form factors. The system will include both layouts (lists, detail panes, overlays) and a rich set of form controls and UI widgets (toggles, sliders, tabs)."

It has been enjoyable to see the great touch and mobile support that YUI 3.2 is adding, and we look forward to hosting the Dojo team at Palm for one of their events. Sencha Touch and SproutCore are showing us that Web applications can feel like "native" apps on other platforms. All in all, the future for a cross platform Web application world is bright. We look forward to working with the entire community to make it happen.

Glimmer: Visual Builder for JQuery Animations

From Tim Aidlin over at Microsoft comes a tutorial on using JQuery to do animation. The tutorial is focused on using a new library they have designed called Glimmer that allows designers and developers to create interactive elements and animations on web pages using JQuery. Using Glimmer you setup your HTML and CSS and then use the visual Glimmer tool to create animations and other effects:

The Glimmer tool then generates JQuery JavaScript automatically that you can pull into your page. An example snippet:

Owned

Cool Guy

Comic by: dunno source via Comix Builder

Backpack Fail

Get your Obama-Sonic-Harry Potter bookbag!

Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader

Sunday Sweets: Cute-Tastic!

Friday Rewind: Double Fail

This video is also viewable at YouTube | DailyMotion

This is Why Men Don’t have Advice Columns

Fruitarian Warrior

Submitted by: dunno source via Submission Page

The First Rule of Crazy

If you have to say you’re not crazy, you’re probably crazy.

This is a momentous event for EFCP: an email written to us, about us, from a maybe/maybe not crazy person. You decide. Apparently, we imprison minds. Or something like that.

Now im not crazy but this site is offensive to people who is mentally not sane or even maybe crazy. Once you post the peoples email you are violating there right to have FREE minds! Free, understand? Thats not fair plus its illegal. Believe me, I know. Ive stopped many people from doing this to me and helped other people too. LOTS of other people.

See I can play this game too because Ive been there before and how will you like it then! I KNOW how it works, believe me

So you should think 2 or even 3 times before you post other peoples thoughts OR there minds OR if even they think they aren’t crazy OR even if they do even say are fine it does NOT MATTER!

You should already know better, but youll find out and then youll will, know better. Plus I just told so you CANT say you didnt know better at least from now on.

And Im keeping a copy of this email to send to them if you dont stop IMMEDIATELY! Just know that I dont like doing that because I dont like to talk to them anymore but I will if you dont stop IMMEDIATELY!

Thank you

Submitted by: Anon

Epic Coloring Book

Help yourself to a collection of Epic Coloring jobs: