Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Well for one day,  according to TG Daily reporting satistics provided by Net Applications Safari is listed with a 10.91% share of the browser market on 28 February 2009.  This seems to be due to rapid uptake of the new beta version of Safari which is estimated to have been downloaded 11 million times over four days.

It is important to be careful when reviewing this type of browser statistics as there is generally some sampling bias as figures are collected from sites using their products.  However, it does highlight the importance of Safari.

Net Applications figures for the month put Safari’s market share at 7% overall which is a significant number of people even discounting the latest boost from the beta.  However, it should be noted that their figures place the market share of the mac operating system at nearly 10%.  This suggests that mac users may be more likely than microsoft users to switch from the browser packaged with the operating system to firefox or another browser.

Analysis: Safari 4 lifts Apple above 10% browser market share

Browser Market Share

A recent article on the Specyboy blog provides a summary of some of the most useful firefox plugins for web designers.  These include the excellent web developer extension which I have used for several years.  A lot of the other plugins perform tasks already covered by the web developer plugin, however there is the odd interesting one.  These include abduction a screen capture tool and  extended status bar which provides information on load speed.  The full list can be seen here, 27 Indispensable Web Design and Development Firefox Extensions.

Micro-blogging is a phenomena that has seen massive growth over the last couple of years. These sites allow users to provide short text messages updating people on there status and what they are up to.  There are a large variety of these sites including ones with novel features such as emotionr which allows users to rate how happy they are and provides statistics on global happiness.  However, one of the most successful is twitter, in fact it has been integrated into the Userxp site.

The success of Twitter comes down to three main factors; Their ability to quickly build their user base before their competitors, that they provided free sms updates (something no longer available in the UK) and that they allowed developers to produce their own applications.  One such application is Twistori a site that displays twitter updates containing ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘think’, ‘believe’, ‘feel’ or ‘wish’.  Although of little practical use it is none the less facinating to watch and allowing this type of creativity certainly helps promote the twitter site.

According to a study by Accenture in the US, reported by the PC World site, only 5% of electroninc products returned to retailers were due to them malfunctioning.  The study suggested that 27 percent of returns were due to buyers remorse, however a massive 68 were due to the products failing to meet there expectations.  This was either due to the customer thinking it was defective when it wasn’t or not behaving as expected.  With return rates at between 11 and 20 percent this represents a massive number of items returned as they do not provide a satisfactory user experience.   This may also be partly due to the way electronic products are bought.  Often the customer purchases online or in store without first interacting with the product. This may result in users being less forgiving if they experience difficulty as they have already paid for the product.

Most Returned Products Work Fine, Study Says

Later this year sees the release of version three of the popular firefox browser. As part of this event the firefox community plans to show their support by going for the world record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. You can pledge your support and get further information on the download day site.

Download day 2008

It has only been a year and a half since the release of firefox 2 and with Internet Explorer 8 also in development it seems the current level of competition is helping drive the development of improved, standard compliant products.