In his charmingly caustic way Hixie compares how AOL and Microsoft fared in the recent settlement. I am very disappointed, as AOL using Mozilla would have made things interesting. Around here Mozilla has been steadily climbing in the stats. What about the rest of the world? Check out the Google Zeitgeist. After an amazing climb, they show IE 6 tanking for the first time ever, while IE 5 jumps up to actually above IE 5.5. That’s a little disturbing. Also for the first time I’ve noticed they say “Netscape 5.0+ (including Mozilla)” is represented, but for the life of me I can’t find the purple line. Do you see the purple line?
Dude, the purple line is right at the bottom on the right. It would be interesting to see a more detailed analysis, would it not?
Read the pie chart clockwise; in the order of the list below it.
’til later,
john
I have been running linux several years now. Almost never with ie*anything.
BUT, my system reports M$W98 + IE5.0
The reason is simply that M$ software is apparently wired so as to NOT service
competitive makes. AND with linux + mozilla or netscape or konqueror, they are
able to handle most! I believe there are significant numbers doing this rendering
ACCURATE patterns & trends impossible. It LOOKs a lot better for M$ than it
really is. Watch M$ sales these next few years… it will tell a tale. Smart web designers will hedge their bets with browser/OS nuetral programming. It’s the only thing that really
makes any sense.
’til later,
john
Simon, I had to squint but I saw it. Thanks for pointing that out. I would love to have a look at Google’s stats in a less filtered form, or really of any of the top 10 sites. It was a little disappointing because I thought Mozilla was doing much better than that.
John, if you’re going to spoof your user agent, which I wouldn’t recommend, then send a user agent that is at least equivilent in functionality to what you’re using, so if you’re using Konquerer spoof IE 6. I’ve been using a Mozilla exclusively for several months now and I’ve never run into a problem with bad browser detection, maybe you’re just visiting bad sites.
I emailed the Google support and asked if there was anyway to syndicate the “Google Zeitgeist”, he replied saying;
Result?
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html
The client-side browser issues are only ever 1/2 of the story. On the server-side Microsoft technology continues to lose ground as more corporations wake up to server-side Open Source technology. See the chart on the Netcraft site to keep up with the full details.
I think the real reason that MS are trying to exert monopoly pressure on other companies (and other countries !) with their browser strategy is that the corporation wants to try and force their products onto the world’s servers.
All of the interesting developments and innovations seem to be coming from web standards and/or Open Source projects these days. MS is rapidly losing the plot.