Firefox 3.5 Market Share and Statistics

Recently, a lot of folks have reported that Firefox 3.5 is the most widely used browser. This is true; however, the statistics do not show that Firefox is most widely used (which most responsible blogs have also reported).

Geeksmack had an excellent article on this topic. Looking at the graph shown there, there are many things that can be seen if you examine the graph critically:

• The loss of market share by IE 7 seems to correspond to the growth of IE 8.
• Firefox 3.0, at its height, had a larger percentage of users than Firefox 3.5 does right now.
• Firefox 3.5 seems to be affecting Firefox 3.0 the most: after Firefox 3.5 was introduced, Firefox 3.0 dropped in user count precipitously.
• In the middle of 2009, Firefox 3.0 lost users to IE 7 for a period of time.

The last thing is that these are all conjectures based on statistical evidence; true correlation may not exist. Truly, statistics must be analyzed with care.

There is a good article over at Blog of Metrics at mozilla.org describing all the places where one can find the current statistics on Firefox market share.

Announcements: Firefox, Virtuozzo, PDF, and more

There are a variety of interesting announcements that have been floating about.

Probably the most talked about is Firefox 3 – it set a world record for the most software downloads in a single day – over 8 million downloads. Wow!

FreeBSD already has a build of Firefox 3. When will we see a build of Flock 1.2 I wonder?

HP announced that they will sell and support Parallels Virtuozzo (a commercial version of OpenVZ) on Itanium systems running Windows and Linux. What this means for HP-UX VM is unclear at this time.

Adobe’s PDF format has been formalized as a standard, ISO 32000-1. Only time will tell how much of a benefit this will be.

Apple updated MacOS X and MacOS X Server to 10.5.4; time to update your systems. Now would be a good time to check out those security guides for MacOS X (10.3, 10.4, and 10.5) that Apple released early last month.

Also, if you missed it, the security distribution BackTrack released version 3 last month. BackTrack is a live CD Linux distribution focused on security and penetration testing: fix your systems before the attackers do it for you.

An OpenSolaris Review, and OpenSolaris Day 2008

This detailed review of OpenSolaris from an experienced Solaris administrator (at OSYS News Weblog) is a delight. Certainly, any review of OpenSolaris in the “main-stream” technical press (whatever that is) is generally more broad and less technical than an administrator could wish for – especially an administrator who is experienced with Solaris. The author specifically mentions arstechnica.com (this review perhaps?) and phoronix.com (this review?), both about OpenSolaris 2008.05.

OpenSolarisDay 2008 (also being billed as OpenJava Day?) will be held at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Facultad de Matemáticas) on July 26 and 27. If you are in Madrid those days (and speak Spanish), why not go? Sounds very open and fun.

If you use Firefox (or alternative spins like Flock) you can use an extension called HyperWords to translate on the fly as I did (I don’t speak Spanish – French, yes; Russian, I can fake it…. but not Spanish). HyperWords allows you to take a number of actions on a selected item, including translations. Worth getting!