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Monday, December 14th 2009
This week, Firefox will most likely become the most used web browser version in the world, according to Statcounter.
According to Net Applications though, Firefox 3.5 has a while to go before being king.
I wish Google would share their browser data. They did, way back, didn’t they?
Monday, November 9th 2009
Today, the 9th November, is Firefox’s 5th birthday. Firefox 1.0 was released the 9th November 2004.
Photo by Christopher Blizzard.
I didn’t start blogging until December 2004 so I have no historical blog post to link to.
Back in 2004 I’d already been using Firefox since version 0.6, released in May 2003. And I’d been a fan of the Mozilla Suite for roughly 2 ½ years. (Mozilla 1.0 was released 5th June 2002.) And before that I was happily using Netscape 6 since its release in November 2000.
In 2005 I wrote a long version of how I became such a huge Firefox fan. Towards the end, thinking about the future, I wrote:
Imagine being a web developer in 2009, with almost 93% of the browser market being CSS3 compliant.
Hah, that’s a laugh. It turns out things don’t move quite that fast. Still, we’re basically rid of the IE6 plague and IE7 is heading in the same direction – down.
Here’s to another 5 years of Firefox gaining market share! In 2014 it should have at least 50 percent. IE will be a minority player.
Tonight I’m meeting Mozilla Sweden
, i.e. David Tenser and Patrick Finch at the Bishop’s Arms for a … beer? Naw, a coke maybe. 
Wednesday, October 14th 2009
Another of the main Swedish news sites, Dagens Nyheter, is dropping support for IE6. This isn’t a day too early. Back in February, Aftonbladet did the same thing.
Visitors using IE6 are shown a pretty box at the top of the page, suggesting the visitor upgrades to IE8 or installs Firefox, Chrome or Safari. As usual, poor Opera are left out of the fun.
Opera is still among the supported browsers though:
We should do something similar at ekuriren.se. Heard my boss thinking aloud about perhaps suggesting Firefox, but then I believe IE6 is already as low as one or two percent!
Tuesday, September 29th 2009
Google recently announced Chrome Frame, a plug-in for Internet Explorer which lets web sites use the rendering engine from Google Chrome instead of IE’s default rendering engine, Trident.
Before I understood how this was meant to work, i thought Wow! Google are going to rid the web of Internet Explorer!
My happiness soon came to a screeching halt though.
If we ignore all the difficulties of making Chrome’s rendering engine (Webkit) play nicely with the Internet Explorer interface, there is one fundamental problem that stops Chrome Frame from becoming the web saviour that everyone was hoping for.
The problem that Chrome Frame aims to fix – the large user base of Internet Explorer coupled with its stone-age rendering engine – exists mainly due to lack of knowledge.
People who keep using Internet Explorer do so largely because they don’t know about the alternatives, or what a huge problem IE is for web developers.
The number of IE users who have made a conscious decision to stick with IE, but still are knowledgeable enough to understand the benefits of a modern rendering engine, can probably be counted on a few thousand left hands.
So, along comes Chrome Frame. But, the essential factor knowledge is just as lacking now as it has been before. Chrome Frame still requires IE users to knowingly install it, which I really can’t see happening.
However, Google may have another card up their sleve. A card known by the name Google Wave.
Google Wave is, drasticly simplified, a replacement for e-mail. It is an online tool for communication and sharing. Now this sounds like something we’ve all heard a million times before. It isn’t.
Anyway, Google have given up on trying to get Wave working properly in Internet Explorer. Wave relies heavily on modern standards, and IE is just too far behind. Instead, Google Wave will ask IE users to install the plug-in Chrome Frame. Or another browser.
If Google Wave catches on properly it may well give IE users a healthy nudge in the direction of better browsers and/or Chrome Frame. And having seen the demo of Wave, I think it may very well become the next big thing.
However, having followed the browser market for ten years or so, I’ve seen how slowly it shifts. I doubt Chrome Frame and/or Wave will introduce any dramatic changes.
Thursday, September 24th 2009
This, my friends, is development:
In one year …
*) This chart beautifully illustrates the efficiency of Firefox’s automatic update system compared to that of Internet Explorer (Windows Update). Firefox 3.5 has got further in three months than IE8 has in 6!! It wouldn’t surprise me if the Firefox 3.5 update is the fastest ever in the history of software, measured in number of users per time.
If we take a step back and look at the global numbers, things aren’t quite as rosy. But everything is still moving in the right direction:
Obviously, all these numbers are all according to Statcounter only. NetApplications numbers tend to show Firefox at slightly numbers. The trends are essentially the same, and the Statcounter graph tool is so much nicer to use.
Thursday, May 14th 2009
At the end of March, we launched a new version of our website at Eskilstuna-Kuriren, ekuriren.se. We replaced our ancient content manger with a new, modern, flexible system known as Polopoly. Polopoly is developed in Sweden and used by many of the large Swedish news sites.
The launch went smoothly, but soon we started getting e-mail upon e-mail from users about speed problems. After a while it turned out that many Internet Explorer users were having huge problems both loading the page and scrolling the page.
Apparently, when loading the website in Internet Explorer it can sometimes make the whole computer slow down to a halt, forcing a hard reboot. If you manage to load the page, it can scroll painfully slowly.
Obviously, this mainly shows that the site hasn’t been properly tested. A huge majority of our visitors use Internet Explorer. Or at least they used to. Perhaps the percentage has gone down now, from people simply giving up on us. It truly amazes me how the developers still haven’t properly managed to sort out the performance issues. They have supposedly been working on this from day one, which is almost two months back now.
While I still haven’t actually heard a precise technical explanation of what the problem is, this experience shows in a very tangible way how big a difference there is between Internet Explorer and the more modern browsers when it comes to speed. Whether it is the scripting engine or the rendering engine or something else that is causing the problems for Internet Explorer users I don’t know.
What I do know is that we simply haven’t had a single complaint about performance from Firefox or Safari users.
Here’s to hoping that the site admins get the issues sorted as soon as possible and that all browsers will be able to display our news site without the user suffering serious illnesses from frustration.
Thursday, May 7th 2009
After finishing my slight redesign here I found that IE8 made a complete mess of it. Turned out of course that I had forgotten to change the doctype into something other than XHTML Strict, which IE still doesn’t understand.
I went with the nice, simple HTML 5 doctype, which seems to be the best option:
<!DOCTYPE html>
That was all that was necessary and now, miraculously, my blog looks … decent in IE8! Looks like it has finally understood my max-width rules as well! Amazing stuff.
Monday, March 30th 2009
This is part two of my comparison of the latest browsers. (Part one is here.) This time I compared page-loading times, just as Betanews recently did.
The browsers I’m comparing are …
I compared the browsers on five different sites / web pages:
Let’s just get straight to the results. I’ll go through my methods later.
In the graph above, the average page-load times for all five web pages have been added together, as have the 95% confidence intervals. All in all, this graph is based on 500 page loads.
Chrome and Firefox are tied for first place – their confidence intervals overlap. Safari and Internet Explorer are tied for third, and Opera is fifth.
For each combination of browser and web site I did a total of 20 page-loads. I measured one web page at a time, working my way through the five browsers.
Since network traffic and page weight can vary over time, I did them in two sets of ten measurements. First I did ten measurements with the browsers in one order: A, B, C, D and E. Then I did ten measurements in the opposite order, starting with browser E. I also rotated the five browsers between A, B, C, D and E for the five different web pages.
Before timing the page-loads, I shift+reloaded (or the equivalent ctrl+reload in IE) the web page ten times to saturate any network cache and to get the browser warmed up
. I did this for each browser, before each set of ten measurements. (Ten reloads might sound excessive, but I started off doing only three, which turned out to be too little to reach the shortest load times.)
Between each page-load I cleared all browser data (cookies, cache, etc.). Except for Facebook, where I kept cookies and secure sessions to be able to time the Facebook home page when logged in.
To time the page-loads I used this Javascript page-load timer. As the Microsoft white-paper on testing browsers says, this could introduce an observer effect
. But I think we can assume that the Javascript that is being executed is pretty simple and shouldn’t affect the times noticeably.
This test showed that Google Chrome 2 beta is not 100% stable. It hung twice (in 100 page loads) and produced load times of over 30 seconds. I decided to remove these values and replace them with new ones.
In these graphs, each bar shows the average of 20 page-loads. The error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.
For youtube.com, Firefox and Chrome are tied for first. Safari and Internet Explorer are tied for third. Opera is last.
The Facebook home page loads fastest in Firefox and Chrome, whose confidence intervals only just overlap. The other three browsers are significantly separated.
Perhaps it is the fairly Javascript-heavy nature of Facebook that makes it load so slowly in IE8?
Msn.com: Chrome and Internet Explorer are tied for first. Firefox and Safari are tied for third. Opera is last, again.
I decided to test the browsers on a long Wikipedia article with lots of images. I looked up Munich, which turned out to be a good candidate.
Chrome and Firefox are tied for first place. Safari is third, Opera fourth and IE fifth.
Finally, ebay.com: Chrome, IE and Firefox are all tied for first place. Safari is tied with Firefox but slower than Chrome and IE. Opera is last.
Chrome sucks web pages off the Internet like an Electrolux. So does Firefox. In this test I haven’t managed to separate them significantly. As we all can see, Chrome has a lower average sum than Firefox, and perhaps with more data it would be possible to separate them statistically.
Opera is the slowest of the lot, which surprises me. Opera was also slowest in the start-up test. Perhaps though we should cut it some slack – it’s labelled alpha after all. Performance might improve when it reaches beta and final status. Opera also has a turbo feature in the works, but that is kind of cheating since it will lower image quality by tougher compression.
Obviously, this test could be made better in mainly two ways. I could test on more web sites, and I could do more page loads for each web site. But this test was, all in all, 500 timed page-loads and 500 non-timed page-loads. It took me more than a day to complete.
It’s also worth noting that this test is pretty much consistent with Betanews’ page load test, where Chrome 2 beta wins and Firefox 3.1 beta 3 is second.
This test was done with clean browser cache. I’m considering doing the same test but without clearing cache and cookies for each page load. After all, that’s how most page loads are done in the real world. A user who visits any of these five sites will most likely have been there many, many times before. I just need to figure out a good set-up for such a test.
Wednesday, March 25th 2009
A few days ago I compared the four different releases of Firefox for start-up time (cold and warm) and page loading time. It got quite a lot of attention so today I decided to compare the five latest preview releases from the big five:
This time I did things a little more scientifically, following Justin’s suggestion in the comments. I made a batch file for each browser to print the exact time, then launch the browser, opening a page with a script showing the exact time again. The time difference equals the launching time.
It should be noted that this method requires me to opt out of Chrome’s default “new tab” page, with suggested sites. If this affects the results in any real way is unknown, but personally I doubt it. The new tab page in Chrome loads very quickly.
Cold start-ups (directly after booting your computer) are the ones that can feel like an eternity some times. For that reason I think it is more important to have a fast cold start-up than a relatively speaking fast warm one (which generally are about 5-10 times faster anyway). So let’s start with cold start-ups.
I did ten measurements for each browser. A fairly big sample size which gives tiny 99% confidence intervals, which are visible in the graph below.
IE8 is the winner here (2.40 secs), slightly faster than Chrome (2.66 secs). All browsers are, with a 99% probability, significantly different (none are tied). However, this comparison was done on my Windows (XP) computer so IE8 has an unfair advantage – who knows how large part of Internet Explorer is pre-loaded with the operating system? That makes Chrome’s performance all the more impressive.
Safari is marginally faster than Firefox (4.98 vs 5.19 secs). Surprisingly, Opera (7.14 secs) is roughly two seconds slower than Firefox and Safari. I actually thought it would be at least as fast.
Now let’s have a look at warm start-up times. I launched the browsers four times before starting the timing. Then I did 15 measurements for each browser.
Here, Chrome is in a league of its own with an average of 0.247 secs. Firefox and Opera are tied. They took on average 0.530 and 0.531 secs respectively, and their confidence intervals overlap. IE8 averaged 0.575 seconds and Safari came in last with 0.617 seconds.
Chrome impresses the most, even if IE8 launches slightly faster after reboot. Firefox and Safari are pretty similar, while Opera clearly is the slowest for cold start-ups.
These results really explain (and justify) Chrome’s good reputation for speed.
I’m curious if the differences are as large when it comes to page-loading. I’m planning on doing such a comparison too, I just need to work out a good solid method. So stay tuned if you like this kind of stuff.
Monday, March 23rd 2009
Firefox 3 is quickly becoming the most popular browser in Europe. At the moment StatCounter shows it to be just a about half a percentage point below Internet Explorer 7.
Above is a graph showing what has happened since July 2008. Within one or a couple of weeks now, Firefox 3 should have passed IE7. This can be compared to North America where IE7 still has roughly twice as many users as Firefox 3. (Let’s not talk about Asia, where IE6 still is king.)
