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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?
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!
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.
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.
Saturday, March 7th 2009
I decided to have a go at comparing JavaScript execution speed in some upcoming browsers. Actually, that’s just almost true. The version of Chrome that I tested was 1.0 which obviously is a final release. There is no newer alpha or beta release from them at the moment. (As far as I can see.)
The tested browsers are (all on Windows XP):
I tested the browsers with two different benchmark suites. Google’s V8 and Apple’s SunSpider.
So, lets get straight to the results:
As you can see, I have normalized all the results for both tests so that the winner of each test gets exactly 100. This is to make a comparison possible between the two benchmarks.
I ran all benchmarks three times in each browser to get more reliable averages.
Safari and Chrome are as tied as can be. They both get a total score of 193. Opera and Internet Explorer are both a lot slower than the two winners, with 38 and 24 respectively.
The interesting thing is that Firefox does so well with SunSpider (93), and so poorly with V8 (12). What is the big difference between these benchmarks? Not that I’d understand it if someone explained it to me …
Obviously there’s still room for improvement to Firefox’s JavaScript engine (currently known as TraceMonkey).
Sunday, July 30th 2006
After redesigning my photography website today, I noticed that Opera 9 has a fairly serious rendering bug:
I don’t understand what I’ve done to make it do that… The CSS for H1 is here:
h1 { font: 220% Georgia, “Gill Sans MT”, “Trebuchet MS”; margin: 0.5em; letter-spacing: 0.25em }
h1 a { border-radius: 0.5em; -moz-border-radius: 0.5em; padding: 0.2em 0.4em; background: #eee; opacity: 0.5 }
h1 a:hover { opacity: 0.65 }
Maybe Opera applies
by default?
Tuesday, February 7th 2006
This is not a full review of Opera 9 (TP2). Just a little pointer to a few things I like about it, things I think Firefox should have too. 🙂 Alright, alright, Opera fans, it’s all about copying features.
The title is visible at the top of the tab, and the other informations doesn’t feel essential enough to outweigh the clutter it creates. I doubt that this is something that should be in the default Firefox install though.
The improved content blocking à la adblock initially seems to work fine. Does anyone know how it remembers what to block? If a different ad is displayed in the position where I blocked an ad a few days ago, will that also be blocked? If not, this is useless. If it is, this is useful. Adblock still has a slight edge on Opera though, with the ability to import a ready-made filter. Also, Opera doesn’t seem to be able to block Google Ads, should you wish to do so.
As for the widgets, I’m not entirely convinced of their usefullness. At least the widgets available now seem to be of limited value. Maybe the possibilities go far beyond the present ones. I get a feeling this whole widget thing is a bit overrated – a fad or a craze if you like.
All in all, Opera 9 looks very promising. I almost thought Wow!
and This is something I could use permanently!
. But I just can’t get used to the behaviour of Ctrl+Tab. I want it to be instant, as in Firefox. Not a big issue, but I just can’t quite get used to it.
Edit: Fixed a typo in the title.
Wednesday, September 21st 2005
As I was hoping a while back, Opera (the desktop version) has now become real freeware, without ads. This is truly great news for the web.
Now, hopefully, the Firefox and Opera communities can work united (sort-of, at least) towards the main target: to bring down the marketshare of that old, stinking, vile pile of a browser known as Internet Explorer.
Now, some may think
Oh, what does it matter, now that IE7 is just around the corner? Microsoft are working towards standards compliance now.
And here’s why it matters: We still don’t know if Microsoft’s intentions with Internet Explorer 7 really are good. In fact, they most likely aren’t – simply because they have no reason to. They do seem to be caring at the moment, but they did so about five years ago as well… It’s merely an overgrown PR stunt. If we ever let Internet Explorer’s market share grow as high as it was a year or two ago (~95%), I think we will find out the hard way that Microsoft’s aim was, once again: domination and (most importantly) lock-in. 8-|
So, if we (i.e. us Firefox and Opera fans) make sure that our favourite browsers always have a healthy market share, of at least 10% each (and hopefully a lot more), I think we can keep this Internet thing moving. If we want to be able to use any CSS3 stuff before we die we had better give it our best try.
Wednesday, August 24th 2005
It’s great to hear that Opera may becoming freeware in the near future. This is what Opera has been needing so badly to gain further market share. Market share which would give their mobile browser much better brand recognition, and hence make it an even greater source of income for Opera the company.
Is it just me, or are Browser Wars II really starting to heat up?
Thursday, August 4th 2005
The other day I was reading up on things like PHP and XML at W3schools. I was sortof hunting for a way to make my web gallery database driven. I got to the part about XSL, and was amazed at how useful and powerful, yet simple, it seemed. (Have a look at their samples.) The good feelings soon wore off though, when I realized Opera doesn’t support XSL at all.
My first thought was that if even IE6 from 2001 can do this (which it can), why on earth can’t Opera (v. 8)? After searching the Opera forums for answers, it turns out Opera (the company) doesn’t think XSL is a good idea. (Remember, this is a W3C standard…) Opera doesn’t think XML should be transformed on the users computer – instead they insist that this transformation should (always!) be done on the server. (Read more about XML transformations [XSLT] here.)
Well, that’s very easy for them to say. But for all the rest of us, who aren’t PHP 1337, XSLT seems like a very usable standard. Of course, as with any language, there are right and wrong ways to use it. For instance, if I were to be the developer of some huge website, I wouldn’t send the user 4 MB of raw XML data, and then make the XSLT document pick out a few hundred kBs to display in the browser. Since I’m a thinking human being, I realize that wouldn’t be a good idea. The Opera developers don’t seem to think webmasters are capable of that kind of brain activity.
Wednesday, June 22nd 2005
Just found a rather nice JavaScript application, so I thought, since everyone else is hyping JavaScript/AJAX/DHTML/whatever right now – why can’t I?
The website in question is a Swedish website where you can find phone numbers to basically anything (in Sweden). It seems to be specifically the private phone numbers part which has a slick JavaScript hack: After searching for a name (try Pettersson
, that should give you a few hits to play with) you can click any entry, and you will immediately get a map showing where the person in question lives:
Click again to minimize the entry again. Well, I guess it’s not all that advanced, but it’s definately handy. And, believe it or not, it actually works in IE, Firefox and Opera. I think I’ll have to send them a short thank-you-letter. 🙂
Wednesday, June 1st 2005
It looks like the Opera devs are pretty close to passing the Acid2 test. Just a few more bugfixes and they will be done! Hopefully they will release a version with all the fixes too, in a not too distant future.
Firefox has got left in the backwater of Safari and Opera here. The current nightlies of v1.1 still display the face like this:
Hopefully we will see the Acid2 fixes for Firefox after v1.1 is released this autumn. (Don’t expect that release any sooner…)
I also sincerely hope the IE Trident developers (Chris Wilson & co) are working towards passing the Acid2 test. If there isn’t time before shipping v7.0, then maybe at least for a version such as 7.1 or 7.5.
Tuesday, April 19th 2005
Opera have now officially released version 8 of their browser. I welcome the simplified default toolbar setup, which in version 7 could be pretty dauting even for a nerd like me.
Still, I find that Opera are a little inconsistent when they choose to always show the tab bar as default. The statusbar has long been set to auto-hide as default to maximize page space – why not hide the tab bar when only one tab is open? (I know there is a “show only when needed” option, I’m just wondering why it isn’t ticked as default.)
Also, the popup blocker in Opera 8 doesn’t seem as efficient as Firefox’s. When checking my website stats at my.statcounter.com I get a popup which I never get when using Firefox.
Update: Opera.com seems a little under the weather rigth now.
Sunday, March 20th 2005
I have downloaded and tried both betas of Opera 8 (and I now see they have put out a thrid one), and I must say they have improved the user experience considerably since version 7.
However, it still took me something like four tries, and endless amounts of time, to get the toolbars the way I wanted them: menus, Google ads, basic navigation buttons and location bar, and then the tabs. Now, I would consider myself fairly computer-litterate, having made two themes for Firefox among other things, so it shouldn’t be because of my level of general computer knowledge. I suppose it could just have been bad luck. It could also be due to the fact that I’m very used to Firefox. My feeling, though, is that the toolbar customization in Opera 8 is still fairly unintuitive. What do you think? If you haven’t tried Opera 8 yet – give it a spin. It’s the best browser around. Sadly, it’s also (to my knowledge) the most expensive.
Tuesday, March 8th 2005
Over the last few days, having had nothing better to do, I’ve investigated how well the main (free) website statistics services cope with browser recognition. The results of my testing are presented in this table.
The first step was to create a webpage containing all the counters to be studied. I started off with Nedstat Basic 3.0, Statcounter, OneStat Basic 3.0, eXTReMe Tracker, CQ Counter, S-Tracking, Site Meter, NextGenStats, WebCounter and PowerPhlogger. However, the last three turned out to be excruciatingly slow in updating the stats reports and I didn’t have the patience to sit and wait for them. They were excluded from the study, and I don’t feel it was a great loss since the quality in general of those services felt rather low. (WebCounter, for instance, was constantly trying to get you to pay for stuff even though this was supposedly a totally FREE sevice.) After publishing some preliminary results in the user forum at statcounter.com I was asked by David Smith to check out Site Meter too. (I later realized he is the creator of Site Meter.)
The results were collected by loading the counter page in one browser at a time and subsequently checking the browser reported by each stats service. Some services (NedStat, OneStat and CQ Counter) don’t show detailed information about each pageload, which means that I had to track the changes on the browser stats pages available.
For pageloads with non-Windows browsers (Safari, Camino and Konqueror) I received help from Jeff Pony, David Smith and Johann Petrak.
There weren’t any really big surprises. However, the myth that “many Opera users are detected as IE users” is at least killed, once and for all. (Opera’s default setting is to identify as IE, so as to prevent the user from unecessarily being locked-out by clueless webmasters.) The only statistics provider to be fooled by the Explorer spoofing is S-Tracking, who seldom (if ever?) drop browser figures on the world OneStat–&–WebSideStory–style.
One noteworthy fact is that OneStat’s free stats service doesn’t discriminate between Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (or any other Moz browser for that matter). Yet they publish press releases which do (or look like they do). There are three possibilities here: Either (1) they exclude statistics from the free accounts in their press releases, (2) the browser stats in their press releases are seriously flawed, or (3) they actually count Firefox and Mozilla Suite seperately for the free counters too, but to make a paid upgrade seem worth-wile they don’t report them separately.
Netscape 8 beta had an interesting habit of importing the Firefox user agent string when importing other settings from said browser. The original string includes the information Firefox/0.9.6, which was exchanged for Firefox/1.0.1 after importing Firefox settings. As well as fixing this bug, Netscape need to produce a unique user agent string for the final release if they want to be visible in website stats at all.
Another slightly odd thing was that Site Meter sometimes claimed to be able to see more information in the user agent string than was actually there. One example was Netscape 8 beta in Internet Explorer rendering mode: the user agent string presented when calling navigator.userAgent using JavaScript was Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1), while Site Meter claimed it was Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) NS8/0.9.6. I can only presume I am missing something here, so if you know – please contact me.
Statcounter is quite clearly king of browser recognition – it accurately reports even the minor versions of almost all browsers. The only thing holding it back from total perfection is that it doesn’t understand Mozilla Suite version numbers. Judging from this test and previous experience it seems like all Mozilla Suite 1.x versions are reported as version 5.0. (The user agent string of Mozilla Suite always begins with Mozilla/5.0.)
Worst of the pack is S-Tracking. For starters it’s the only service fooled by Opera’s user agent spoofing. It also puts all Mozilla-related browsers as well as Safari (!) into one category and simply calls them Netscape. However – because of this – it’s the only service that correctly identifies Netscape 8 beta. Impressive! 🙂
OneStat, which is a fairly popular website tracker, can probably be considered second last. Even if it seldom actually gets it wrong, it’s a pretty blunt tool. It groups all browsers into Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape Navigator (including Konqueror!), Opera and Apple (better known to us earthlings as Safari).
