Day: January 3, 2007

Safari & Firefox Marketshare Continues to Grow in 2006

/ Adam Nash

Some of the latest market share numbers from Net Applications:

Some of the key insights from Mac Daily News:

According to data collected by Net Applications’ “Market Share,” Apple Computer’s Safari Web browser continues to gain market share in the Internet browser segment. In December 2005, Safari’s market share was 3.07%. In December 2006, Safari’s market share stood at 4.24%. The rise from 3.07% to 4.24% represents a year-over-year growth of 38.11% for the month of December.

Safari experienced a 5.21% increase from November 2006 rising from 4.03% to 4.24% in December 2006. Safari is a Mac OS X-only browser.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser continues to lose share, dropping below 80% to stand at 79.64% in December 2006. In December 2005, Internet Explorer’s market share was 85.05%. The fall from 85.05% to 79.64% represents a year-over-year loss of 6.36% for the month of December.

Firefox went from 9.57% in December 2005 to 14.0% in December 2006, a 46.29% increase year-over-year.

Interestingly, if you dig into the numbers you see that the Safari market share is now basically equivalent to the size of the Mac OS marketshare, implying that the growth to date has been coming from two factors:

  1. Growth of Mac OS marketshare
  2. Growth of Safari adoption by Mac OS users

Unfortunately for Apple loyalists, #2 has likely played its course as most Mac users have upgraded to Mac OS 10.2 or later now, where Safari became the default browser (back in 2003, when Microsoft killed Internet Explorer for the Mac). That means that going forward, Safari growth has to come primarily from growth in Mac OS marketshare.

The Firefox growth is stupendous, and hats off to my friends at Mozilla. 14.0% is amazing, and has a lot to do with the official change in policy by many websites to include multiple browsers as officially supported platforms for development of new features. (It also has something to do with their rumored economic success of late.)

Many people don’t realize how much additional development and quality assurance effort goes into designing web applications for use on multiple browsers and operating systems. However, users vote with their actions, and they have said, loudly and clearly, we support multiple browsers.

I’m glad to say that as of 2006, eBay officially does too.

I, of course, always seem to be off the beaten path. As more and more Mac users adopt Safari, I have recently moved to Firefox 2.0 for my default browser. Maybe Safari 3.0 & Mac OS 10.5 will change my mind.

For Anneliese: Puppies & Babies

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

I received a comment on my end-of-the-year post from an old co-worker, Anneliese.  She included a link to her blog, which I really don’t understand.  🙂

However, she said for a personal blog, I’m not including enough “Baby & Puppy” pictures.   Which is fair since I’ve posted at least two posts about my tomatoes from my garden, but no puppies.

Well, here’s a teaser picture.  A great image, captured by the famous Eric Cheng, of my son Jacob (2) and my first Beagle Newton (4).

Enjoy.

Battlestar Galactica: Renewal for Season 4 (but new spin-off Caprica struggling?)

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

A quick news tidbit from a new blog – SyFy Portal.  Yes, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I read it.

The good news is that it looks like the SCI FI channel is ready to announce support for another season of Battlestar Galactica, probably my favorite drama right now that isn’t on HBO.  Season 3 is about to start up again after the mid-season cliffhanger on January 21st, with a move to Sunday nights.  If you are not Tivo’ing this or catching it on iTunes, it’s never too late.

The bad news is that the new spin-off show proposed by the creators of Battlestar Galactica, “Caprica”, may be having some trouble.  The article suggests that the new show is unlikely for 2007.  That might be a good thing, since the spin-off doesn’t sound that compelling, and might represent a real “jump the shark” moment for the series.

In any case, you can read more about it here.

Mac OS X: How to Clear Your DNS Cache (or How Can I See My New Server?)

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Let me preface this post by saying:  Your-Site.com Sucks.

In fact, that’s an important enough fact for another complete post.  Let’s just say that I have not had email service from my provider, your-site.com, since December 29th.  Forget 99.9% uptime.  This is over five days of no email service, and very terse and angry emails from their customer service when requesting daily updates of status.   I’ve been using their service for over five years, so you’d think they’d treat you a little bit better, but no.

I finally got tired of hearing nothing useful from them, and I switched providers yesterday to GoDaddy.com. Cheaper ($4/month), more features (5GB space, 250GB transfer, 500 email accounts), and email support 24×7 that responds in about one hour.

However, I did learn an important trick.  So GoDaddy got my new hosting service up in record time, literally hours.   However, I realized that my current FTP & Email clients were still seeing the old DNS mapping for my domain.

I realized this was because my machine had cached the DNS lookup for my domain.  The applications weren’t seeing the new IP address, because they thought they already knew it.

The answer is simple:

  1. Open up the Terminal application (in Utilities)
  2. Type “lookupd -flushcache”

That’s it.  I love the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X, so it’s always nice to discover a nice back end trick.  This one was easier than most.

Many thanks to the Inert Ramblings blog for the easy answer to this problem.

Hopefully, I will now have consistent and available email service through the rest of 2007 & beyond.