Can Opera get more usage?


I came across this link (Facebook To Buy Opera? Maybe. Here’s What We Hear) earlier.  It got me thinking about what that could mean for the browser wars.  Right now, Opera has less than 2% of all web users browsing with it’s browser on the desktop, although they have 15%-20% of all mobile browser traffic.

Facebook meanwhile has a ton of users.  They might have to be a little careful, but they could promote Opera to their users and increase Opera’s user base.  But more importantly, Facebook can use the experience Opera’s developers have with mobile.

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Browser stats, Summer 2012


One of the things I have to review periodically is what browsers people are using.  I am looking for a few things specifically.  I don’t really care which browser is edging out the number 1 spot.  No, I’m generally looking at the bottom of the scale, to which browsers are falling out of use, and are safe to discontinue testing on.

I’m currently particularly interested in the stats for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6.  Why those 2?  Starting with Firefox 5, Mozilla implemented automatic upgrades similar to (although a bit more manual than) the upgrades to Google Chrome.  And if you look at the stats for Firefox 5+ or Chrome, you see very quick abandonment of preview versions when a new version comes out.  Firefox 4 never got much traction, but Firefox 3.6 had a lot of holdouts that either upgraded and then rolled back or never upgraded at all.

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Blogging for fun


I’ve been meaning to post to my blog off and on for a while, and I always ended up at the writing panel without a clue what I wanted to write. And then 6 months would go by, without anything new.

Well, that time to over. I plan to post my thoughts here at a minimum weekly, and I am publicly committing myself to that in this, my inaugural post. Of course, “publicly” is a little bold, as I have a visitor count approaching zero.

So what will I write about? I will be writing about web development topics – Front End development using HTML, CSS and JavaScript will likely dominate the technical posts, although I may drop in some C# or PHP once in a while when I learn sometime cool. I also plan to write about the things I find cool, whether new products or techniques.

And once in a while I reserve the right to go off on a rant, although I’ll remind myself right here that this public forum is not the proper place to rant about personal or workplace issues. The tone will stay professional.

And while I won’t always end with a quote, I do like to quote those more articulate than myself. And in this case, this applies:

“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”
~Napoleon Hill