Rob Larsen

Archive for the 'browsers' Category

Internet Explorer 8 Released

Much to digest, and I haven't even downloaded it yet, so the best thing I've seen so far is this viral ad they're running to support the launch:

They've got a whole youtube channel set up. It's funny stuff.

Beyond that, as I announced on Twitter today, I'm no longer supporting IE6 for future development. Obviously at work I'll have to support whatever I'll have to support, but on my own projects I'll be ignoring IE6 completely from here on in and I couldn't be happier.

Congrats to the IE team.

No Matter What the Numbers Say- IE6 Support Here Ends With IE8's Release

Right now Internet Explorer 6 averages about 10-12% of my traffic here (11% for the past month.) While I won't dismantle existing support mechanisms, I will no longer test new features in IE6 and going forward I will not support or test for IE6 for the new version of the site.

The good news is, I rarely do anything here that will tax IE6 heavily and the redesign will likely be architected in such a way that it will probably work pretty well in IE6 even without specific attention. The bad news is, 11% equals about 6000 people and the thought of annoying, even slightly, that many folks over a month worries me. The thing is, I just can't support three versions of a browser, especially when one of them is such an odd man out. IE7/IE8 are comfortably supportable browsers. IE6 plainly sucks.

Spurred on by this:

Microsoft: IE 8 won't be done until 2009

So I've got to draw a line in the sand.

Now if I can just convince them to do the same at work…

Free Web Based Screen Reader Service

If you're already working on accessible sites this may not be of interest to you, but if you're not and you've wondered what your web pages sound like when read by a screen reader, then this link is for you.

I know when I first started paying attention to accessibility and wanted to understand how the changes I was making would sound to users with screen readers I was initially confused by the myriad options and scared off by the cost of some of the tools. I eventually worked through it, with a couple of free tools, but it took some digging. This web-based service from the University of Washington clears up any confusion:

WebAnywhere: A Screen Reader On the Go

WebAnywhere is a non-visual interface to the web that requires no new software to be downloaded or installed.It works right in the browser, which means you can access it from any computer, even heavily locked-down public computer terminals.WebAnywhere enables you to interact with the web in a similar way to how you may have used other screen readers, such as JAWS or Window-Eyes,

Fun With Numbers – or- WTF? Vista Growing Faster Than Mac OS?

The following chart only tells part of the story (both based on the specific demographics of this site and for the fact that XP is off the chart) and is really only offered up for perspective on what Apple is up against in their battle with Microsoft for OS dominance. Apple has made healthy gains in the OS market share race over the past few years, so keep that in mind when you look at the following chart.
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Google Chrome So Far- 1.73% Market Share

At least with my sites. Over the two weeks it's been live I've seen 26567 visits at the sites I have analytics for and 462 of them have been with Chrome.

Admittedly, the vast majority of those visits have been to this site, so it's not as broad a sampling as I would like, but it's still and interesting number after just two weeks.

For reference here are the DrunkenFist.com numbers for the two weeks it's been out

Browser Number of Visits Percentage
1. Firefox 11,279 48.76%
2. Internet Explorer 9,358 40.45%
3. Safari 890 3.85%
4. Opera 556 2.40%
5. Chrome 399 1.72%

As you can see Chrome is nipping close at Opera's heels. Can Safari be far behind? We'll see how it all plays out.

In case you were wondering… YES I do love the fact that Firefox browsers are the #1 browser of choice of DrunkenFist.com visitors.

What are other people seeing in terms of Chrome adoption?