I was reading John Resig's Browser Page Load Performance post earlier today and followed up from there on the concept of Link prefetching. Currently supported by Firefox 2+, Link prefetching is a browser based mechanism for fetching "future" content. Considering I wrote (and ultimately scrapped*) similar functionality for my gallery pages, I was obviously intrigued.
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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?
Lost in the past few years of IE6 based stagnation (and ensuing developer angst) is the fact that the Internet Explorer team have come up with some pretty cool enhancements to the way we build web sites over the past ten plus years.
So, while we're cheering on Firefox's growing market share, hesitantly eying IE8 and waiting for the ugly stepchild of the browser landscape, IE6, to finally die a painful (and hopefully immediate) death, I thought I'd lay out some of the innovations introduced by Internet Explorer to remind us of relatively positive days gone by*.
As a fun exercise, while you're reading this, compare these innovations to the black hole left in the web development world by the long and terrible reign of IE6. It's an interesting juxtaposition of help vs. harm. Here's hoping future versions of the browser continue to trend closer to the "help" line as IE7 has and IE8 appears to be doing**
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To make use of the native getElementsByClassName I rewrote my getElementsByClass function to use the method where possible.
Here's the code*:
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The following table outlines current browser usage across several sites for which I have analytics access. This represents the trailing 30 days, ending yesterday, 2008-06-25. While not a full cross section of the Internet there's a reasonable spread between the sites in terms of age and technology experience, so this sample should be reasonably interesting to those of you who care about such things. It's interesting enough for me to post about 
| IE 6 | IE 7 | Firefox (all ) | Safari (all ) | Other | Total Visitors | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Totals | 15133 | 24739 | 20165 | 3102 | 2649 | 65788 |
| Percentages | 23% | 38% | 31% | 5% | 4% |
As you can see, while it's now third, Internet Explorer 6 is still hanging on with unfortunate tenacity. Which means we still have great pain to deal with when trying to develop cross-browser web sites in this rich, interactive era.
I also means there's demand for people like me who know how to handle the beast, so I guess I should look to that as a silver lining…
Still, die IE6 die.