Burningbird

As of this first week in January, 2009, the web statistics at my five main sites read as follows (only values greater than or equal to two percent are listed):

Burningbird (main page)

Burningbird RealTech (this site)

MissouriGreen

Secret of Signals

Just Shelley

Analysis:

I'm not surprised to see the Windows 2000 users, and am assuming the MSIE 6 users among my stats are primarily based in the Windows 2000 operating system. This state may continue into the new year because of Microsoft's decision to provide MSIE7 to Windows XP users and up, without providing an official upgrade path for those people still using Windows 2000. Not every Windows 2000 machine can easily upgrade to Windows XP. However, if people can't upgrade their OS, they can upgrade their browser to Firefox 3.x or Opera 9.x, and possibly other, supported, browsers.

As for MSIE 5.5, good golly folks, it's time to move on. And no, these are not Mac Classic users, as the Mac Classic OS percentage is typically less than 1%, if it shows at all in my site stats. No, I would imagine that most of these people bought a Windows 95 or 98 machine that came installed with 5.5, and the thing is now too infested with viruses for them to use, much less upgrade the software.

Speaking of upgrading, Firefox 2.x users, as of December, Mozilla is no longer supporting your browser. Firefox 3.1 is just around the corner, and is very sexy. Time for you to move, too.

There are few other browser percentage surprises. My primarily tech sites, RealTech and Secret of Signals, feature a larger percentage of Firefox users than my two non-tech sites, MissouriGreen and Just Shelley. What was pleasantly surprising, though, is that Firefox is becoming the dominant browser at the sites. Just Shelley is about the only one still heavily dominated by MSIE.

Safari's use is increasing, which isn't surprising because it really is the best Mac OS X general browser, as well as now being available in Windows. Safari/Webkit's graphics rendering engine is the best, a topic on which I'll have more to talk about, directly, in a writing I'm doing on SVG.

I would have expected, though, some increase in Opera use. I started last year with Opera at about 5%, and it's still about 5%. Actually, the lack of change is a little spooky—who ever heard of a straight line in a chart related to the web?

But where's Chrome? That's what I thought when looking at the stats, and finally spotted it at under 1% for this site, only. What did the pundits say last year? Chrome was going to be a threat to Firefox? Well, I don't think we need to dump our Firefox t-shirts just yet.

Based on the trends from last year to now, when I compare this year's stats against next year's stats, I predict they will show the following:

• The number of users of the new Windows 7 operating system will be inversely proportional to the number of Windows Vista users
• More Chrome users, but Firefox and Safari should still see incremental growth.
• Fewer MSIE users, with most switching to Chrome or Firefox.
• After MSIE8 releases, we'll quickly be able to see who are the MSIE personal users, versus MSIE corporate users, because of the MSIE8 upgrade blocker.
• We'll see a significant reduction in MSIE corporate users, as many will get laid off.
• Mac OS X use will continue incremental growth, and everyone will still be questioning Steve Jobs' health
• Opera will continue with 5% of the browser market. Spooky.

Battered into a fetal ball by waves of bad economic news, only surfacing to watch an occasional crash and bash flick, such as Iron Man, I discovered my own personal bailout via Naomi Klein's book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". Oddly enough, it wasn't something that Klein wrote (though she has many interesting points and I hope to write more on her book at a later time). No, it was a quote by the master of the Chicago School, Milton Friedman, himself, that loosed my death grip on self. As introduction to his book, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman wrote:

only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

The irony that the free market system Friedman loved so well is now experiencing its own "shock and awe", as corporations grasp at despised government intervention, like a baby its bottle, has not escaped me. But for me, the operative phrase in this quote is "the actions that are taken depend on the ideas lying around". This is totally irreverent to the problems we're facing, and I apologize in advance for seeming to trivialize the very difficult times we're all facing, but when I read this phrase I thought to myself, "Internet Explorer, your days are numbered."

Consider this: movement forward in the web has been stymied in recent years because, we're told, thousands of corporate intranets, and millions of corporate employees using these intranets are dependent on tricks and hacks put into place to support Internet Explorer 6. Add to this the, in my opinion, anal fixation that web pages must look the same in every browser, and most of our page design has been stuck like a bug in pitch.

Now that the corporations are downsizing in order to preserve what they can of executive compensation, the machines on which these applications run are being sold for scrape, tossed out along with the other chaff (i.e. employees). And those still employed, frankly, have other concerns than whether IE supports opacity or not.

I don't believe I'm alone in seeing the Friedmanesque possibilities of our current economic disaster. What better explanation for the recent production release of Google's Chrome browser? Google released Chrome from its beta utilizing a speed for which the company is not known. After all, isn't the GMail still in beta? Come to that, isn't the Google search engine still in beta?

Then there's the fact that Chrome is currently only supported in Windows, just like IE. Only like IE, as a matter of fact. No, I am sure that Google sensed corporate shock, and moved quickly to displace IE in the hearts and minds of upper management—not to mention the hearts and minds of millions of newly unemployed workers who are no longer subject to the intransigence of corporate IT. If by doing so, Chrome also kicks Firefox, Opera, and Safari in the face in its haste, eh, casualties of war.

I am not displeased by Google's move. After all, Chrome supports XHTML and some SVG, both of which Microsoft seems incapable of implementing. However, there is some confusion about what Chrome is, or is not, capable of supporting. True, Chrome has utilized the excellent WebKit, which also serves as the soul of Safari. However, as others have discovered and my new experimentation in web design demonstrates, Chrome has a different graphics engine (Skia) than Safari/Webkit. In the interests of "stripping" down the browser to make it lean and mean for web applications, the developers also made it rather, um, unattractive. At least for now. If you view this web page using Chrome, you will see that Google currently does not support the CSS3 text-shadow property, though it does support box-shadow. It also supports border-radius, though badly—the anti-aliasing is less than optimal, as is the support for alpha transparency.

While it is true that text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius are CSS3 properties, and thus not part of a released specification, they are supported in Safari 3.1 (and Firefox 3.1 and partially in Opera 9.x). Because of the Webkit tie-in between Safari 3.1 and Chrome, people may be confused when what works in Safari, does not work in Chrome. Well, those people who don't have other, more pressing, worries.

Before the build copy of Firefox (known as "Minefield") upgraded itself on my Mac, dying a horrible and immediate death in the process, one other change I noticed in the upcoming version of Firefox is that color management is now on by default.

I also noticed, again before the crash and burn death, that the new version seems to be much more efficient and fast compared to the old.

As pointed out in comments, Bobby Holley has an excellent discussion on color management and the state of Firefox. Bottom line, in the interests of performance, the new version of Firefox will have color profiles turned on, by default, for "tagged" images: images with embedded color profiles. I started embedding profiles for my pictures about 2 months or so, ago, in hopes that more browsers will follow this path.

It would be nice to have full color management, but I think support for color profiles in images is a good interim solution. This is also the approach that Safari uses, and hopefully Opera, too, eventually.

My first experiences with IE8 beta 2 have been mixed. On the one hand, I like the fact that compatibility mode no longer requires restarting the browser. However, I've found it virtually impossible to tell when I have compatibility mode turned on or off. I've also found that once turned on, you do have to reload a page in order to turn it off again, because the button disappears.

Sam Ruby wrote about an improved namespace blurb that appeared about IE8 at a Microsoft site, which has since disappeared. In the post, Sam also mentioned that IE8 no longer supports CSS for elements it doesn't recognize, also detailed in a bug Anne van Kesteren linked in comments.

I went to check out the bug at Microsoft's LiveConnect with IE8 beta 2, but received an error in the page that I don't have permission to view the page. Puzzled, I also noticed that the page asked if I wanted to sign out of LiveConnect.

I had originally obtained a LiveConnect login in order to report bugs about Expression Media, which I was testing for my Painting the Web book. I figured that somehow my old account was interacting with the page in such a way as to make it inaccessible. I tried to delete cookies, in fact every kind of storage associated with IE8, but I still received the same page: I don't have permission to access the bug, would I like to sign out of LiveConnect.

I looked more closely at the IE8 Delete options, and noticed that there's another option I missed, Preserve favorite website data, with the following explanation:

Keep cookies and temporary files that enable your favorite websites to retain preferences and display faster.

This checkbox overrides the cookie deletion option when login information is stored. *I'm not sure if this option was present with IE8 beta 1, and I'm not sure I like it—one could easily think they've cleared all personal information out of a browser by deleting cookies, only to forget to uncheck the favorite site option, and leave critical logins still active.

Hakon Lie wrote about Microsoft's back stepping on standards mode. Microsoft had originally stated it would support standards mode by default with the first beta of IE8. Now, it supports standards mode by default on the internet, but supports the old IE7 non-standards mode by default for intranet accesses. The setting can be changed via a menu option, but the problem with this approach is that if you develop a web site internally and it works one way, it may break or work oddly once published externally, unless you remember to turn standards mode on when developing the page internally. This adds all new meaning to the term, quirks mode, as this really is quirky behavior.

IE8 does implement the new JSON object, though be forewarned: it treats single quotes as second class citizens. In other words if your application returns strings delimited with single quotes, your application will fail. The JSON with single quotes still works with eval, though, so you could end up with breaking behavior when you switch from one to the other. To be honest, I find this to be a flaw with the JSON "standard"—either JSON is JavaScript Object Notation, or it's not, and single quotes can delimit strings in JavaScript.

One new feature, or at least another feature I don't remember from IE8 beta 1 is that when you encounter a runtime error in JavaScript, IE8 now pops up a window with a note about a runtime error, and asks if you wish to debug it. I imagine this will only appear if you have developer tools enabled. The script debugger included with IE8 in beta 1 is still available in beta 2, and is one really nice feature in IE8.

Less nice, though, is Microsoft's non-support for DOM Level 2 event handling. There's also no need to go into details about how the browser doesn't support XHTML and SVG and MathML—Microsoft will never support XHTML, which should be a disappointing given now. In fact, it's unlikely Microsoft will ever support SVG, even if this gets included in HTML5. Some would say this will kill SVG. I disagree and believe that this will eventually kill IE. Not just the lack of SVG support: Microsoft's refusal to deal effectively with the issue of XHTML support, DOM Level 2 event handling support, and so on. Too many gaping holes in standards support, and too little commitment on Microsoft's part to truly be a standards-based browser.

On the other hand, IE8 does have improved support for CSS. It's now about equivalent to Firefox 2 in CSS support.

Lastly, if you're a Netflix Watch Now fan, be warned: IE8 beta 2 does not work with the Watch Now feature, no matter what mode you set. Do not install IE8 beta 2 if you use this feature.

All in all, beta 2 has the feel of being a rushed delivery. Not surprising when you consider beta 2 was released on the seventh anniversary of the release of IE6—a day some of us designated as IE6 EOL or Uninstall day.

*The Preserve favorite option is new with beta 2, but is not working as described. It's preserving data for sites that are not on my favorites list. In addition, Microsoft puts its own sites on this list, automatically making data to them "saved" with this option.

I have Windows XP SP3 installed on my Dell I was therefore more than a little taken back about the instructions to follow to install IE8 beta 2:

• Uninstall Windows XP SP3
• Uninstall IE8 Beta1
• Re- install Windows XP SP3
• Install IE8 Beta2

If you don't follow this path, you'll have permanently installed IE8 on the machine. You know, you can't make up stuff like this.