January 12th, 2010
W3schools.com recently released a fun visualization, showing what browser software people are using – including historical web browser usage over time. It’s a fascinating one page snapshot and you can find it here:
http://www.axiis.org/examples/BrowserMarketShare.html
Top 5 Browsers by Market Share:
1. Firefox (47.40%)
2. Internet Explorer 7.0 (15.10%)
3. Internet Explorer 6.0 (13.60%)
4. Internet Explorer 8.0 (10.60%)
5. Google Chrome (7.0%)
Combined, Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 account for 39.3% of market share.
(Source: W3schools.com’s Historical Browser Statistics, August 2009)
Web designers will rejoice at the shrinking size of Internet Explorer users – with Internet Explorer 6.0 in particular steadily shrinking from 24.0% to 13.6% between August 2008 and 2009.
The reason this is significant is because Internet Explorer 6.0 creates some tricky technical problems for web designers. This is due to the fact that Internet Explorer 6.0 does not display certain types of formatting (CSS) in a way that is consistent with other browsers – so designers need to dig into their bag of programming tricks to make sure websites look, and work, the same in Internet Explorer 6.0 as they do for other browsers.
Big movers-and-shakers of recent months have included Internet Explorer 8.0 – growing from launch to 10.8% market share within 8 months; and Google’s “Chrome” browser – which now accounts for 7% of the browser software market.
Does your web developer understand the differences between the way sites are displayed in some types of browsers? Alliance Software’s web developers do. Click here to talk to us about your web-site.
Posted by Ben Stickland in Technology | No Comments »
December 15th, 2009
Every week, I have the opportunity to discuss potential website development projects with clients. I regularly have the opportunity to debate the merits of ideas ranging from the brilliant to (in my view) the bizarre.
Furthermore, as a web development business, we’ve been privileged to work on some great successes. Our own Market Samurai is, as I write this, about to pass the 100,000 user mark (thanks again to the genius of Eugene, Brent & the dev crew). Other examples include clients like Theo & Meg of dlook.com.au. I hold them in high regard for creating an online directory that attracts tens of thousands of visitors daily and services a large and growing paid client base (especially as their initial business model for the site failed). It’s also exciting to see the growing success of the Sustainable School Shop and ‘member only’ projects like Grain Assist or FraudWatch.
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Posted by Ben Stickland in Strategy | 4 Comments »
October 27th, 2009
I was recently told that todays advanced software systems represent the single most complex artifact or ‘thing’ that mankind has created.
Whilst this isn’t true for all systems, it’s certainly the case that even moderaly complex systems soon contain more details than one programmer can hold in their mind. This gets worse for mature systems in a maintainence phase, where the developer isn’t regularly working to update the application.
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Posted by Ben Stickland in Technology | 2 Comments »
October 13th, 2009
What professionals know about pricing a custom software development project that most buyers don’t (and end up learning the hard way).
Having both won and lost our fair share of software project proposals, it appears that most buying decisions for large scale software projects typically come down to a choice based on three common factors. These are, broadly speaking, the quoted price and the perceived capacity to deliver and the more intangible ‘vendor likability’.
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Posted by Ben Stickland in Strategy | 1 Comment »