Chrome Is the Third Double-Digit Browser 299
An anonymous reader writes "Google's Chrome has taken the 10% market share hurdle, according to Net Applications and is past 15%, according to StatCounter. It is interesting to see that IE is declining at an accelerating pace and IE9 Beta cannot, despite the massive marketing campaign, dent Chrome's growth, while Firefox is holding on to what it has. It almost seems as if IE9 will not be able to turn around the decline of IE."
Wasn't on purpose (Score:5, Funny)
Studies also show that due to the icon, most Chrome users thought they were downloading a Pokemon application.
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Net Applications measures web site hits, not installation base, so your logic doesn't work.
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or SAL 9000 [neatorama.com]
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They just wanted to see what Simon said.
Not surprising (Score:2)
Seeing, as it is, that I am using Chrome on the mobile appliance I carry around, both Chrome and FFox (ffox being the main) on my notebooks and I have no IE as default browser on the two Windows devices that i still have for business reasons.
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yes, i measure the world by my standards. i am sorry you're not up to that.
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Your representative sample of 1 is most impressive.
Obi-wan has taught you well.
It's about time! (Score:2)
It deserves so much better than 10%!!!
Browser support by sites (Score:2)
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Generally speaking, any site that uses browser detection and refuses to support an unknown browser (or specifically refuses Chrome) will not be visited by me. I can understand using browser detection to refuse to support IE6, or perhaps even IE7. Afterall, those two browsers often require work-arounds to display standards-compliant content. But the default assumption should be the a browser is compliant unless it is otherwise known not to be. If you've coded your site in such a way that it can only work
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What is truly pathetic is the government and university websites that still don't support chrome. Nothing like completing 4 hours of forms just for the last page to flip a shit and say "YOUR NOT ON I E YOU BASTARD" and have to repeat it in a shitty ass browser while freaking out about virii.
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Re:Browser support by sites (Score:4, Interesting)
It happens. An airline company had to access my banking account and it only worked in IE. I struggled a little to understand what was going on, since all that I got was a "problem connecting to the banking services - please retry", then called support and the bastards politely told me to fuck off like this:
-Hi, I'm trying to pay for my ticket and can't. I've tried using Firefox and Chrome.
-You must use IE.
-Yeah... I actually don't use Windows. Is there some other way?
-Click Start, then IE.
-I'm telling you I can't. Are you telling me there isn't any way that I can buy from you guys if I don't also buy a Windows license that costs more than the plane ticket I'm trying to purchase?
-Is there anything else I can help you with?
Then people ask how a reasonable, sane person turns into RMS. Dealing with this sort of crap on a daily basis.
And with it goes Bing (Score:2)
And no doubt MS is getting worried about this. I wonder what part of Bing's success is due to it being the default search in IE. If IE loses share then their ability to push Bing also slides.
It's interesting to note that according to Net Applications stats IE may drop to under 50% market share sometime in the middle of this year.
IE9 beta? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would a beta of the browser stop the transition? It's clearly aimed at web developers and designers for testing, not at general populace. That's also where all the marketing is at. Actual users only see IE8 (if that!), and Chrome, of course, soundly beats it.
The only way to see if IE9 can turn the tide is to wait until it gets released (and rolled out to Windows Update, at least as optional update).
If you really want to compare the numbers, how about Chrome beta/dev installs vs IE9 installs?
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Chrome sure does get frequent major updates, but it has been extremely stable for me - more so than either Opera and Firefox. And these days I normally open browser at OS startup and keep it running all the time with at least one pinned tab (for GMail and GTalk), so having weeks of uptime is not unusual - and it survives that just fine.
As a web developer, (Score:5, Insightful)
even as of this VERY moment, i am having to battle with standard incompliance of various ie versions (including next ones) and the different 'interpretations' they have of the same fucking pages than other browsers.
really
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I would be thankful *IF* chrome actually fixed THEIR noncompliance bugs that they have been sitting on for years.
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I switched back to Firefox from Chrome. (Score:5, Interesting)
I switched back to Firefox from Chrome.
Chrome is nice, a bit under featured, poor ad blocking (although it has gotten better its still slower and not as good as firefox.
In general, Firefox is faster than chrome all around. Even on older hardware, Firefox scrolls better than Chrome.
Firefox's bookmark manager is much nicer. I loved how chrome syncs your bookmarks but now that FireFox has it built in as well, I'm plenty happy.
Firefox has better color management. Chrome nice but... It still has that slight sluggish feeling about how it renders pages.
The new Firefox betas are looking and performing very well, so well that I switched back from chrome.
Re:I switched back to Firefox from Chrome. (Score:5, Interesting)
I too prefer Firefox because I don't trust Google. Chrome sends so much data to Google (every keystroke that you type into OmniBar) and I prefer not to give Google any of my data. Firefox has no such issues.
Issue with Chrome's ad blocking is that ad blocking in Chrome works by DOM modification and all the ads are downloaded before they're hidden. That also means that all the ad companies have your IP and browser fingerprint as well and that also means that you waste bandwidth downloading ads. Firefox, again, has no such issues because it filters actual requests.
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To be fair though, Chrome's ad-block extensions do actually block ads from downloading now. For a while they just hid the ads from the viewer. However I still tend to find ad-block faster in firefox. I find that ad-block shows down chrome.
There is just something about webkit that doesnt scroll very well either. I cant tell what that is, but safari is guilty of the same problem. Firefox has a very nice scroll/render, where as chrome seems more choppy... although not horrible, just not as nice as firefox.
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The omnibar isn't only a search bar, it's also the URL bar. Unless you're a luser who types the domain in google search and clicks the first result, Google wouldn't get those domains.
omnibar communication (Score:2)
AFAIK, all keystrokes in the omnibar are sent to Google. Ever type the first few characters of a popular website into Chrome (on a fresh installation, no import of bookmarks)? Chrome fills in the rest because it's asking Google (pseudocode) SELECT * FROM domains WHERE LEFT_STR(domain,3)='nyt' ORDER BY hits LIMIT 1, thus giving you 'nytimes.com'.
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I switched back to Chrome from Firefox after trying Chrome a while ago. I really like the security features of Chrome, built-in secure pdf reader, sandboxed flash, etc. Flash ships with the browser and auto-updates itself. Its nice when things just work. The inspect elements feature is great for working with CSS. The extensions market for Chrome has exploded lately and IETab just works. I'm not even sure which IETab to use in Firefox, the last time I tried it it became nagware. Chrome is crazy fast too.
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Chrome is a very nice browser with plenty to offer design wise. I'm a fan, but I do find Firefox to be faster on new and old hardware. It scrolls and renders pages a lot smoother than Chrome has ever done.
Chrome loads pages fast, but in terms of cpu performance, Firefox seems to perform better.
It's interesting, I'm comparing them right now, so that I'm pretty accurate in my statements, and I find chrome likes to chug a bit when scrolling back and forth fast... Firefox is smooth as smooth gets. For example C
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I switched back to Firefox from Chrome after trying to be happy with Chrome for quite some time. I really like how Chrome is snappier on lightweight hardware and I still use it in such conditions, but ad blocking is seriously inadequate and so is script protection, to say nothing of cookie management. Chrome has mediocre support for User Scripts and some scripts can't be made to work on it because of certain things which I believe aren't in Webkit. I've definitely had Flash not work in Chrome and work OK in
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Believe it. :) There's no reason for me to make it up.
You're right Chrome is very fast to load as a program. Same here, Quad core 8 gigs, except, 6TB Sata raids, no SSD, GTX 470, 30inch monitor... at 2560x1600. Thats a lot of pixels to scroll nice and smooth. Firefox 4 scrolls better with less cpu usage, and thats even with smooth scroll turned off in Firefox.
No idea why that is, but thats how it is. I've always found webkit to scroll a little chunkier than firefox, be it chrome or safari.
Chrome's page load
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One thing that still confuses me. When I launch one Chrome window, I have about 3 or 4 chrome.exe applications running. Yet if
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This. I have the version pinned to 5.0.342.7 beta in Ubuntu. I think that was a good version. They're adding more and more cruft in Chromium (which I haven't pinned), and also taking stuff away which was useful (the Go button, the separate Page and Application menus).
I'm doubtful about the integrated Flash or PDF reader.
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Firefox is my default browser, but I go to one website that has some sort of video banner ad that throws Firefox into fits. I use Chrome to view that one website, because it correctly renders the video instead of freaking out. So kudos to Google for a technically superior implementation of video handling..
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I switched back to Firefox from Chrome.
Chrome is nice, a bit under featured, poor ad blocking (although it has gotten better its still slower and not as good as firefox.
In general, Firefox is faster than chrome all around. Even on older hardware, Firefox scrolls better than Chrome.
Same here. On older hardware, Chrome is incredibly slow (even with Flashblock + ABP) compared to Firefox... not to mention it uses exactly as much RAM (lower RAM usage was the main reason I was contemplating switching away from Firefox). So slow, in fact, that a lot of Flash video stutters in Chrome while being smooth in Firefox...
Any ideas why?
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The new Firefox betas are looking and performing very well, so well that I switched back from chrome.
The betas are part of the reason I switched to Chrome/ium. All of the the betas have been dog slow, ugly, and buggy as hell (at least on my computer). In the beginning it was the requisite extension churn, but now that most of my extensions are supported it still is slower than hell and extremely buggy. And ugly, did I forget to mention ugly? Mozilla forgot what made Firefox nice, it was light and simple
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I've compared the two on new and older hardware, firefox scrolls smoother, loads faster. Compare heavy sites like Huffingtonpost.com. Try it with both adblock plus on and off in each browser.
Scroll... It becomes quite obvious that firefox scrolls better, and loads faster, but if you really want proof try it on older hardware. It becomes very obvious.
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Also, chrome takes more cpu usage while scrolling than firefox. Chrome takes about 35% to 40% on a quadcore to scroll this page.
FireFox, takes 18%-24%
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64 bit Fedora Core Linux 13, Quad-core i7 laptop, 8 GB RAM.
Scrolling the screen continuously in Chrome 8 makes it take up about 10% of CPU. (that's 10% of *one* of the 8 virtual cores available) Doing the same thing in FF 3.6 takes up about 80% on one of the cores.
And, in my experience, the latest Chrome is significantly faster than FF 3.6 on *any* platform, enough that we've started recommending it for our web-based application.
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Whats your cpu usage while scrolling? compare chrome to firefox 4 beta using this page.
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I tried the beta too.
It's fast but I wouldn't say it's smooth, it's performance can be erratic at times.
But it's beta so I suppose it's forgivable, but I do hope they fix it up before they ship it.
Will be sticking with Chrome 9 beta for the time being.
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Unfortuantely I have seen this, and it still seems to be a problem for Firefox but Firefox does in general perform better for me than chrome
I've tried Chrome, FF, and IE... (Score:3, Insightful)
...and this new version of Slashdot looks horrible in all of them, and doesn't work as well as the previous version in any of them.
Err? (Score:2)
IMO this version of slashdot is vastly better than the last one. I'm surprised that you liked slash 2.0 which (IMO) was far worse than any other version.
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Didn't say I liked it. I just dislike it less than the new version.
Realistic analysis of he daa (Score:2)
Firefox has been suck a 20-something percent for 2 years.
Chrome has been growing for until spring of 2010, when it took a nosedive to low even negative growth. This correlates to IE market loss, so it is reasonable to suggest that chrome users are abandoning IE. The numbers also suggest that users are unsatisfied with Chrome.
The growth numbers also suggest that Saf
Re:Realistic analysis of he daa (Score:5, Interesting)
This correlates to IE market loss, so it is reasonable to suggest that chrome users are abandoning IE.
The simple fact could be that Chrome does not require administrator privileges to install. Users at offices where we are not given admin rights can install Chrome over IE and use it without slogging through a helpdesk ticket for something IT deems unnecessary. This may account for the growth we see as users are looking for more freedom and the bells and whistles a more modern browser with the ability to install extensions without needing better permissions.
Perhaps we are seeing a leveling out as those who want a different browser are finally being exhausted and entering a "long tail phase".
Bingo... adding data point (Score:2)
My sister switched because at work, her draconian IT wouldn't give her admin privs and she needed to get away from IE (seriously if an IT dept isn't pre-installing a non-IE browser, they're just doing their users a disservice)... not even an exemption or "I'll install it for you".
So she installed Chrome and is quite happy with it on her work laptop. I have no idea if she's switched from Firefox on her home Mac, but she spends most of computer time at work anyway...
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Your analysis seems messed-up to me. I assume you are referring to this chart http://www.conceivablytech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/browser2.jpg [conceivablytech.com] Chrome's rate of growth might have slowed a bit, but it still grew by what looks like 10%. IE has had negative growth pretty consistently. Safari's growth rate seems to be much lower than Chrome's. Since your understanding of the data seems so far off the mark, I doubt your conclusions are accurate.
Trident vs. Webkit? Good luck w/ that (Score:2)
From this is seems likely that MS can kill Chrome simply by delivering a competitive browser, without the tricks and subterfuge used to kill Navigator.
I think you underestimate the effort that has gone into the open-source project Webkit (the engine for Chrome and Safari) and the corresponding javascript engines (Chrome V8, Safari Nitro).
Microsoft has sat on it's laurels for years, ignoring and impeding web standards and reaping monopoly rents on Windows and Office. Now that they can't hold back the innovation, they've got a whole lot of catch-up to do.
According to w3c.. (Score:2)
chrome nearly hit the Double-Digit mark by the end of 2009.. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp/ [w3schools.com]
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Woops, here is the correct url: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp [w3schools.com]
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What about Netscape? (Score:2)
Domestic Cars lose ground to Foreign Imports! (Score:2)
Every time I read about browser wars, it reminds me of the domestic cars in the 60s/70s .. leading into the 90s and new millenia. More and more, domestic cars lose ground to better made, better driven imports -- and we as consumers see the benefit. All that was really required was a little competition, and education.. domestics will get better slightly, then hit bankruptcy, then come out of bankruptcy with a viable product. If we transpose that onto the browser wars, MS will have a decent product in abo
The question is what happens after 2011 (Score:3)
Quoting WP:
A footnote in Mozilla's 2006 financial report states "Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006, however Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and has now renewed the contract through 2011.[8] Approximately 85% of Mozillaâ(TM)s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract."
The financial FAQ [mozilla.org] dated November 18, 2010 says:
What is the status of the organization's contract with Google?
We have had a productive relationship with Google since 2004 and that relationship remains healthy. To date, we have renewed our contract three times, in 2005, 2006 and 2008. The current version extends through 2011.
So through 2011 Mozilla has a very good deal. But then Google didn't have a browser of their own and desperately needed Mozilla to break the IE monopoly. I suspect that these negotiations will go quite differently. I'm sure the deal will be extended but I doubt the terms will be anywhere near as favorable as they have been. Google has seen how easily they can now push their own browser into the market, they don't "need" Firefox that much anymore. And from a strict business point of view, where would they go? Bing? Yeah, I'm sure the open source community would love Microsoft as their default search engine. Not to mention that currently Chrome has targeted the IE holdouts. If they go their separate ways, Google will do their best to win Firefox users too. I'd put good money on the browser market looking completely changed in 2-3 years.
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As a side note, I left FF months ago for Chrome and haven't looked back. I think most of the FF fanbase are those who still remember the glory days of old, not taking note that if you're praising FF and scoffing at IE you're just making yourself look like an ass to anyone who really shops around for software.
Re:Here's a constructive comment (Score:4, Interesting)
Have Google or Facebook corrupted standards organizations? Threatened OEMs? Illegally abused monopolies to gain market share in other markets and lock out competitors? Massacred standards to create lock-in?
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Huh?
MS is the new IBM (established, but staid and losing relevancy). Apple is the new MS (proprietary market share). Google is the new Apple (innovative, with a somewhat fanatic following). Facebook is the new Google (up and coming, but no concept of reality). It's just the wheel.
Oh, you're right, in that they're all degrees of evil. IMO, Google slightly less than the others (hard to argue with free and transparent).
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Chrome's ad-blocker isnt as fast as the firefox version of ad-block. Chrome is still a bit wonky in that area.
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Surely you could just stop going to sites which have adverts you don't like? It seems a bit cheap to use a site's bandwidth, for content you clearly like, and not want to repay them by just being served a few adverts. You don't even have to click them for the site to get money.
Chrome is an awesome browser, though. Version 10 is sweet.
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All companies are evil to a degree, although IMHO MS is higher on the scale than Facebook and definitely Google.
Again my opinion.
But I don't see MS as intrinsically evil, just their leadership.
I'm waiting for the day MS turns over a new leaf, but it looks like that day is a long way off as it seems the likes of Balmer aren't going anywhere.
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All companies are evil to a degree, although IMHO MS is higher on the scale than Facebook and definitely Google.
Again my opinion.
But I don't see MS as intrinsically evil, just their leadership.
I'm waiting for the day MS turns over a new leaf, but it looks like that day is a long way off as it seems the likes of Balmer aren't going anywhere.
Well, even if the engineers know it's a terrible idea, if Ballmer and co decide today to screw up with HTML5 just to piss off the competition that's what the IE9 team will end up doing and what end-users will receive, so in that respect their leadership is Microsoft moreso than their engineers, developers and other employees doing the actual 'grunt work'.
Every once in a while the engineers do get to have their way, though, as shown by the not-too-important-but-still-valuable contributions they've made to Fr
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I understand, if I were offered a job at MS I personally would be pretty divided about it.
But there are people out there that just want to make a living and don't concern themselves with "idealogical" stuff.
Almost all of MS schemes are concoctated by the top brass, if they were replaced MS could go in a total different direction.
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You are pretty spot on in your analysis.
I have friends that work there, and they are far more open about stuff than Apple or even Google. They weigh in on support forums and follow up when people post problems.
If they can't talk about something they just say so instead of ceasing to communicate at all. Some even openly disagree with the company decisions.
The evil at microsoft was from the top. By the time you got to the coders and designers they were just overworked Joe Programmer types. They burned thr
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you're confusing monopolistic behaviors as something that could possible be something besides as unethical as you can get without whipping your workers and selling their bodies for sex.
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That's pretty cool, and it seems to make SlashDot posting page behave better as well.
Bit of a hack to set up but the step by step works fine.
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Replying to myself, ...
I take it back. It does work, but it is such a mess its not worth it.
It pretty much disables most of slashdot posting, even when slashdot is whitelisted.
I turned it off.
Re:Here's a constructive comment (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's great that Chrome has surpassed the psychological (but purely arbitrary) milestone of rendering web pages for a double-digit percentage of the internet's population. But the moment they have too much of the percentage is when my approval becomes concern.
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Thats not constructive at all. I use windows because it is compatible with the engineering software I have to run for my profession, and for the wide versatility win7 ult x64 offers, and frankly I rarely have problems with it. But at the same time I hate IE with a passion and am a strong supporter in google chrome for the same reason I love windows on my box. I mean, that whole thing was just a terrible oversimplified comment that makes ridiculous assumptions as to the character of anyone that isn't as gung
Re:Here's a constructive comment (Score:4, Insightful)
Balanced people: "So....why should I care? Oh yeah, Microsoft's evil."
As a balanced person (I'm running OS X, Win7, Vista, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu currently); I'd be happy if Chrome/ium, IE, and Firefox were split down the middle. I would be happier if their were ten mainstream browsers with 10% usage. Competition is good.
IE benefited greatly from Firefox. Firefox might benefit from Chrome being around (it needs to, it has turned into a fat, sloppy, unfocused mess). Chrome might benefit from poor old Opera. And Opera will sit in a corner and feel depressed that no one loves it.
Re:IE9 (Score:5, Funny)
Sometimes integration is a bitch.
Integration is always a bitch. I find derivatives far easier to calculate.
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Now witness the power of our fully armed and operational knowledge engine [wolframalpha.com]. Integrates at will!
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First thing I do when I am done installing win7 ult. x64: Download chrome. IE is a fucking virus. I have uninstalled it 30 times now from this computer, even erased every last file involving it from my box, and stopped all updates containing it, then BAM there it is again. It may exist on my computer, but I am sure as hell not a user.
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oh yeah, well my website degrades gracefully to Netscape Navigator 2.0. Beat that!
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Re:IE9 (Score:4, Funny)
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01010010 01000001 01010111 00100000 01000010 01001001 01001110 01000001 01010010 01011001
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Re:IE9 (Score:4, Funny)
Pfft, I lick my Ethernet cable to get raw frames, bitches!
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Insecure. Try SSL if you can.
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Please tell us how to SSH to port 80 and issue GET commands.
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HTTPS doesn't run on port 80 , but on port 443 by default .
Re:Webkit browsers (Score:5, Funny)
If I follow your math correctly, then in just one year, 101% of internet users (17% + (7% * 12)) will be using WebKit browsers, leaving just -1% left to split between Mozilla-derived, Opera, and Internet Explorer!
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OK, then, I shall try again.
If I follow your math correctly, then in just 27 months, over 105% of internet users (17% * (107% ^ 27)) will be using WebKit browsers!
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And again you fail. Math is correct this time, but the statistical extrapolation is flawed.
If the math is the same as what you're doing, then the statistical extrapolation is no different from what you did; I just used more months to illustrate that, as you point out, that extrapolation is flawed, since applying it can potentially result in impossibly large numbers.
So you've hit on what I'm trying to say: you shouldn't project that a browser's market share will increase by k% each month into the future. All browsers' market share figures must add up to 100%. So, right off the bat, the projected
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No, I'm not doing it incorrectly. Short term growth trends which are well below some limit are completely sustainable, and in practice are usually sustained until they start to approach their peak saturation. Also, it's not necessary for them to sustain a 7% monthly growth to achieve the result I stated. They're currently gaining approximately 1% of the traffic per month. While that's currently 7%, the percentage growth needed to gain an additional 1% traffic volume will decrease from 7% to about 4% over th
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Parent is correct - where's the basis for the assumption that the growth will be 7% for the next six months? I find that rather unlikely.
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I don't think that's Chrome specific. I use FF, and the slashdot login process is rather hit and miss lately.
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You wouldn't be a geek if you didn't try uzbl. IE isn't geeky at all.