Bluemoon Sanctuary

Just my musings and rants on technology, internet, gaming or even social media related stuff

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Posts tagged with "Web Browsers"

It's december 2009

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 6:31:37 PM

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Recently for the pass few months I have been monitoring the browser market share using Net Applications, which measures browser usage by tracking the machines that visit the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients, which results in a pool of about 160 million unique visitors per month.

Novembers 2009 Browser Market's share = http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0 (Clicking on this link after december 2009, will show the previous's month results )
October 2009 Browser Market's share = http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpmr=100&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=129

IE dropped to a 63.6% share, a new all-time low, as it lost just over 1 percentage point of market share. Firefox added about 0.7 of a percentage point to its share, finishing November with 24.7%. Chrome grew by 0.4 of a percentage point and Opera increased by 0.1 of a percentage point, to end the month at 3.9% and 2.3%, respectively. All three browsers' shares were records.

In the world of market share, gaining or losing even 0.1% is already ALOT of users. Remember easier I said about 160mil unique visitors/month, well 0.1% is around 1.6mil people. So even though browser's like Opera got increased in 0.1% that is considered around another 1.5mil+ people joined Opera. What is amazing is Google Chrome, it now stats at 3.93% (almost 4%), which is considered good since the browser recently only turned 1 year. If all goes according to the recent trend google's browser will overtake Safari and Opera might be a bit behind.

IE, however, remains the browser to watch, if only to track its decline, which Microsoft has not managed to stem with the March 2009 release of IE8. Since then, IE has lost 4.8 percentage points, almost as much as the 5.8 points it fell in the same eight months of 2008.

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The Future of the Web

Monday, November 30, 2009 5:31:13 AM

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I normally give this presentation on what the web might be in the future, so far I have giving it at APIIT college at 16th September for MixOnCampus 09 and also on 15th November at BarCampMelaka 2009.

Presentation Slides:- http://files.myopera.com/Zentarien/files/Future%20of%20the%20Web.pdf

I will just go over my thoughts based upon the slides, so if anyone wants to use these slides, go ahead.

Semantic Web - I think most we features in future will include these feature. You can already see this feature implemented in google search (not a lot but quite a bit), like when you search for Star Wars, immediately the search suggests other star wars related queries like Star Wars Characters, Star Wars Movies, Star Wars Books, etc etc, basically everything related to star wars. (Refer to slide for diagram)

Artificial Intelligence - Most web applications/sites will continue to implement a sort of AI in the background to help the user. Imagine when the user clicks something related to the vampire movie Twilight, the AI can recommend other movies that the user likes, lets say maybe Vampire Dairies (another vampire series).

Virtual Worlds - Online Communities nowadays have more interactions then real life ones, most web applications/sites all try to make it have some kinda of community effect in it. Think of second life, how people spend tons of real money on that game just to be famous in an imaginary world.

Mobile - Well most of the web will be accessible from either a mobile phone or mobile device. With mobile platform getting better and more powerful, most people can access web applications/sites on the go.

Online TV - How many people actually watch TV now (the younger generation?), Most of the people I know watch stuff like Heroes, Gossip Girl, Ugly Betty, Big Bang Theory all from the net. There are even sites like netflicks making tons of money from this concept.

International - Most websites/application now come in multiple language, this is done to reach a wider audiance not everyone can understand/read english. This also means that website cater differently depending on country, take yahoo and google for example, depending on the country you login from they display things specific to your country.

Personalization - Giving users a degree of customization is one of an emerging treand, I am quite sad facebook still didnt implement this yet, but most other websites have, take youtube, myspace, twitter for example.

Sharing - As the old saying goes, sharing is caring, well a lot of people love to share what they found on the web or maybe share those vacation photos or movies with their friends and family. This is why sites like Youtube and Facebook picked up dramatically.

User Involvement - Most famous websites have community features and depend on the user for their success. Take youtube, wikipedia, facebook, myspace, twitter, etc etc, take away the user and the site is useless.

Some technology that can help you develop sites with these trends:-
JavaFX, SilverLight, Flash, JavaScript, HTML5, PHP6, ASP.net 4.0, Adobe Flex


I think a good example of a web application which has most of the features I mention above is:-
Google WAVE
(Too bad doesnt quite work in Opera Yet)


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IT Magazines and Newspapers in Malaysia

Sunday, November 29, 2009 5:52:12 PM

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I am starting to get real pissed off at majority of IT Magazines and Newspapers that I buy every month. Most of them claim to give reviews or professional opinion about technology but all they are doing is sucking up to companies. I picked up the november issue of Max IT, a local magazine for technology, they were covering the release of Windows Mobile 6.5, and praising it, even to the extend of saying it comes with the best mobile web browser free of charge. The next page had a coverage of windows 7 launch, and that one was saying we should thank microsoft for giving the first 700 copies of windows 7 at a discounted rate. The way the author handled this two articles, clearly showed that he was being very bias towards both softwares, it was not an honest write-up. Then I began to check other articles in the magazine and found most of it were...well marketing articles.

This is not the only magazine, I remember few months ago, when PC Gamers Malaysia were covering on Windows 7 features, they mentioned about how Windows 7 is different and we need to accept change, the author didn't bother to mention how microsoft fucked up with the previous version of windows in the gaming department, he/she were merely just praising saying Windows 7 is the Saviour of the gaming world.

Ok lets change companies, most magazines always praise Microsoft, yea that is kinda normal. But they also praise other companies like Adobe, or even some of the various anti-virus companies. You pull out the IT section in some of the local papers you can see there is a chance how there is an article on the latest Anti-virus and how it is necessary that you get it NOW for you PC, if not your data is all gone. This again if you see is more of marketing articles.

But 1 thing is kinda funny, when it comes to stuff like Google, Sun Microsystem, Oracle, Linux these print media don't mind a free bashing. I remember got 1 time in the newspaper, the author wrote about Ubuntu Linux and how good it is as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, but he wasnt used to it, so he went back to windows xp. Few weeks later he wrote another article about Windows 7 and saying how different it is, and he wasnt used to it, but this time he said he is sticking to it. Really, our print media either have such low standards to allow authors like this? This really gets on my nerve.

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Web Browser Wars at BarCamp Melaka 2009

Tuesday, November 24, 2009 5:26:16 PM

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Web Browser Wars: A comparison of web browsers

This is a summary of one of the presentations I did at BarCamp Melaka 2009 at Multimedia University which took place on the 14th and 15th of November. The topic of my presentation is as stated above, I was quite lucky that my session got over 50+ people out of the 170 people who attended the BarCamp.

Basically I began by introducing myself and then introducing the top 5 web browsers (Base on Market share). I explained that I will not be going into above the top 5 as there will be too many to compare and I could not do all that in 1 hour. The web browsers that I choose to compare are as followed:- Mozilla FireFox 3.5, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple's Safari and last but not least Opera Software's Opera.

I started off by asking which web browsers most people use, the response I got was quite shocking, out of the 50+ people in the room, none of them even mentioned using Internet Explorer 8 or below. Some however did admit that they use Internet Explorer at work as their workstations didnt allow them to install additional softwares or that even the web application that they are using are only Internet Explorer compatible. (Worst still, it was only IE6 compatible.)

After that I went to introduce each of the web browsers one by one to the audience, I gave my take on each of them. I went though the pros and cons of each browser, without trying to be bias. The only browser I had a problem giving thumbs up was well again Internet Explorer 8. Seriously it got to be one of the hardest to praise, I only could think of disadvantages of using IE8.

Once I explained my take on all the top 5 web browsers. I went and gave my ranking of the browsers (this is just my opinion, if you have a different take, it is ok)

  • 1st – Opera – Comes with almost everything out of the box without installing plugins. First to come up with features that other browsers follow.
  • 2nd – Google Chrome – Simple and Clean, love the interface and the speed of browsing. Also love the ability to sandbox each of the tabs.
  • 3rd – Mozilla Firefox – Tons of plugins, but giving a bit of memory leak problems. Still good in security sense.
  • 4th – Apple's Safari – Nothing much since I dont own a Mac or use Windows a lot.
  • 5th – Microsoft Internet Explorer – Nothing good to say (Also only for Windows).


I explained why I think Opera is one of the best web browsers between the 5. The main reason is that Opera is one of the first web browser to go into the cloud with both it's Opera Link and Opera Unite services. I explained Opera Link and Opera Unite in detailed and also mentioned some other features such as Speed Dial and Mouse Gestures.

After all that I took some questions and answers. One of the questions required me to explain how opera turbo functions which I gladly answered. Once all is done I gave away some Opera pens (Sponsored by Opera Software) to the audience.

Presentation Slides:- http://files.myopera.com/Zentarien/files/Web%20Browser%20Wars.pdf

Pictures can be found on my facebook profile, tons of people took pictures of this event and tagged me smile

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