Browsers.. from Ars
Arstechnica has published an interesting browser report. Interesting because it shows a much more even field of browsers in the market they are focused on – ‘PC enthusiast’s’. #1 is of course IE but at 38% while Moz is 31% and Safari with 8%. Opera is a mere 3%…
When we look at stats on info we see something really different. Still a 90% share goes to IE and 8% Netscape.. although I wonder why its Netscape – perhaps Moz is missing in the dated log reader? Have to check out two things: can we get awstats on info? and what would happen if UW Windows installs offered a different browser than IE?
Weekend reading
I am going to start a weekly round-up of interesting articles I have come across in my NetNewsWire. This is just a tip of the article pile (44 RSS subscriptions and growing), but I thought I’d share just a snippit of my addiction to RSS.
- Pretty funny look at what happens to people when you take people’s internet away – Users Reluctant to Break the Net Habit
- Great rant on bad design in Love for Web Developers
- An accessible web is good for all. Does that just make sense? You make an accessible web page and everyone benefits. Perhaps because you take creating a web page more seriously and don’t throw it together because you are forced too?
- What happens after people find what you ask them too in usability testing? Usability testing for findability looks at usability testing’s unanswered questions—how useful is the information that is found? Do people use it?
- Firefox fans rejoice, Windows admins need to know that SP2 Internet Explorer enhancements for Windows XP only. So if you want the latest and greatest browser you now have no choice but to use an alternative like Firefox,Mozilla,Opera, and the list goes on. If you are wondering what all the fuss with these ‘alternative browsers’ is, check out Browse Happy.
- I need one of these in my office. My new office may have windows that open but it is missing a screen… wasps everywhere.
Firefox and it’s growth
Worth a mention, the Spread Firefox has surpased its goal and is still moving along nicely. For those who don’t know what Firefox is; it’s a web browser based on Mozilla – Netscape 6.x-7.x is as well. It has a huge number of extensions that make the browser a lot of fun. One I would highly recommend to web folks is the web developer 0.8 extension.
Check out Firefox, UW staff can ask IST for more information. Not sure about the support angle but if enough people ask I am sure they will make it available once version 1.0 is out 
UPDATE: From IST, they don’t support Firefox and have no immediate plans do so.
New search engine from Amazon – A9
Something worth looking at – A9 – Amazon.com’s new search engine. It has a little different interface than Google (A9 is ‘enhanced’ by Google) along with some cool features.
Take a look at search in A9 for University of Waterloo verses a search in Google for University of Waterloo and note the images on the right column. If you look at Google’s image tab for the same search you will see the same images but A9 skips the tabs. On the site you can find the why use A9 scoop.
One thing you do get with Amazon is the contact details which are the same for all UW sites. Interestingly UW has an average traffic rank of 9, 789 and its speed is ‘average’. No idea what that means – based on Google’s pagerank? Also, in the top three of ‘People that visit the UW page also check out Dr. Daniel Scott’s site. It doesn’t seem to exist. Suppose A9 has a few bugs yet – oh and it needs to update that screen shot of UW.
min-height: argh!
This is a ‘why didn’t i think of that’ moment in time. Seems Dave Shea has a fix for the insane annoyance that is min-height in his min-height: fixed; entry. Putting it here for my own benefit and perhaps others would appreciate it. One thing to note to the CSS builders on campus is the number of bug fixes and browser tricks required… yuck.