Every week we take Internet marketing questions from friends, acquaintances and client business partners and unravel them at the end of these enewsletters. Is there something you would like to know about the weirdly wonderful world of websites? Ask us here and we shall answer.

Question: Which browsers should I be paying attention to?

Answer: According to Wikipedia, as of October, 2009, the top browsers by usage are:

• Internet Explorer (64.64%)
• Mozilla Firefox (25.30%)
• Safari (4.30%)
• Google Chrome (3.19%)
• Opera (1.50%)

Those figures, of course, do not delve into the sordid world of version numbers. And, as you may well know, comparing Firefox 3.5 to Internet Explorer 6.0 is like comparing a pristine, freshly picked Navel orange to a moldy, old, half-eaten Gala apple.

That said, you should still be watching Internet Explorer 6.0.

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FireFox Downloads Surpass 1 BILLION

The Mozilla Firefox web browser recently surpassed it 1 BILLIONTH download. Of course, while we’re throwing around those kinds of numbers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 surpassed 200 MILLION downloads, according to cnet.

On the Spread Firefox site, the current number of downloads for the browser (as of last viewing, 2009-08-05 10:35 AM EST) equaled 1,006,472,513, which is to say, 1 BILLION, 6 MILLION, plus change.

Those are pretty large numbers that sound impressive, but what do they really mean? Just because these browsers have had that many downloads, does that mean people are really using them to surf the web? Are they trying out new technology and then returning to their tried and true browser at the end of the day? Or, as is the case for many a web developer, are they installing these browsers side by side?

Download numbers make fantastic headlines, but by themselves they don’t tell much of the story. For that, we need to look at browser usage trends, over platforms, over time.

What Do Our Own Stats Say?

I decided to take a look at some of the data that we’ve been collecting. For the purposes of this blog entry, I chose to examine the Google Analytics data for one of our largest consumer plus business oriented sites, the Metal Roofing Alliance. This site caters to consumers, businesses, trade organizations, and the media, so it seemed like a good cross-section of Internet browsers for a sample set.

After chunking the numbers from July 2008 through July 2009, there were some interesting (and somewhat unexpected) trends that emerged. 

The thirty-thousand foot summary is this: across all platforms, Internet Explorer lost approximately 6.6% of the browser market share while Firefox gained 3.1%, Apple’s Safari gained 2.0%, Google’s Chrome gained 1.4%, and even the Opera web browser was marginally in the black (by about 0.1%).

The fifteen-thousand foot summary: on all operating systems identifying themselves as Microsoft Windows (Vista, XP, 2003, ME, etc.), Internet Explorer still lost 6.5% of the ground (the rest of the ground that IE gave up, not surprisingly, occurred on the Mac, where IE has been deprecated for over half a decade now), with Firefox gaining 2.7%, Chrome gaining 1.4%, Safari claiming a meager 0.3%, and Opera, again, in the marginal black.

The other fifteen-thousand foot summary: when examining operating systems as reported by web browsers, Windows lost 2.2% of the market, with Macintosh claiming 1.4% and the iPhone claiming 0.5%, for a combined Apple gain of 1.9%! Linux also came in with a marginal uptick.

Highlights for those overwhelmed by graphs:

• Year-over-year, Internet Explorer lost 6.6% of the total web browser market and, more significantly, lost 6.5% of the market on its own Windows operating system, where it comes bundled as the default web browser.
• During the same time period, usage of the Windows operating system (as a platform for browsing the web, anyway) dropped by 2.2%.
• Surprisingly (or maybe not, based on recent observations out and aboout), the use of the iPhone as a medium to view the Internet rose from virtually nil to just over half a percent!

Raw data, as normalized by percentage of total web traffic, is available upon request.

Browser Usage Trends

Of course, if you don’t have access to a bunch of web server logs, don’t have time to crunch a bunch of numbers, or don’t have a team of professionals like those at Congruent Media to help you out, you can still get a good feeling for the current trends by going to the Net Applications Market Share site.

Among other potential useful data available to the public is the “Top Browser Share Trend” report. This report is customizable by date span and a few other key criteria. For example, usage data from July 2008 through July 2009 can be found here:

The general trend for IE 6-8 versus all other browsers tends to follow what we’ve seen in our own data – a slow decline for Microsoft, losing ground to the combined forces of the competition, but most notably Firefox.

What Does This All Mean?

In general, this loss of market share is a good thing. Anything that can challenge the dominance of the biggest player in the market spurs innovation on all parts. The fact that there are five significant browsers in the mix (Internet Explore, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera) means that a host of issues can be addressed for specific user groups and niche markets. I use Firefox primarily in the office because it has good developer tools, a must for anyone building a rich internet application. At home, I tend to use Chrome or (gasp) Internet Explorer. Microsoft, of course, needs to get smarter and better – not simply resting on its laurels. It needs to come out with something innovative and new to sharpen its competitive edge, instead of just playing catch-up.

Of course, there is a war just heating up here, larger than the competition over browser market share. In tandem with its 5% browser share loss, Microsoft also lost about 2% of its operating system territory, and almost all of that went to Apple, as reflected in our browser operating system data. 

The bigger stakes are in the integration of operating system, Internet, and peripheral devices. Software-as-a-service requires a web browser that will work correctly with all of the rich feature set provided by AJAX or Flex technologies. Meanwhile, the use of PDAs and SmartPhones demands that these devices be easily synchronized with or connected to one’s own desktop. Don’t forget about your media-playing devices like your MP3 player or your Internet-enabled television.

Apple is already the king of ease-of-integration, making it a snap to merge your Mac, iPhone, iPod, wireless speakers, and whatever other Apple-enabled devices you might have, into a single network of electronic objects communicating with each other synergistically.

And lest we forget, Google is taking aim at Microsoft’s empire. It plans to release its Chrome operating system later this year, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if it features the same ease-of-use integration with its own products, like the Android phone and, of course, the web browser of the same name.

Every week we take Internet marketing questions from friends, acquaintances and client business partners and unravel them at the end of these enewsletters. Is there something you would like to know about the weirdly wonderful world of websites? Ask us here and we shall answer.

Question: What is Google Website Optimizer?

Answer: Per Google's dry summation:

Google Website Optimizer is a free A/B testing and multivariate testing application that helps online marketers and webmasters increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of website content. But, if you're a website owner or an Internet marketer with "mad scientist" tendencies…

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Every week we take Internet marketing questions from friends, acquaintances and client business partners and unravel them at the end of these enewsletters. Is there something you would like to know about the weirdly wonderful world of websites? Ask us here and we shall answer.

Q: What should we do with all of our old pages when we launch our redesigned website?

Short Answer: Always back it up and map your legacy content to new locations.

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Prepare to rejigger your website code.

Microsoft has officially moved IE 8 out of Beta and into full release.  You can download it yourself, or just wait for them to push it onto your PC. That's right, they plan to push IE 8 through Automatic Updates, just like they did for IE 7.

With the latest version of IE, Microsoft is hoping to reverse the market share loss they've experienced over the past several years. As recently as 2004, IE had 94% of the browser market (!!), but at the start of 2009, most measures had them slipping below 70%.

There are some potentially nifty features in IE 8, and it purports to be IE's  most standards-compliant version (insert joke here), but judging by the beta release, it's pretty bloated and not all that fast.

Time will tell whether they've tuned it up enough to stem the flow of users to their competitors.

Have you played with IE 8 in beta? Have you downloaded the actual release already this afternoon? Let us know your thoughts.

By now it's all over the Internet - Microsoft's Internet Explorer has lost significant ground in the web browser war. According to statistics reported by Net Applications from January through December 2008, IE's hold on the worldwide browser market has slipped from 75.5% in January 2008 down to 68.2% in December 2008, with a steady decline across all months. On the other hand, Mozilla FireFox and Apple's Safari browser made steady gains, rising from 17.0% and 5.8% to 21.3% and 7.9%, respectively, over that same time period. Google Chrome crept in and took 1% of the market since its appearance just four short months ago in September 2008.

An examination of data collected by Congruent Media for several of the most visited websites that we host also reveals this downward trend in IE's market-share. Our data, which is collected from sites that are primarily viewed by browsers within the United States and Canada, suggests that IE commanded 81.2% of the browser market in January 2008, falling to 75.9% of the market in December. In that same time period, FireFox rose from 13.7% to about 17.3%, and Safari moved up a percentage and a quarter from 4.2% to 5.4%. Chrome took 0.7% of the market in the four months since its debut, more than all non-FireFox Mozilla browsers, Netscape, and Opera combined.

If the steady decline in IE market share illustrated by the Net Applications data and corroborated by our own holds true in 2009, it's possible that we'll see IE drop into the high 50% range worldwide and in the high 60% range in Canada and the USA. This is extremely significant news for anyone with a web site, and for web development teams in general.

Assuming this trend is not an anomoly (and a full year of decline is not likely an anomoly), it rings the death knell of the days of Microsoft's web browser market share domination. We are moving into a time when many good, competitive browsers are on the market, pushing innovation of web technologies and converging on web standards, with many more web-savvy consumers willing to try them out. This means that web developers can no longer adhere to the faulty mantra of "it works in Internet Explorer, that's good enough", which may have been fine in the early half of this decade. Now, however, developers must produce sites that are cross-browser compliant, functioning well in not just Internet Explorer, but also in the other popular, competing brands.

Sites that fail to do so are immediately rejecting 1/4 to 1/3 (or possibly even 1/2 come the end of 2009) of their potential market. If your web site is an eCommerce store, that translates directly into a monetary loss - you are casting off 1/4 to 1/3 of potential sales! That's huge!

Now, consider the flip-side. If you have a well developed, compliant, cross-browser friendly site, not only are you keeping those 1/4 to 1/3 of potential sales on your site (because, well, the site works correctly in Safari or Chrome or FireFox), you're also going to catch the eye of the cast-offs from those other sites that AREN'T compliant. (Of course, browser-compliance isn't going to be the key to the success of your eCommerce store - you still need to be selling something people want - but you get the picture.)

Fortunately, Congruent Media has always developed web sites with this mindset, adhering to the latest web standards and ensuring that the sites that we produce work correctly in all of the popular browsers.

Today, the mouse - the human interface device, not the furry rodent - turns 40 years old.  Yes, the mouse has existed that long, longer, in fact, than the ARPAnet/Internet.

The original mouse was made of wood and used two wheels to slide and roll along a surface, and was unveiled at the Fall Joint Computer Conference on December 9, 1968. 

Later, it evolved into the mouse we're all used to, the one with a ball that rolls.  Not much of an evolution, really - the wheels are just inside of the device and are turned by the ball.  More recently, optical mice have been developed which measure their movement based on scanning the surface they're moved against.

But without that original, wood and wire creature, who knows how we'd interact with computers?  Sure, there's always the keyboard.  But how to drag and drop?  How to point and click?  Double-click?  Right-click?  Would we all be using joysticks?  Touchpads?  Pointing sticks?  Tablets?  It baffles the mind to imagine...

So let us raise a virtual cocktail glass in salute to that venerable little piece of machinery we take for granted and use every day to click and drag and drop our way through our cyber-lives.

Happy 40th birthday, Mouse, dear old friend.

Google launched a new tool, Flu Trends, today and announced it was working with the CDC to help identify geographic breakouts of influenza. In the post on their blog, Google explains they found that the volume of certain search queries can be a good indication of the level of flu outbreak in a specific geographic region. So for example, a huge increase in a region for "flu symptoms" or "thermometer" could be indications that the flu is flaring up there.

They came to this conclusion by comparing hundreds of billions of search queries over the past 5 years next to actual CDC flu statistics. They admit it's experimental, but nevertheless they have launched Google Flu Trends, where curious visitors can go to to see the flu breaking out in real-time across the country.

But wait, doesn't the CDC already have this information? Well yes, they did. But apparently CDC's information was 1-2 weeks old, where Google is pulling their information from real-time search queries.

It is certainly not hard to imagine how helpful this information can be to the CDC in their fight against influenza. Accoring to this Reuters Story, Influenza kills 35,000 people every year in the United States.

There are of course privacy issues at play here and Google assures everyone that it is not tracking individual searches. I'll leave that up to you to ponder.

The fascinating aspect to me is that Google has become so ingrained in our society, that by analyzing search data we can map trends, lifestyle patterns, the spread of infectious diseases...  Really the possibilities are endless. It makes you wonder what they're going to start tracking next.

For right now though, we know they're tracking outbreaks of the flu. So keep your eye on Flu Trends as we head into yet another flu season.

In case you didn't already catch it, Google Streetview has come to Baltimore. What is Google Streetview you ask? Well, it's a feature of Google Maps which allows users to see actual 360 degree street-level panoramic views of cities. For example, here's a shot of our office parking lot in the back of the Natty Boh Tower.

Google Streetview originally launched in May of 2007, and only in five U.S. cities: San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami and New York City. Since then, Streetview has expanded to thousands of citiies in the US and globally.

Baltimore Streetview was released yesterday, along with Washington D.C. and Seattle. According to Google Map's blog, these were the three most highly requested cities.

Google Streetview has been in the news a bit this year, with many concerns about privacy being voiced. Apparently the armies of camera-mounted Google cars have caught several people in less-than-flattering poses. So go to Google Maps, type in your address, click on the street-view button and see if you're one of the latest Streetview stars. 

Let us know what you find.

This being an election year, I got to thinking about the security (or lack thereof) of our electronic voting machines.  I'm talking about security from malicious hardware/software designed to change election results...

Okay, so the story actually starts with an automated error email I received from one of the websites we host.  I usually get those when somebody (or, more often than not, some bot) attempts to access a page in a manner inconsistent with what the page is expecting (think SQL Injection Attack - don't worry, our code is designed to prevent those).  Occasionally, some computer science student somewhere will be working on their own benign web crawler that manages to do something it shouldn't, and when that causes a page to throw an error, I'll get those emails as well.

Being in the mood to peruse the error messages that came in overnight while I drank my morning coffee, I noticed one from a crawler with the following user agent:

UCSB? I thought. That's my alma mater, the University of California, Santa Barbara. Somebody in the computer science department is crawling our web sites. Intriguing.

I followed the link back to Marco Cova. It turns out that he's a graduate student there, working in the Computer Security Group.  After looking through a few of his blog posts, I found one from about a month ago on the topic of the security of the Sequoia electronic voting machines in California.  It pointed out how easy it would be to infect a machine with various types of malware to alter the voting results, even the so-called paper trail, and how the infected machines pass the tests to verify the sanctity of the software because both the software and checksum have been altered.  As if that all wasn't bad enough, the malicious software is shown to be capable of spreading itself from one machine to another because of the mechanism used to initialize the voting smart cards.

What about Maryland's voting machines?  In this state, we use AccuVote-TS devices developed by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems).  Unfortunately, these machines are also highly susceptible to malicious code injection and other ways of rigging the vote, as a security analysis by a team at Princeton University determined.

Viral adjustment of voting records, electronic log changes, modified paper trail results, a fraudulent vote count that looks real...  This is scary stuff that tears at the very fabric of Democracy.  A political candidate with enough resources and no sense of ethics could hire a couple of equally shady programmers and a handful of ground troops to infect voting machines in key demographics, rigging an election in their favor.  It wouldn't take a lot of people, just a few smart people with the right resources.  With malicious code that can pass verification tests, alter log results, and even adjust the printed results accordingly, there is not way of going back and reconstructing the legitimate results of an election.

Welcome to Democracy in the 21st century.  What now?