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.

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?

This is the second in a two-part series exploring the current state of Web 2.0 and the need for better optimization in the age of Rich Internet Applications.  Part 1 gives an extremely brief history of Internet development and takes stock of the current state of the World Wide Web, specifically in terms of various big-name and AJAX-enabled sites.  It also discusses large download sizes inherent with Rich Internet Applications and their impact on end-user perceptions.  Part 2 introduces various client-side optimization methods that every Web 2.0 developer should perform and every Web 2.0 client should expect from their Internet solutions partner, and explores these optimization methods in detail.

Current State of the Internet (Redux)

In part 1 of this post, the Congruent Media team examined some big-name websites and discovered some disconcerting results about their size and lack of optimization.  By far the worst site in the data set was CNN.com (as measured the afternoon of July 23rd, 2008), which came in at a total size of 635 KB with 263 external items (images, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript files) encompassing nearly 97% of the total download.  BBC News came in a close second with 503 KB total download size.

To recap:

A further investigation revealed that none of the external JavaScript files for the CNN site, including third-party libraries, were compressed!

In this Web 2.0 age of the Internet, first impressions count - users expect things to work quickly.  Waiting around for 10 or 20 seconds for a page to download and work correctly is time that a web browser is likely to spend doing something else, like hitting the back button, returning to their Google search results, and trying the next site down - your competition.

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This is the first in a two-part series exploring the current state of Web 2.0 and the need for better optimization in the age of Rich Internet Applications. Part 1 gives an extremely brief history of Internet development and takes stock of the current state of the World Wide Web, specifically in terms of various big-name and AJAX-enabled sites. It also discusses large download sizes inherent with Rich Internet Applications andtheir impact on end-user perceptions. Part 2 introduces various client-side optimization methods that every Web 2.0 developer should perform and every Web 2.0 client should expect from their Internet solutions partner, and explores these optimization methods in detail.

In the Beginning...

In the good old days of the Internet - back in that other millennium - the majority of people surfed the World Wide Web over a 56kbs modem (or worse!). Bandwidth was at a premium. Download times were gigantic. Most people were running Windows 95 or Windows 98 on 386, 486, or Pentium I boxes using Lynx, I mean Mosaic, I mean Mozilla, I mean Internet Explorer... [ visit http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_browse.htm for a quick and interesting look at Web Browser history ] In short, web browsers were springing up everywhere, there were very few standards, and it took forever to download a web page that was anything more complicated than some text and perhaps an interlaced GIF or two.

During that nascent age of the Internet, web developers were faced with the daunting task of keeping the size of their pages to a minimum. Cascading style sheets hadn't come onto the scene, so everything was based on tables, and images were far and few between. JavaScript, which started to show up in web pages in the late 1990s, never really worked right, and was too slow to be practical for anything but the most basic of tasks. The main concern of web developers, after getting the correct information on the page in an organized manner, was to keep the size of those same pages to a minimum so that people could actually download them in less time than it took to smoke a cigarette.
 

Got Bandwidth - Will Travel

Fast forward from the 1990s to 2008, and more than 80% of all Internet users (and over 93% when you just consider the work force) in the United States are on broadband connections, according to a WebSiteOptimization.com report,and a September 2007 survey by the PEW Internet and American Life Project found that over 50% of Americans have "high-speed Internet connections" at home.

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My friend, R, instant messaged me earlier today, with the following geek joke:

Q: How do you bury a programmer?
A: Face down, nine-edge first.

Not understanding the joke (and thus completely missing out on the absurd humor), but also not wanting R to know that I was completely clueless, I immediately switched to FireFox and Googled the punch-line.

The first (and only) link I followed led me to the website everything₂ - a veritable mish-mash of random factoids and miscellaneous lore - which happened to have the answer I was looking for: "Face down, nine-edge first is the proper way to insert card decks in the IBM 1402 and 1622 punch card readers."

What's great about this random discovery, however, beside the quick history lesson, is that the explanation went on to tell me that this phrase is used in a geek poem called "The Last Bug", hearkening back to the far-distant, dark, dusty days of punch card computing...

Ah, to stumble around the Internet and find a wonderful, random, old post like this.  It takes me back to the days of scowering the racks at the college library for books that hadn't been checked out since the early 1900s.

But I digress.  So, I IM-ed R back a link to the poem, thanking that dark overlord Google for pulling the weight of my obvious geek-slackerness.

My friend, C, emailed me this morning to let me know he was rudely awakened at 6 AM by his BlackBerry, which had received some sort of SPAM or other...  In the same message, C also let me know that Google had just launched its new "App Engine", open to the public (well, about 10,000 of them, anyway, since this is a "Preview" release) - pointing me to Matt Cutts blog (posted yesterday) on the subject.

According to the official Google Blog, the Google App Engine opens up to developers the "same building blocks" that Google itself uses.  Items built using the Google App Engine are hosted on Google servers, for free, and receive 500 MB of storage utilizing the Google File System and Bigtable data storage system and 10 GB of daily bandwidth.

This rung a bell, reminding me of SalesForce.com's entrance into providing Software as a Service (SaaS) with their AppExchange and SDK for developing SFDC-integrated and hosted solutions.  A little bit of Internet sleuthing uncovered a blog entry on Tech Crunch, also dated yesterday, that hints at "Deep Integration" between SFDC and Google.  According to the blog post, SFDC is going to begin reselling Google Apps, such as Google Docs, which will be "tightly integrated" into SalesForce, and is purported to make an announcement next week to the same effect.

Interesting timing... In light of the Google App Engine announcement, WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?  The Tech Crunch article goes on to offer the tantalizing speculation that Marc Benioff, SalesForce CEO, might be considering selling to Google, but I'd think a merging of forces might be more in-line with these recent announcements.  If SFDC is going to resell Google Apps which are going to seamlessly integrate with it's own SaaS platform, it makes a blogger wonder if SFDC isn't going to end up being powered by the Google App Engine itself.  Imagine the kind of powerhouse that would be...  People integrating SFDC inside of the hosted Google App Enginge, people integrating Google Apps in SFDC, strange hybrids between Google and SFDC, monstrous cross-breads, ridiculous amounts of customer data flowing back and forth...

Is Google in it to gain access to the customer data?  That "deep integration" certainly is a way to expose Google Apps to the corporate (paying) sphere...

Are Google and SalesForce in it for platform dominance?  A combined Google/SFDC platform would sure blow the metaphorical socks off of the Windows Live/Office Live platform...

And aren't there any other players out there?  What happened to that offer for Oracle to buy up SFDC?  Where's Yahoo! when you need them? (Oh, right, hoping to fend off Microsoft's takeover bid...)  And Apple Computers (forget about them - they gave up the good fight a long time ago)?

It's beginning to look more and more like a two-player world after all - two corporate titans gobbling up everything else in sight.  Get ready for another match up of corporate titans, ten rounds of Microsoft versus Google, Steve Ballmer versus the tag-team of Larry Page and Sergey Brin.  I don't know who to root for on this one...  Linus Torvalds, where are you when we need you the most?

Where's the Beef Laptop?

After waiting patiently over a month to receive my "Get One" latptop from the One Laptop Per Child's "Give One, Get One" promotion, I finally got around to calling their 800 number a week or so ago to see what the story was.  Looks like I'm going to have to wait a bit longer...

So, like I said, I called the 800 number and, a moderate wait time later, was greeted by a very friendly and sympathetic support person. Once she was able to pull up my information, we discovered the culprit...  The way that the PayPal fields mapped up to the OLPC database basically dropped half of my address.  Yes, line 2, the important one where I put the actual street address, because I placed "Congruent Media" on line one, had vanished into the ether.  Apparently, the delivery service doesn't know the location for "Congruent Media, Baltimore, MD 21224"...  (Who coded that, the same people that forgot to convert from metric to English a few years back during that Mars Climate Orbiter fiasco?  That would never have happend if the OLPC had hired Congruent Media to do the job!)

At any rate, after we got that corrected, she informed me of the good/bad news - my laptop wouldn't ship until the end of March or the beginning of April, because they were out of computers and in the process of assembling more.  To me, that's great news, in that their "Give One, Get One" promotion was a huge success!  So, presumably, some time in April that box will show up at the office and I'll be able to pop it open and experiment with this crazy $200 computer they're building for the children of the Developing World and, well, children everywhere...

Why'd I Want the Beef Laptop Anyway?

So it's along story (or maybe a short one).  Sure, it'll be cool to mess around with the OLPC's cheap, robust gizmo, put it through its paces, and see if I can use it in my plans for world domination.  But really, the story begins back in the 1980s.  You remember the 1980s, right?  That time where everyone had outrageous haircuts, the Ford Mustang traded in its classically cool look for something boxy out the future, Knight Rider was on television and people actually thought David Hasselhoff could act, Reagan was President, and having a 16 color monitor was cool?  (If you don't remember the 1980s, you can catch the highlights on VH1.)

Anyway, when I was a kid, back in the 1980s, one of the single most important decisions my parents ever made was to purchase a used IBM PC Junior from our neighbors across the street.  For those of you that are historically challenged (go watch the VH1 highlights), the PC Junior sported a 4 color monitor, a 5 1/2 inch floy drive, and amazing 64 KB of RAM.  You had these solid-state cartridges you'd plug in to get into the BASIC programmng shell.  Yeah, you know, maybe one or two steps above punch cards...

Like I was saying, when I was a kid, back in the 1980s, my parents bought this used PC Junior from our neighbors, and suddenly my brother and I were exposed to a whole new world of possibilities.  Being the precocious children that we were, we dove right in.  The gloves were off within weeks, and soon we were pushing that machine as far as we could go.  As technology progressed, we upgraded to a 286.  I remember that time fondly.  I coded up a drawing program in BASIC (the old, old BASIC, that had line numbers, with GOTO statements, and no GUI interface) - you could use the arrow keys to move around on the screen, draw basic, paint boxes, and even save your images!

The point is, I became comfortable with technology, with using it, with modifying it's components, with the fact that if I broke it, I could fix it - no big deal - just a few hours of tinkering around.  Now I'm designing crazy Internet applications and my brother is installing and maintaining VOIP systems.  Without that exposure to jump start us, I don't think either of us would be in the fortunate position we're in today.  Sure, we would have eventually been exposed to computers in school, but we would have missed out on those crucial formative experiences.  Instead of creating things with technology, we'd likely only just be consumers of it.

We were fortunate enough to have parents who could afford to buy us that first piece of technology.  The majority of the world's children, however, don't have parents that can afford that luxury.  Every child deserves a chance to succeed, and variouis organizations throughout the economically developed world have have been attempting (for a long time) to better the condition of children, and especially poor children, in our countries and abroad, through various means.  We've given money.  We've given food and other kinds of aid.  We've built schools.  Now the OLPC has come along and thought - "Let's give them TECHNOLOGY".  This is a novel approach, and not necessarily the most intuitive.  But this may be the missing piece of the puzzle - who knows? 

We've moved from the Industrial Age into the Technology Age, and one of the most important skills anyone can have is the ability to confidently use a computer for a productive purpose.  It's that whole "give a fish / teach them how to fish" proverb... and to fish in this age, you need a hard-drive and a connection to the Internet.

The news is out, Microsoft is making a bid to purchase Yahoo! for just under $45 billion.  According to reports, the Redmond software giant believes that combining forces with Yahoo!, the ailing Internet portal and search engine, will turn it's own Internet business around as it continues to hemmorage money in the battle against the 700 pound gorilla named Google.  Apparently, the offer is 62% above Thursday's closing price for Yahoo! stock, illustrating Microsoft's brilliance at overplaying it's hand in a desperate attempt to gain some sort web foothold. 

While Microsoft may think that aquiring Yahoo! will help it level the playing field, the only people I can see winning from such a deal are the shareholders themselves, and Google.  If I was a Yahoo! shareholder, I'd take the deal and split with a fat wallet, much happier than losing my shirt as Yahoo! continues to sink.  And if I were Google, I'd be happy that Microsoft is throwing away good money after bad by purchasing an already-bloated, under-performing Internet company.

What Microsoft should be doing is taking a page from the old Google playbook - invest in bright ideas by aquring small companies doing really cool things, as well as tried and true larger ones.  This brings in new talent that hasn't fallen into the brain-numbing rut of the mega-corporate-technocracy, fostering the maverick pioneer spirit of innovation, and generally creating an exciting work environment.

To be fair, Microsoft has aquired its share of small companies as well as large, most notably to this blogger the 2004 purchase of GIANT Company Software, Inc., which had a really cool anit-spyware tool until the good old boys in Washington monkeyed with it and turned it into the clunky Windows Defender.  The problem is that, while Microsoft may be aquiring talent, it's not aquiring Internet talent, which is what it now hopes to achieve through this unholy union.

Personally, I'd like to see Microsoft make some headway in the Internet battle against Google.  Maybe, despite my nay-saying predictions, the Yahoo! executive board and shareholders will approve this proposal and it will be a wildly successful combination and not money thrown down the drain.  Don't get me wrong, Microsoft is no friend of mine.  But just as Netscape and Microsoft battled it out in the late 1990s, followed by the rematch of Microsoft versus Firefox in the last few years, for browser dominance, and just as Microsoft and Apple have been dualing for twenty-some odd years in the computer systems arena, this battle of Google versus Microsoft is bound to fuel new innovations.  This time around, Microsoft is the underdog.  Hopefully it can keep Google in check - the last thing we need is for Mountain View's wildest success story to turn into an evil, information controlling, mega-opoly.  It's certainly sitting on top of that slippery slope right now.

Earlier today, a beautiful fruit bouquet was delivered to Congruent Media World Headquarters, addressed to one Ryan Katz, Director of Client Services, as a thank you gift from a client.  The bouquet included chocolate covered apples and strawberries, grapes, and pineapple chunks and melon balls shaped into flowers, all with a green kale base.

Normally, Rebecca Savage, Customer Service and Front Desk extraordinnaire, would walk the bouquet back to Ryan's desk.  Unfortunately for Ryan, though, he's currently on an airplane en route to Florida for a week-long series of meetings with another client. 

However, the folks here at Congruent Media are not a wasteful bunch... Rather than let Ryan's delicious-looking fruit bouquet moulder and rot on his desk, collecting fruit flies and feeding the mice, we decided to do him a service - and eat his fruit bouquet!