Browser wars
Did you ever wonder how the browser wars worked themselves out in terms of Allpar users?
Internet Explorer 8 seems to have had excellent adoption with 30% of hits coming in with it. The closely related Explorer 7 browser was in the #3 slot, with 18% of hits. Filling in between was Firefox 3, with 24%.
Safari came in higher than expected, with 8% of hits; that beat Chrome’s 3% and Opera’s 1.5%.
Other browsers and versions accounted for around 8% of hits.
45% of hits came from Windows XP, which shows that Allpar folk have good judgement (yes, I did just install Windows 7 in a virtual machine, and it was not pretty.) 26% use Vista and I believe 8% use Win7. 7% are Mac users, 2% are Linux users, and 1% are iPhone users. Other operating systems, including various older Windows and Mac varieties, accounted for the rest.
Oh, and though Microsoft makes Bing the default on Win7 and makes it rather difficult to replace it with Google, and despite massive advertising, Google remains King Kong for Allpar, with 80% of hits, followed by Yahoo and Bing with around 10% each and a mismosh of others (HotBot is still around?) fighting over rounding errors.
“45% of hits came from Windows XP, which shows that Allpar folk have good judgement ”
I’m sorry, using a nine-year old OS is “good judgement?” Are you serious? You’re basically doing the equivalent of telling Mac users to stick with OS 9.
“Oh, and though Microsoft makes Bing the default on Win7 and makes it rather difficult to replace it with Google,”
Uh, what? click the drop-down on the search box, select “Add Provider,” and choose Google from the page that loads. How is that “rather difficult?” How long did you *really* spend with Windows 7?
XP is lightweight, fast, and doesn’t hide things from you. Windows 7 is wonderful at putting the same old stuff under six layers of eye candy. And with SP3, it’s hardly nine years old — no more than Windows 7 is.
Mac users sticking with OS 9 isn’t a bad idea if they can get away with it. Fast, lean, and relatively secure. All the viruses that will ever be written for OS 9 have probably already been written and dealt with.
“Rather dificult” — if you follow MS’ instructions, you first have to drop out of “easy” mode, then you go through and they stick up a window and hide it beneath another window, and when you select Google from their list in that window, it doesn’t replace Bing anyway. That’s not easy. Of course I COULD wait for your reply and then discover that there’s a hidden dropdown list. That’s real user-friendly.
Best bet: Install Firefox on any of the above and be done with it. Changing the search engine is easy and you can add additional search engines fairly easily. I use either Windows XP or Linux – the later most of the time.