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.

Speedups redux

We had load averages going back up over 2.5 again, and made some changes which dropped them back down to around 0.6 again. I turned on a setting which makes it easier for browsers to cache images and css and javascript files; went through the two javascript files that make up the menus and combined them into a single file (which I will minify later, after going through an extended revision); and moved the “stolen.gif” image which is shown to people trying to show our graphics elsewhere (without permission) to Amazon Web Services temporarily (while we see what it costs to keep it there). If the latter is successful, we will move some other popular files there, because it speeds things up (among other things, AWS puts them closer to users outside the Michigan area).

So things should be faster as I run the Red Queen’s Race.