Browserland

A few baffling problems with (surprise surprise) the Windows Mobile system led me to take a look at our web statistics again, and boy, what a surprise!

Explorer is down to 54% of our visitors. Wow. I never thought I’d see that again. Especially considering that, traditionally, Allpar has had more Explorer users (as a percentage) than most sites.

Firefox has risen up to 21% of visitors. Safari, which for a brief time ran close to Firefox, is now relegated to 14%. Most Mac users I know stick with Safari, which comes with the Mac, though many use Firefox; it’s also available on Windows. I personally use Safari most of the time, with Firefox and Explorer called in as needed. (Apparently iPhone and iPad users are also considered to be using Safari. So, oddly, are Android users, according to Google — that’s an unnatural boost since they’re using Chrome, aren’t they?)

Next in line is Chrome, which is essentially Google’s browser that uses the open source components of Safari. Chrome’s 9% increases the market share of the underlying Webkit engine to 23% (on Allpar, anyway), beating Firefox’s Mozilla engine.

The next of the majors is Opera, with a mere 1% share. Opera’s been around for years and years and years, and it’s find some interesting new uses in mini form lately, but all the various flavors of Opera together still add up to 1% at allpar.

The next two are BlackBerry and PlayStation 3. Together they add up to, well, not much in terms of percentages.

Within Explorer, I’m happy to see that no less than 74% of visitors are using IE8. Hurrah! 19% are still on IE7 — come on, guys, time to upgrade. And 6%, Heaven help me, are still on IE6, presumably because they’re on corporate systems that have to stay that way for compatibility with their overpriced Siebel Systems (or whatever) corporate apps. Hey, better to save the money on upgrades now and we’ll pay to clean up all the cracking later, right? (1% more are using IE9 Beta, and less than .01% are on various other forms, like IE Mac, which dropped out years and years ago).

Looks like I don’t have to support IE4 any more.

Windows users are still the main Allpar readers, with 82% of the population; Mac users are at 8%. The remainder are mostly handheld users — Android at 3%, iPhone at 3%, iPad at 1%, Linux at 0.7%, iPod Touch at 0.6%, BlackBerry at 0.5%. Many of the Windows users, like me, are still on XP — 48%. Only 29% are on 7, and 22% are on Vista. The rest are on various flavors — oh, look, there’s Windows 98 coming in at 0.1%!

Oh, here’s Windows Mobile. It’s in its own little area, Mobile Devices. Of mobile visitors, 36% are Android, 35% are iPhone, 15% are iPad, 7% are iPod, 6% Blackberry… and here’s Windows at 0.6%. Eek.

Patience, please!

People sometimes write to me and demand to know why Chrysler is so slow to adopt their favorite technology.

Much of the time, I agree that what they want is reasonable. Like diesel engines – I’d love to see diesels in the 200/Avenger or Wrangler or Ram 1500. Especially those VM Motori diesels they use in Europe, or, for the Ram, those new Cummins models that apparently only the U.S. Government is using.

But let’s take a quick look at Chrysler.

For nine years they suffered under Daimler’s “cut it, then cut it again, then cut it again” mentality. Then they went under Cerberus’ knife and even the Pentastar V6 nearly bought the farm — as far as I can tell, it was saved by press coverage.

So here’s what Chrysler is hurrying to get ready:

* Pentastar V6 Variants: direct injection, MDS, turbocharged, twin turbocharged, and possibly 3-liter high-mileage or economy versions
* New transmissions: nine speed and eight speed — apparently in just about every vehicle they make
* World Engine rebuild — as far as we can tell, essentially scrapping most of the top of the engine and starting over
* Federalized Fiat engines (1.4, 1.4 turbo)
* Power/efficiency upgrades for the Hemi V8s
* MultiAir implementation
* Viper V10 upgrades

It’s quite likely the engineers are also working on a V8 version of the Pentastar V6, as well — or at least some sort of replacement for the Hemi, to debut a few years down the road. No engine family lasts forever.

(As for MultiAir, it’s hard to tell how much of its implementation is political vs engineering, especially on the variable cam engines.)

At the same time, they’re working on all those new Fiat designs, replacing the compact cars, the midsized cars, the Liberty, the Journey… working on the minivan replacements for 2014… and presumably bringing over large vans and investigating class 6-8 trucks. That’s not to mention the Dakota replacement, Wrangler pickup, etc.

So if there’s no Wrangler diesel next year, I won’t be surprised, nor will I be upset. A decimated engineering crew joined by a large number of probably-inexperienced newcomers is doing amazing work, but they’re all still human. Give them time and be patient; between the engineering, debugging, testing, refinement, re-testing, and certification, these things take a lot of time and money. On the lighter side, we may be looking at several years of marked improvements — our reward for having to endure a decade of disappointments?

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