Year: 2006

Non-Tech Website Statistics

by Steven Garrity

Some semi-anonymous browser statistics from a non-technology-related e-commerce website during a one-week period in early February 2006:

Browser usage from a mid-sized e-commerce site – February 2006
84.1% Internet Explorer (97% of these using IE6)
9.6% Firefox (43% of these using v1.5)
2.5% Safari

A few thoughts:

  • Firefox really does have somewhere around 10% of the market. Most of the other statistics I’ve seen are skewed towards a more tech-aware crowd and lean more in favour of Firefox.
  • Almost everyone uses Internet Explorer is up to version 6. It has been out for a few years now, and upgrading is easy, but I’m still surprised how few people are still on IE 5/5.5. This bodes relatively well for update of IE7 (which is already starting to show up in the statistics in beta form).
  • A few people (literally, just a “few”) use IE5.x for the Mac
  • Not even one visitor during this week used Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4. Not one. I never thought I would live to see such a time.
  • Mac users are around 4%, Linux users below 0.3%. Someone visited using OS/2!

Ah, bullet points – lazy cousin of the paragraph.

 

Election Day: Hive Mind Politics

by Steven Garrity

Having voted earlier this evening for the Green Party in the Canadian federal election, I left the poling station with a strange sensation.

Given all the talk (some of it my own voice) of how little a vote counts, and how ineffectual a partisan political system can be, it is easy to be cynical (and I am) about the value of voting. For example, tonight I voted for a candidate and party who have virtually no chance of winning in my riding.

That said, there is something remarkable about participating in a collective decision with tens of millions of others.

Voting makes me feel small, insignificant, and powerful.

Update: Again doing something in common with tens of millions of others, I’ve turned on the TV to watch some election coverage. I’m back to feeling cynical.

 

CNN/Netscape Synergies

by Steven Garrity

I’ve long found CNN.com to be at least as funny as The Onion. The robots that control their homepage “top stories” have a knack for ironic juxtaposition, amusing corrections, and being just plain wacky.

All along, though, there was been an odd little blob of pixels floating in the top right-hand corner of the CNN.com homepage that has remained throughout their various design changes. The Netscape logo/wordmark lives up there, taking up what expect would be some of the most valuable “real-estate” on the web.

CNN.com composite image

Netscape lives on as a “brand” at AOL, but seems to have been diluted from having been one of the most powerful company/product names in the history of technology to being a second-rate dial-up provider and 1999-style web-portal. Today, for example, the Netscape.com homepage includes such scintillating stories as “10 Things Credit Card Companies Don’t Tell You”, “The World’s Top Topless Beaches”, and my favourite, “Sexy Pix: 10 Best Rear Views”. Of course, the “news” on Netscape.com is supplied by CNN. It’s synergastic.

What misguided cross-pollinating-eyeball-stickyfication-content deal led to this prominent positioning of the Netscape logo on CNN.com? I can only imagine that some starry-eyed marketing folk signed a 28-year agreement back in 2001 and thought it was the deal of the century.