Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

firefoxes are cute

click image to visit source.

More here, including video.

internet explorer 6 finally falls

This week, Internet Explorer 6 has finally been surpassed by Internet Explorer 8. This is a huge event for the Web. IE 6 is now the least popular IE version still in widespread use.

Browser tracking data from Net Applications Market Share Report.

When making decisions about how to code and test Web pages, priorities are starting to shift. The Web is getting better.

eight million downloads in two days

We just crossed the two days since release mark at about 8 million downloads. Not bad at all.

colleagues at mozilla

My good friend, and Mozilla contributor, Ken Saunders was just featured in an excellent Business Week article titled "Mozilla's Crowdsourcing Mystique.

Congratulations Ken! It's recognition well deserved.

firefox 3.5 downloads

We shipped Firefox 3.5 at about this time yesterday and already 5 million people have downloaded it. You can watch our live download stats here and see where those downloads are coming from. (In case you were wondering, no, that's not Flash. It's a nifty SVG, Canvas, and JavaScript app.)

great review

Mozilla Links has a great review of Firefox 3.5.

firefox 3.5 now available

In Firefox do this: Help -> Check for Updates...

Or, head over to mozilla.com and get your Firefox 3.5 the old fashioned way.

mostly moved in to our new home

Deanna and I spent another weekend moving and we're mostly done.

Here's a couple of photos of the new place.

This is a shot of the front deck and main room. Click the image to see a larger version.

This is a shot of the main room.Click the image to see a larger version.

The house is not only nestled in among the beautiful Coast Redwoods (also called California Sequoia, properly Sequoia Sempervirens) but it was constructed from the same back in 1928.

We're very excited about this move :-)

spirit and opportunity

They're still plugging away.

I'm guessing that without mobility, they won't be able to get Spirit angled well for winter solar energy gathering and so Spirit probably won't survive this winter. Opportunity, unless something unforseen happens, should survive the winter and reach Endeavour crator in a little more than a year from now.

The engineering team that designed and built these robots really are to be congratulated. In an environment as hostile as Mars these two rovers have defied all the odds and delivered more science than anyone would have dared imagine.

If they are coming to their ends, it will absolutely be in triumph.

Still, I get a bit misty thinking about it.

friday bunny blogging

Almost two years ago, our family grew by one -- a bunny named Munch.

He and the cat get along quite well, occasionally playing chase (Munch is the chaser and Ptolemy is the chasee.) Once we've finished moving into our new home, the family is going to expand again, possibly dramatically. Hopefully it will go as smoothly as it did when we added Munch.

good news in korea

It's more than a month old, but this report is really encouraging.

Long ago, the Korean government mandated an ActiveX encryption scheme for all Korean secure transactions. This essentially locked out all not-IE browsers.

Because this requirement came early in Korea's adoption of the Internet, Korea has never had the multiple-browser culture that, in the West, persisted even after Netscape had been crushed by Microsoft. So, despite having an amazing infrastructure with 95% of the population connected via broadband and top of the line government and private sector services online, it's been an IE-only country with no other browser, not even Firefox, able to achieve any measurable share.

When I visited Korea a few years ago, I was surprised to learn how bad the problem was. I'd always assumed it was just a more extreme version of the "IE's got 95% of the market so everyone codes to it" problem we were all familiar with. It hadn't occurred to me that you simply couldn't do any online transactions if you weren't using IE. For all the brokenness of the Web in the years before Firefox, SSL was supported across browsers and platforms and while sites might have had display problems, and a few even blocking users, the technology didn't explicitly exclude Mozilla or other browsers.

There's just no where else in the world where things are this broken. I'm hopeful that with the Korean government taking the lead like this, and with Korea's top Web service providers like Daum committing to Web standards and cross-browser support, that things will start to turn around.

If we can get over this technical hurdle, we have an amazing Mozilla community in Korea with fantastic leadership that are poised and ready to take Firefox into the Korean mainstream in short order.

tell me about your television

It's been about 6 months since we purchased the totally amazing Panasonic Viera TH-42PZ85U Plasma HDTV.

We really couldn't be any more pleased with this TV. Blu-ray movies from our PlayStation 3, TiVO HD, and both standard def and high def live television are just gorgeous.

As part of our move, we're looking for a small television for the kitchen. We expect to be watching television, and occasionally plugging the laptops in for Web browsing. The space is just perfect for a 26" television and even though I see some better deals in 32" TVs, I don't think we can squeeze in anything that large. We're also going to be viewing from pretty oblique angles at least some of the time so one of the newer IPS or S-PVA panels with the 170+° viewing angle would be good.

It doesn't look like you can get 1080p panels at this size unless you go to pretty expensive image and video professional LCD computer monitors (or maybe the LG 26LU55 that I can't find anywhere, perhaps not released yet?) so even though we're going to be up close and personal with this screen on occasion, it looks like we have to settle for 720p. It shouldn't be a problem with this small of a screen and a 4-5 foot viewing distance for most TV watching.

Our requirements, then, are 26", good off-angle viewing, D-sub PC input, 2 or more HDMI inputs, and maybe a swivel stand.

So, as with the previous purchase, I've read up at a lot of the online review sites, I've done my price watching, and I've narrowed it down to four that look pretty good.

The first TV we're looking at is the Panasonic VIERA TC-L26X1 26" LCD TV. This Panny has the right inputs but no swivel stand. One negative is that the side inputs are analog only and don't include one of the TV's two HDMI inputs. It does have an iPod dock and on-screen iPod controls, though I have no idea if we'd use that. I haven't seen this display in person, and while Panasonic doesn't list the wide viewing angle at their website, (and identifies the panel as VA,) several sites selling the TV do report a 178° viewing angle and even claim the IPS or IPS Alpha panel. I'm assuming that the retail sites are wrong and Panasonic's site is right. I'll have to confirm that in person. It sure would be nice if it did look good from oblique angles. I'm guessing it doesn't.

The second TV we're considering is the Samsung LN26B460 26" LCD TV. It has the HDMI and VGA inputs but no swivel stand. This TV gets solid reviews online -- especially high praise for it's color and excellent contrast in direct viewing, but it also appears to use the less good for off-angle viewing PVA panel rather than Samsung's S-PVA panel which is available in the larger screens. Once again, the 26" seems to get the short shaft. The side inputs and the "touch of color" are both nice and would work quite well in our kitchen.

Next up is the Sony BRAVIA KDL-26L5000 26" LCD TV. It's got the necessary inputs including a convenient side HDMI input but an inconvenient no-swivel stand. Sony doesn't disclose panel type, but given the advertised 176° viewing angle, I think this one is probably S-PVA. The aesthetics of this TV, though, are pretty bad. How anyone can call it stylish is beyond me. I'll have to take a look at this in person to see if the off-angle viewing really is that solid and to decide if I can live with a chunky ThinkPad-like design. A bonus feature with the Sony is PC picture in picture mode so you can surf the Web an watch TV at the same time. Might be cool.

The last TV on our list is the LG 26LH20 26" LCD TV. Like the others, it's got the inputs we need, but not the convenience of HDMI side input. LG claims 178° viewing angle on this one, and a pretty amazing contrast ratio so I think it's one of their newest S-IPS panels. It's also got something the others don't, a swivel stand. Solid off-angle viewing and a not too horrible looking bezel and stand, might just be enough for us.

So, the Sony and the LG will probably lead and unless we hear something really great about the Sammy or the Panny from one of you all, those probably won't make the cut.

Finally, maybe we'll just wait it out until someone starts shipping the LG 26LU55 which has a swivel stand, side inputs, great contrast, 1920x1080 resolution, and a fairly attractive design.

multi-process firefox demonstrated

Chris Jones has a demo video up showing some of the early progress that he, Ben Smedberg, Ben Turner, Boris Zbarsky, and Joe Drew are making on multi-process Firefox.

browser memory usage

Firefox 3.5 dominates in memory efficiency. Average usage in this benchmark puts Firefox at more than 3x better than Chrome and about 2x more efficient than both Safari and Opera.

It's good to see that all that work we put in to improving memory usage during the 3.0 development cycle continues to pay dividends.

new firefox logos

If you blog or write articles about Firefox and your blog or publication usually includes a Firefox logo with those stories, please take a moment to head over to the Mozilla Firefox Logos page and get updated artwork.

The Firefox logos and wordmark are available in in various sizes, with and without the shadow. Please help spread the word that with the release of Firefox 3.5, the previous two logos are deprecated and these new logos are available.

where's the video, opera?!

One of the really exciting features coming up in Firefox 3.5 is Open Video. Open Video is a couple of things. First, it's the HTML 5 <video> tag which makes video a first-class citizen of the web -- an HTML element that works like other HTML elements and interacts with the DOM in Web-normal ways. The second part of Open Video is the open source and unencumbered video (and audio) codecs and containers.

Both of those are really important for the Open Web and while there's really strong agreement among the modern browser vendors, Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera, about the HTML <video> element and how it works, there's not yet agreement on the second part, the codecs and containers.

(To make this easier to understand, think of the HTML <IMG> element. It's what you use to put an image on a page. It's stylable and DOM-manipulatable, etc. Then there's the different image types you can use, like JPEG, GIF, PNG. Right now, we all agree that we want an <IMG> element and we agree on how it ought to behave as part of HTML, we don't, however, agree on which image formats should be used.)

Obviously Mozilla is going with the open source and patent unencumbered codecs and container format. That's Theora+Vorbis in an Ogg container. Apple favors using QuickTime and its various codecs. Google is embracing both open and not-open, with support for Theora and Vorbis in Ogg as well as H.264+AAC in an mp4 container. Opera, I'd understood from an Opera Labs build that Opera was going to support Theora+Vorbis in Ogg.

So, that's what I thought was the state of things.

Well, I just downloaded the latest Opera 10 test build, ID 6510, and there's no video support.

What gives, Opera? I've been bragging you up to the press and across all of my recent world travels saying that all of the "modern browsers" (Opera, Mozilla, Safari, and Chrome) were going to support HTML 5 video in their current or next release.

Now it looks like Opera's getting really close to a release and no sign of video. What gives? Don't make me a liar ;-)

Seriously, though. Is this gonna happen for Opera 10 or not? If not, why not? Does Opera not think that a unified front on this issue would be good for the Open Web? Has Opera changed its mind about video on the Web? Is it too "desktop" for a mobile-focused company? What's the deal, Opera?

outsourced opera bashing

You knew it was coming ;-)

(I kid.)

I think that Chris is pretty much right here and where he's not is mostly unimportant.

I'll just add that my only wish for this project was that it was featured as a mobile-first effort where I think it would make a lot more sense to a lot more people. It's what they're best at, so I'm surprised that's not where the focus was.

theora video vs. h264

Some of you may have seen some of this on Slashdot or elsewhere online, but I'll bet that many haven't and I think it's pretty important as we get ready to unleash <video> and our unencumbered audio and video codecs and the Ogg container format onto the Web.

Let me preface the links by noting that yes, there's still a long way to go before we can say that Open Video will succeed, but the pieces are coming together and at least some of the chicken-and-egg problems are starting to be solved.

I've been working with Mozilla's Open Video technologies (including the Ogg container format, Theora video encoding, Vorbis audio, and the HTML 5 <video> and <audio> tags and their respective DOM APIs) for about 10 months and I've watched not only Firefox's implementations improve, but also the tools and the codecs themselves making great progress.

Firefox now has a pretty nice set of audio and video controls that are certainly ready for an initial launch. The DOM APIs, while not complete, are good enough that we built our browser controls using them and people are able to do some pretty cool demos and even final implementations with them. The Xiph QT Component, a tool that brings Ogg/Theora+Vorbis to QuickTime-capable apps has just had another release that brings it up to speed with the Theora 1.0 release and fixes some key bugs. (And another release is expected soon.) Theora 1.1 alpha 2 has made some really big gains for video encoding quality.

And, we're about to ship these capabilities to 300 million Internet users.

So, what about quality. First, it's important to note that when we talk about video on the Web, quality has to be paired with size. So, what kind of quality can you get from Theora in a comparable file size to H.264 -- the latest and greatest of the not-Open video codecs.

In recent days, Greg Maxwell and Maik Merten have both put up some real-world comparisons that go beyond the geeky sort of synthetic and objective benchmarks that made the rounds last month.

Greg's comparison is here and I think it makes a pretty good case that Theora+Vorbis is solidly ahead of YouTube's H.263(Sorensen Spark)+MP3 and quite competitive with YouTube's high quality H.264+AAC at resolutions of 400x226 and 480x270 respectively.

I'm a stickler for audio and video quality and even have some formal background in both and I can certainly see some differences.

I think that Theora+Vorbis absolutely trounces H.263+MP3 and I don't think there's even a question of which kind of artifacts you prefer. Theora+Vorbis is just plain better than the majority of what YouTube and many other Flash video sites have been serving to users for years.

When it comes to the H.264+AAC comparison, I think things are a lot closer and I personally prefer the H.264 video. (I couldn't pick a winner in audio but perhaps if I had a better pair of headphones...) The H.264 video isn't miles ahead though and I'd wager that most people, and this is supported by a few folks I've asked to look at it, either won't see a difference or if they do see a slight difference aren't bothered by it.

Not satisfied with those two rather low resolution video comparisons, Maik just posted a comparison at 1280x720 and the results are also quite positive for Theora+Vorbis.

Watching these two videos it really does seem to me like I'm asked to pick which kind of artifacts are least bad. Both videos have issues that bother me and the Theora version doesn't have quite the color saturation and contrast balance of the H.264 version but they're really not that far apart. Overall, I think I again prefer the H.264 version but only barely and the truth is I pay a lot more attention to the subtle differences than most Web users and even many content producers.

Oh, and one final closing thought. The Theora encoder is getting better every day and by the time we've rolled out Open Video to 300-400 million Web users (say, end of the year-ish when most of the Firefox user base will have completed the upgrade to 3.5) I think we're going to have a Theora encoder that will match H.264 for Web content in the eyes of 99.9% of the Web population.

extend firefox some more

For the last several years, Mozilla has sponsored a contest for add-on developers called Extend Firefox. This year's contest promises to be really exciting and includes some great prizes.

If you're an add-on developer, or you're interested in becoming one, this is a great opportunity to get involved. Fame, fortune, and 300 million Firefox users await you!

browsing doesn't change as fast as i think you think it does

Lots of things change really fast on the Web. The phrase "Internet time" has often been used to describe the way things actually do move faster on the Internet.

I remember how quickly Google displaced MetaCrawler as my go-to search service. I remember MySpace just blowing Friendster out of the water. TechCrunch obsoleted c|net almost overnight.

On the Internet, we'd like to believe, if a better product comes out, people move to it quickly.

But some things we associate with the Internet don't change fast. One of those things is browsers. Why is that? What's making it so difficult for superior products to leap frog each other the way so many other Internet products do.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser accounted for ~95% of the global browser usage in 2004 when Firefox first burst onto the scene. In the five years that Firefox has been taking share from IE, it's only managed to siphon off about 22 points of share from IE. For the first two of those years, without any effort at all from Microsoft. That's 4-5 points of share per year.

That's not the rate of change that I think people think of when they talk about Internet time.

Another example is Apple's Safari browser on Macintosh. Apple's bundling of Safari caused it to very quickly become the dominant Mac browser. In the four and a half years since we shipped Firefox 1.0 for Mac, we've managed to siphon off about 27 points of share from Safari, but Safari still sits with a comfortable 72% of Mac browser usage.

On both Windows and Mac, the OS vendor bundles a browser and taking browser usage share from those is very difficult. No one, other than Mozilla, has been able to put a substantial dent in the share of those two bundled browsers.

(What's also really interesting to me is that Firefox has done better on Mac where it has had a much more capable competitor in Safari.)

One of the reasons that no one is able to seriously dent Microsoft and Apple's browser share is that those two OS vendors ship their OS and their bundled browser on about 300 million new PCs every year.

By my estimates, about 100 million of those are new computer users (and new browser users) and the other 200 million of those are upgrades.

For the 100 million or so people getting PCs and going on line for the first time each year, the OS vendors have first crack. They are the default and the initial experience. If it's "good enough" then inertia wins and the OS vendor gets that browser growth essentially for free, piggybacking on the overall growth of PCs.

That's how I explain, because I can't think of any better explanation, Microsoft adding ~300 million IE users to its roster between the release of IE 6 in August of 2001 when development on IE was ended and the release of IE 7 in October of 2006.

(How many other products that we think of as Internet products can go 5 years without significant improvement and still add 300 million new users.)

Sure, there wasn't a lot of competition from 2002 to 2004, but even if you just look at the years 2004 through 2007, when there was substantial competition and nothing at all new from Microsoft, they still gained more than 100 million new IE users.

And I think it's actually worse than that. If you look at the 200 million new PCs sold each year that are upgrades, they all come with the the OS vendor's Web browser as the default browser regardless of what browser the user had on her previous machine.

That gives the OS vendor the opportunity to re-convert any Firefox (or other not-the-vendor browsers) users at zero cost.

So, even if Mozilla or Google or Opera managed to get a PC user to switch there's a very good chance that in the not too distant future Microsoft or Apple will at least temporarily regain that user's default browser status and another shot at being just "good enough" for inertia to work for them again -- all this without having to do anything to actually make their browser better.

(I'm not saying they don't improve their browsers, though there was that long IE dry spell there...)

This is a huge advantage for OS bundled browsers and something that is very different from most of the rest of the Internet. It's also something that I don't think many people think about when they think about browsers and competition between browsers.

I'm asserting that OS vendors can and do highly leverage the OEM channel for their browsers, both for new users coming online and for seasoned users upgrading, is the single biggest reason that Web browsers aren't evolving and replacing each other on "Internet time".

What do you think?

amazon, have you no pride?

Today, while adding some albums to my music collection I ran across an album that wasn't available to US customers of the iTunes store (no idea why) so I headed over to Amazon.com to check out their service and see if they had the album.

I was in luck. Amazon had the album and they even had a decent little helper app that gives download progress and automatically adds new music to the users's iTunes library. Nice stuff.

But.

How did they let that ship with those horrible button images? It's really not that hard to anti-alias your artwork against the toolbar background color before plugging it into an app. Even better, use an alpha PNG image.

I know it's not a major issue, and it didn't impede my getting the music, but I was having such a nice experience with purchasing music at Amazon for the first time and now I think "these guys are sloppy or just don't care." That's not the impression you want to leave with a new customer.

If there's someone at Amazon reading who knows where to send this complaint, please do. Hell, I'll even clean up the images for you. It's not rocket science.

firefox browsing tip

In the last couple of weeks I've had at least three people surprised to learn that Firefox's page zoom feature will happily zoom video content (yes, even Flash video). If you're n a page with a video and you'd like the video to be larger but not so large as full-screen, then just hit control + on your keyboard to zoom in on things. To return to the default zoom level, hit control 0. (If you're on a Mac, use command rather than control.)

Got any tips that you've been surprised to learn your friends or colleagues hadn't already learned? Share them here.

how's that 11 million downloads workin' for you, apple?

As I mentioned yesterday, Apple's PR team announced that Safari 4 had been downloaded 11 million times!!! just three days after the release. Even more exciting, they suggested, 6 million !!! of those downloads came from Windows users.

I'm not the first to suggest that most of those downloads probably were not actually users seeking out Safari 4 but rather were users receiving and accepting the automatic update from Mac or from the Apple Update Service on Windows. (This service is installed on every Window machine where users have installed either iTunes or QuickTime.)

Still, 11 million total downloads in three days and 6 million downloads on Windows sounds really quite impressive. But what does it actually mean? That's hard to say unless you know whether or not the downloads are 1) unique, 2) new downloaders, 3) updates from beta, or 4) updates from previous major releases.

Since Apple isn't disclosing any of that, I thought I'd do some investigation and see what can be learned from looking at the last few days of browser usage stats.

This graph charts the daily usage changes for the Windows versions of Safari. You can see the fluctuation from weekdays to weekends in both the individual version trends and in the combined trend.

note: This does not represent increased usage of Safari on weekends. The number of users and amount of usage of all browsers falls on weekends. IE 6 falls dramatically more on weekends than any other browser and so the relative share of all the not-IE 6 browsers goes up on weekends.

I've added a trendline for the combined version plot so you can see the overall direction that WIndows Safari is headed. What you can see from the chart is that Windows Safari usage is mostly flat at just under half of one percent of total Web usage. (More precisely, 0.45%)

Windows Safari 4.0 beta usage had already slightly surpassed Windows Safari 3.2 usage but with the release of Windows Safari 4.0 final, you can see a hefty drop in Windows Safari 3.2 and an equal rise in Windows Safari 4.0 usage.

Still, the top line is damn flat given Apple's claims which seem intended to suggest that millions of new Windows users are flocking to Windows Safari with the release of version 4.0.

(data from Net Applications)

11 million downloads in 3 days

I just read that Apple is reporting 11 million Safari 4 downloads in just three days. That's pretty amazing.

I'd like to follow up that report with one of my own.

Firefox 3.0.11 was downloaded about 150 million times in the last 24 hours.

add-on collections and a new amo

There's some great stuff happening in the Firefox add-ons world. You can read about it at the add-ons blog.

Congratulations to everyone that put so much into making this latest release happen. It's very exciting for millions of Firefox users and sets a new bar for the other browser vendors desperately trying to get something going with add-ons.

so close to 3.5

If you want to help us out and you want a taste of what's coming in Firefox 3.5, head over to Dev News and read about and download Firefox 3.5 Preview.

This is the final build before we enter the Release Candidate stage so it's hopefully the last chance for you to tell us if you see something broken that needs fixing.

milestone weekend

This weekend, for the first time, IE 8 usage surpassed IE 6 usage in the Net Applications usage share daily trend reports.

Now, IE 6 always drops off dramatically during the weekends while most other browsers are fairly stable from weekdays to weekends, so this isn't the "real" milestone but we're probably only about a week away from the average weekly share of IE 8 beating the average weekly share of IE 6.

IE 6's share has been falling at a pretty consistent rate for more than a year now and while I don't think IE 8 has had any appreciable impact on that rate of falling, it's still nice to know that within a very short time, it will be more critical to general Web development to test in IE 8 than in IE 6 and that's good news.

This data is already a couple of weeks old, but you can definitely see the historical trends. IE 6's slide continues. IE 8 is taking share from IE 7 pretty much the same way IE 7 cannibalized IE 6 two and a half years ago.

Good times!

hacks.mozilla.org

Upgrade the Web in 35 Days

dish network vs. directv

We're moving :-)

but there's no Comcast at the new home so we're going to have to move to satellite (and away from our beloved TiVo HDs.) Our big concerns with the switch over are a strong HD channel line-up, and a decent HD DVR solution.

Do any of you all have experience with either DISH Network or DIRECTV? Especially useful if you've come from a good cable and TiVo system and you want to tell us how much it's going to suck :-)

highly entertaining blog

I'm really pleased at the quality of interns that arrive at Mozilla each summer. I'd almost forgotten, until I discovered this blog how lucky we are to have such a compelling program with so many talented and dedicated young folks.

Shipping a really cool feature to 300 million Firefox users, for example, sure beats this :-)

historical view of browser usage

Since I happen to have the data handy, I thought I'd update the historical chart. This is chart represents the monthly trends as recorded by Net Applications over the last 56 months.

click the image for a larger view

What's pretty clear from the chart is that the long-term trends are very linear.

Safari's growth, which is really just a proxy for Mac growth (Safari is not gaining any appreciable share on Windows) works out to about 7 points over these 56 months. Firefox's growth clocks in at about 20 points over the 56 months. And IE's loss has been a little more than 26 points in that timeframe.

What's really kind of sad is that while IE has lost 26 points of share since October of 2004, IE has actually grown its user base by about 100 million users.

click the image for a larger view

So, for all the talk of browser competition, a clearly inferior browser has managed to add a huge number of new users over the last few years. There's the big advantage of being the default browser for virtually every new PC that ships.

one year of internet explorer usage share

The last year has been very exciting for browser vendors, Web developers, and users going online. With the release of Google Chrome, Firefox 3, and Internet Explorer 8, the Web is getting better for everyone.

The most dramatic movement in the browser market, however, has belonged to Internet Explorer.

Data from Market Share by Net Applications

Internet Explorer 6 continues its long downward trend, dropping about 10 points in the last year and IE 8 has been cannibalizing IE 7 users at a strong pace for the last 3 months.

I expect that the next month will see IE 6 finally fall under 15% (and hopefully trending to fall under 10% by the end of this year.) That's good news for everyone.

We should also see IE 8 meeting IE 7 and crossing at about 25% each in the next couple of months.

What does this mean for you as a Web developer? As a user? As a browser maker?

four travel questions

I don't know how these internet meme things get started, but maybe this is how.

Deanna and I were just talking about all the great places we've been able to visit and all the sights we'll never forget.

This evening, just as we're about to embark on our second trip to Japan, I asked her which were her favorites. To make it somewhat easier, I asked her about four categories: buildings/architecture, natural wonders, works of art, and animals.

It turns out this didn't make it easier because either one of us could list a half dozen for each category.

The key rule was that we saw the particular item "up close and personal" (and for our purposes, that we saw the item together.) and the instruction that helped us decide was "if you could have ever only seen one item from the category, which would it be?"

Here are her answers, followed by mine.

Deanna:
Architecture/Building: Notre Dame de Paris (Great Wall of China and Himeji Castle were next.)
Natural Wonder: Iguaçu Falls
Work of Art: Nike of Samothrace
Animal: Kangaroo

Asa:
Architecture/Building: St. Basil's Cathedral (Notre Dame a close second)
Natural Wonder: Denali/Mount McKinley
Work of Art: Nike of Samothrace
Animal: Green Sea Turtle (second place would be the Tucans of Brazil )

These were all shared experiences and either one of us might have listed the other's choices without too much prodding.

How would you answer?

we signed docs today

We signed about a million papers today and when things are all processed over the next few days, we'll finally be home owners.

It's nine years to the day since we moved from Texas to the San Francisco Peninsula. Kind of cool. Now we're off to Japan for a while. More on that later.

a new generation of extensions

The good folks over at Mozilla labs have just launched a project called Jetpack.

Jetpack is a newly formed initiative and experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

Firefox extensions have, since their inception, been somewhere between Web development and desktop app development in their complexity and skill requirements. This project is going to really push the barriers down for Web developers and I think open up Firefox extension development to tens of thousands of additional contributors.

If you think the 7,000+ Firefox add-ons available now is pretty awesome, just wait 'till Jetpack takes off!

But don't just sit around waiting. Get involved today!

Oh, and digg it.

firefox a webware 100 winner again

We won! Again! :-)

2008 was the year of Firefox 3, which sports an updated look and an updated rendering engine that's several times faster than the one that came before it. Over 8 million copies of the software were downloaded in a 24-hour period in late June as part of Firefox's download day celebration. In 2009 the company continues to push out further revisions that fix bugs and add new features.

hubble's heroes

It just seems worth saying, and I hope it doesn't come across as too preachy, but the astronauts servicing Hubble are literally risking their lives, from the moment they climb on top of the world's most powerful rocket, through the spacewalks, and back to Earth, and all of humanity owes them thanks for the risks they're taking to advance our understanding of the universe.

It's pretty amazing that there are people who are not only willing, but excited and proud, to put their lives on the line for science and discovery. This isn't like working on a terrestrial telescope. This is life and death for people with families and friends and communities and a thousand meaningful connections. They're putting that all on the line so that we can advance as a civilization and I'm deeply thankful.

Thank you. You're appreciated.

party down

Deanna and I are big fans of Party Down. If you haven't been watching it and you get the chance, it's not just solid entertainment, it's top of the line comedy written and starring some really bright talent. Do check it out.

hubble's second service a success

Not without problems, but the second service to Hubble was a success. With new gyros in place, Hubble is in great shape to give us years more service.

hubble's first service a success

Yay!!

The first spacewalk servicing was a great success. Mission Specialists John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel installed the new Wide Field 3 camera, and a critical data handling computer.

This was the most important spacewalk. With these changes, Hubble is nearing good shape to provide years more science.

Tomorrow, they're going to replace the 6 gyroscopes and three batteries. The following day, they'll be installing the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and starting attempts to repair the totally awesome ACS. After that, they'll try to repair the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, add insulation, and replace the final battery.

So far so good. Keep your fingers crossed. They're gonna need a lot of luck getting ACS up and running again.

a common browser usage misunderstanding

A few sites picked up on the graph I posted on longterm browser usage trends. Among them was Mashable which had the amusing title "RIP Internet Explorer: 1995-2021".

I'm drawing attention to this post because it repeats a very common and very wrong assertion. Mashable writes, "Whether it’s greater security, more reliability, extensions, or something else, it’s clear that more and more people are choosing Firefox, Safari, and Chrome over its slowly sinking competitor."

The truth is that more and more people are not choosing Safari. As a matter of fact, fewer and fewer people are choosing Safari.

Safari, just like IE, gets virtually all of its usage by shipping as the bundled and default browser with its operating system. (Safari's usage share on Windows, where does represent an actual "choice" is even sadder than Opera's -- completely irrelevant.)

The actual case is that we have a bundled browser on Mac that's losing share to Firefox over time. What does this look like? Well, according to Net Applications, here's what it looks like.

data from Net Applications browser usage reports

As you can see pretty clearly by the trend lines, Safari is losing share on Mac and Firefox is gaining share on Mac.

That's not "more and more people choosing Safari." Exactly the opposite, more and more people are opting out of Safari and choosing Firefox instead.

Now, Safari usage is growing. That's plain from my previous graph. The explanation, though, is not more people choosing Safari; it's more people choosing Mac. That's a very different thing. Having chosen Mac, Safari users, about 27% of them, have opted out of the bundled and default browser and instead chosen Firefox.

That's an even higher conversion to Firefox rate than we're seeing on Windows.

I'm not sure how, without just ignoring all evidence to the contrary, anyone can claim that more and more people are choosing Safari when Safari -- as a real user choice -- is fairing not even as well as Internet Explorer.

buying a home isn't easy these days

As some of you who read this blog regularly are probably aware, Deanna and I are in the process of (trying) to buy a beautiful log cabin in the coastal redwoods of the San Francisco Peninsula.

We were so very close at the end of last month but things have gotten a bit more complicated over the last couple of weeks.

It turns out that we have impeccable credit and we'd found a lender that seemed happy to give us whatever loan we needed. Unfortunately, when the loan went into its final review, the lender appraised the home at less than what we, the seller, and an independent appraiser had agreed it was worth.

Mortgage lenders are obviously a bit timid lately. After a year of sub-prime borrowers defaulting at unprecedented levels, and with the option ARM recasts about to hit hard later this year, lenders have pulled back on all but the safest of loans. That means that if we wanted to buy a million dollar condo in Mountain View, we could probably do it tomorrow. But, trying to buy a log cabin in the woods 45 minutes away from Mountain View is a whole other story.

The place we found and fell in love with is quite special. It's the kind of place that has a somewhat limited market appeal and wouldn't be easy for a lender to get rid of if its occupants were to default. Deanna and I are very qualified borrowers but lenders just don't want to take any chances with properties that might be difficult to sell if they went into default. Because of that, lenders are undervaluing "difficult" properties to keep their risk minimized.

The good news is that we've become quite good friends with the sellers over the last couple of months -- a wonderful couple that has put their heart and soul into this home for the last 15 years, and after meeting with them today it looks like we've got a way to make this all work out.

While it isn't a done deal until the deal is really done, we're optimistic that we'll be the proud owners and occupants of the most beautiful little redwood log cabin on the Peninsula by the end of this month.

deepening statcounter concern

Yesterday I blogged that I was concerned about some unexplained spikes in the StatCounter brower share reporting. A few commenter suggested I'd just gotten some intra-day unrepresentative measure and that it would return to normal within a few hours.

Well, it's not getting any better. IE 6, according to StatCounter, has grown well over seven points in just two days. This just doesn't make any sense.

What explains IE 6 making the biggest jump of any browser in the last year or two? Nothing, that's what.

There's something really wrong here and I sure hope that StatCounter sorts it out quickly. It's just not possible that IE 6 is growing -- and growing several times faster than any other browser version out there.

atlantis is fine

I've read all of the reports, and the reports of the reports, and as far as I can tell Atlantis is just fine.

The small, superficial pits in the ceramic thermal tiles where the right wing joins the body of the craft are nothing to worry about. The pits are probably the result of some insulating foam that broke off from the fuel tank during the launch and just barely grazed the right wing.

The tiles on this part of the craft are some of the thickest and most secure. Atlantis is in great shape and the Hubble repair mission should go forward without any craft safety issues.

longterm browser trends

Today I put together a chart of browser usage share for the major players, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. It charts the usage breakdown from autumn of 2004 when Firefox 1.0 was released through last month.

data from Net Applications Browser Market Share Report

I've annotated the chart with the major browser version releases (please let me know if you see any errors there) and what's interesting here is that browser releases aren't having any major impact on the macro trends.

Now, this isn't to say that browser releases don't matter. I could imagine a chart that looks radically different were Microsoft or Firefox to not have had the releases they did in this period.

Still, it's interesting that the trends are so very linear and that major releases from Microsoft and Mozilla don't match even the impact of the nominal seasonal changes.

What do you see in this data?