November 2008 Archives

NetApplications has just released their monthly report Browser Market Share which shows Firefox hitting 20.72% of the global market in November.

(Data from NetApplications)

This is a pretty solid jump over October, but also fairly consistent with the kind of growth Firefox has seen in the third quarter of previous years.

This month, the browsing world hit another major milestone, Internet Explorer fell below 70% market share for the first time, landing at 69.88% for the month of November.

(Data from NetApplications)

As you can see when comparing the two graphs, IE is falling at a slightly faster rate than Firefox is growing. Pretty much all of the difference can be accounted for in the slow decline of the Windows desktop, which has this month fallen under the 90% mark for the first time. (Will the I.E. team get back into the game on Macs?)

And finally, so I'm not accused of leaving off the niche browsers, Chrome has pulled solidly ahead of Opera, making it the new king of the sub-1%ers with about 0.83% usage.

All in all, a great month for browser competition on the Web. Who could ask for anything more.

Cast off the Schick and Gillette shackles for a month.

Turkey. Yum.

I'm a big beef and pork fan. I love the flavors and find that most restaurant prepared turkeys just aren't very flavorful. I suppose that most restaurants don't have 8 hours to prepare them, and that probably contributes.

Deanna and I cook a turkey usually once a year, either for Thanksgiving or for Christmas. This year it was the day after Thanksgiving. Every year it's the best turkey we've ever had.

Deanna's got the magic brine and glaze set-up/recipe and I manage the 6-8 hour smoking process. It was the best turkey ever, again.

As usual, we're more focused on the eating than the documenting, but for those of you who doubt the power of the turkey, these photos should help put those concerns to rest.

Brian Deagon, a technology-savvy business journalist at Investor's Business Daily wrote a good article titled Fired Up Over A Hot Browser. The article covers some of the history of Mozilla and the role that Mitchell Baker played in making it such a success.

There are some great quotes from Mitchell and Brendan in this article along with a solid storyline that hits on many of the key points you'd want to know if you were new to Mozilla.

rant ahead: It's refreshing to read an article, even a short one, where a journalist clearly wanted to learn enough about something to be able to do a good job educating his readers on that topic. I know that's kind of a strange concept to a lot of online writers, but, you know, I think that's actually part of the job of a journalist/reporter. When someone gets through reading an article or blog post, she should know more about the subject at hand, not less. I wish that more of the online tech press understood that better.

We're just a few days away from the NetApplications Browser Market Share Report for November. Last month, Firefox nosed up against 20% and Internet Explorer fell to just over 71%.

My prediction, based on the hourly and daily trends at NetApplications and the growth in the Firefox active daily user number we can see at Mozilla, is that we'll see Firefox break solidly through that 20% mark, probably landing somewhere between 20.4% and 20.6% for the month of November. If that holds, and Apple keeps up its gradual but consistent growth with Safari, we may see Internet Explorer fall under 70% market share for the first time ever.

But these numbers are spread across a huge number of sites located all around the globe. If you get more geographically specific, or tune into specific types of Web sites, they can change pretty dramatically.

Looking out a bit further, and looking back over the last 4 years or so, it's very clear that the make-up of the Web doesn't change overnight. It's taken a long time to get where we are and it's going to take some more years to get to where we all want to be.

That being said, wow. It sure is exciting.

What are your predictions for the November Net Applications numbers for the big three browsers? Where do you see things a year from now, or two or three years from now?

update: and just to preempt complains about not including Opera and Chrome, the Net Applications numbers for both Chrome and Opera are sub-1% and so it they just blurred out the X-axis of the graph and the Chrome numbers are too few and headed downward. They really aren't of any significance here.

Historical market share data comes from the NetApplications Browser Market Share Trend Report

Thanks to Dave Miller, in the comments of an earlier post, for recommending the Xiph's XipQT package for QuickTime. With that, converting videos to Theora for Firefox's new <video> element is a breeze.

I tested out this new conversion with the Barack Obama weekly address which is available at YouTube and at www.change.gov.

I just took the higher resolution QuickTime movie, scaled it down to the size of the YouTube version and exported it with the option "Movie to Ogg" and it came out pretty nice.

There were a number of quality options and the "low" quality option (number 2 of five levels) got the size down to roughly what the YouTube Flash version is and at about the same quality. But YouTube quality sucks. It's surprisingly bad. So, I went with the "high" quality setting which is just about twice the size of the YouTube Flash version but sooo much easier to watch.

I just discovered that they have an even larger version of file, not linked, but available here, so maybe I'll try again starting with that. I'm gonna presume that starting with the highest quality file I can get will lead to a higher quality result. Then again, maybe that's not the case. If the compression on the original file is the same and we're just talking about the number of pixels, maybe it won't make much of a difference. I guess I will investigate and see.

update: The audio sync seems off a bit. It's not off like that when I play the video in VLC but it is in Firefox both in this page and locally. Not sure why that is.

update2: I've replaced the earlier version with a new one that has a better audio track. I'm hoping this fixes some of the problem with the audio and video syncing.

update3: OK, final update. I grabbed ffmpeg2theora, which boasts a newer theora encoder and made one more version of the file. I'm still seeing sync issues in Firefox that I'm not seeing in VLC so I'm going to chalk those up to Firefox problems. This latest version of the file is about 20% smaller and looks and sounds a good bit better than the previous one so I'm encouraged by the move to a newer encoder. Now we just need a new version of the QT plug-in and a simple GUI for the ffmpeg2theora app. It sure would be nice to have those for the Firefox 3.1 release.

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's Chief Lizard Wrangler, has just posted her annual write-up of what we've accomplished over the last year.

The blog post includes information on Mozilla's mission successes, Mozilla's finances, and what's ahead for the Mozilla project. Definitely give it a read.

Wow.

We're at about 1.25 to 1.5 million Firefox 3 downloads per day right now. That puts Firefox daily downloads and add-ons daily downloads at about the same level. Interesting.

Sometimes you run across a story that you just have to share. This is one of those times.

Picture a pig trying to balance on a mouse’s back and you’ll get some idea of the scale of the problem...

update: and in case that wasn't sad or distressing enough, maybe this'll do the job.

Most of the people reading this blog probably already know this, but just in case I want to remind you all that you can watch the Mozilla Weekly Status meetings every Monday at 1PM PST on Air Mozilla Live and if you can't be there for the live stream, (perhaps you're living on the other side of the world or something,) you can see previous meetings using the "on-demand" feature of the Air Mozilla video player. Just click the on-demand button and navigate to the Mozilla Weekly Status Updates section. There you will find the most recent few meetings.

This is a great way to keep up with the regular goings on at Mozilla and to stay connected to the parts of the project you care about. The meetings usually only last about 20 minutes and not only will you be able to keep better track of what everyone is up to, but you'll finally be able to put faces to a bunch of the names and nicks you've been interacting with over the years. This week we had a lot of people that normally work remotely in the office and they were good enough to get in front of the camera and say hi, so don't miss it!

Mars Phoenix Lander Finishes Successful Work on Red Planet

Phoenix was a great mission. Built on the shoulders of the canceled Mars Surveyor 2001 and the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, it really did rise to the challenge and shine a bright light on Martian climate, geology, and the conditions necessary for sustaining life.

"Phoenix provided an important step to spur the hope that we can show Mars was once habitable and possibly supported life," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Phoenix was supported by orbiting NASA spacecraft providing communications relay while producing their own fascinating science. With the upcoming launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, the Mars Program never sleeps."

Indeed. The Mars Program never sleeps. Just take a look at Spirit and Opportunity this week :-) Who knows, maybe they'll survive a couple more years and bridge the full gap to MSL.

A bit over a year ago, Deanna and I rescued this cute little guy. His name is "Munch" which is short for any of Munchkin, Monchichi, and Munchausen.

He's doing great, and as a celebration of the nice autumn weather, he wanted to share some out of doors time with you all on YouTube.

I've encoded the video in Ogg/Theora -- an open source audio/video codec that's natively supported in the upcoming Firefox 3.1, using the dead simple Simple Theora Encoder.

What we really need are plug-ins for Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. That would really really rock. If you know of a better GUI app for Mac or Windows with reasonable options for encoding parameters, please let me know in the comments.

(If you're using a Firefox 3.1 nightly build you should see a yellow box to the right and if you mouse over the bottom of it, you should see some player controls become visible. Click the play button and there you have it. If you're not using a capable browser, consider trying out the latest Firefox/Minefield builds.)

Update: Dave Miller mentions in the comments that there exists a plug-in for QuickTime, available for both Mac and Windows, which will let you export into Theora any video that QuickTime can open. The great thing about this option, as opposed to Simple Theora Encoder, is that you can actually use QuickTime to set encoding options. Dave also notes that iMovie will do what ever QuickTime will do so this should work in iMovie as well. Thanks, Dave!!

Show me yours :-)

I think this is a dream. Only better.

I have confidence in Barack Obama, but at this moment that doesn't even matter.

I mostly feel a sense of relief, a complete, totally exhausted sense of relief that George W. F'ing Bush will finally be headed back to his fake ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Right now, it doesn't even matter to me whether Obama will be a great president (he will) it just matters that we're no longer George W. Bush's country.

To my U.S. audience, vote.