There you have it. Before and after.
November 2009 Archives
The grand beard experiment of 2009 comes to an end tonight. Here's one last look.
The Mozilla project continues to kick ass and Mitchell's state of Mozilla report describes much of that ass kicking.
Check it out.
NeoWin is reporting that Microsoft will be revealing their Internet Explorer 9 plans tomorrow at PDC.
Here are my predictions:
Microsoft will demo an early build of IE 9 that will feature an all new and super-fast JavaScript engine. They will show an updated Office Web that utilizes JS threading, <canvas>, HTML5 drag and drop events, online and offline events, some kind of local storage, lots of CSS3, including some CSS 3 text and font additions, columns, and maybe some box styling additions.
They will commit to supporting most of HTML5, including adding at least preliminary support for <audio> and <video> tags, local storage, drag and drop, and they'll commit to most of CSS3 but not all of it in time for the IE 9 release
They will also talk about or demo some other awesome capabilities that won't get nearly the press coverage as those items listed above. I expect to hear something about ICC color profiles, and possibly even some cool device DOM APIs like geolocation and orientation.
I predict that we'll all be shocked and that the IE 9 plan will signal that Microsoft is committed to to joining the modern browsers in moving the Web forward.
Microsoft dug a huge hole when it mostly abandoned IE 6 and the Web from 2001 until 2006. Their early efforts at ramping back up with IE 7 were a big disappointment to most Web developers and while their efforts with IE 8 were much better, they're still at least a full generation behind the modern browsers.
That team has some really strong people and they're not going to let another release go by where they're still seen as badly trailing. Not with Office moving to the Web. Not with Search and other web services becoming huge revenue opportunities.
Falling short with IE 9 would be the last straw for Web developers' little remaining faith in Microsoft and so they won't miss this opportunity.
That's my prediction. What do you all think?
update: Bummer, Ina's reporting that we're not going to see IE 9 at PDC.
update: Looks like I got some of this right. Let's all hope that the rest comes to pass as they move further into the development of this next version. When any browser improves, the Web improves. It looks to me like Microsoft is getting more serious about improving the Web. This is good news and the IE team should be hearing our positive feedback and encouragement.
If you're an add-on developer, it would be good to read this post. Firefox is going to make some huge improvements to Firefox's stability and your extension might be affected.
Over at Cnet's Crave, Flora Graham's written up a great mobile browser comparison article. The take-away for me? Firefox Mobile is coming on strong.
Of the six browsers they reviewed, Skyfire , Opera Mobile, Firefox Mobile, Safari, Mobile IE, and
BlackBerry browser, the still in beta Firefox Mobile came in second place.
Here's what Flora had to say about Firefox Mobile.
Fennec was insanely fast at loading complicated pages -- the fastest of the browsers we tested. But there's no Flash support yet, and we had no trouble crashing this prototype version. Nevertheless, it may be worth a few crashes to take advantage of Fennec's slick user interface, speed and support for loading multiple simultaneous pages.(emphasis mine)
Stability and Flash support are obviously things we have to improve for the final release, but to have our first mobile product coming out of the gates with superior speed and UI speaks volumes.
The mobile browsing market isn't locked up, no matter what some of the other guys might think.
Here's a set of screenshots I put together for some reporters doing 5 year articles.
The series goes from Phoenix 0.1, released September 23, 2002 to Firefox 3.6 Beta, released October 30th, 2009.
Five years ago, on November 9th, 2004, we set the world on fire with the launch of Firefox 1.0 and the beginning of the modern era for Web browsers.
On that day, I was too exhausted to write a serious blog post about the occasion, but thankfully history has spoken louder than any words then could have.
Today, with somewhere between one quarter and one third of global browser usage, 330 million Firefox users have made a statement that the browser matters. That may sound uncontroversial today, but 5 years ago most people really didn't get it.
But some of you did and you not only made the choice to move to a better browser, but you spread the word to hundreds of millions of others and became the largest grassroots software community the world has ever seen.
There's a lot to celebrate today, but the people of Mozilla -- the thousands of you who made this all happen, you all are what I'm celebrating. Thank you for making such a profound difference in how we all experience the Web. Thank you for improving the lives of hundreds of millions of individual human beings.
Just an observation: Firefox and Facebook have pretty much the same number of users.
A couple of people who see me regularly in person noted that my profile photo and other photos of me around the Web are a bit misleading because I've been sporting a full beard for the better part of this year. It probably won't survive 2009, but that's no reason not to share, so here's a quick iPhone snapshot that my friend Rey took.
It's getting a little bit (some might say that's not emphatic enough) out of control but I'm kinda digging it.
The Zero Day Initiative has reported that Mozilla leads the industry with the fastest vendor response time to security bugs. Scroll down to Vendor Patch Time Statistics.
No surprise here, but nice to see it documented.
Today the Google folks disclosed that they have 30 million active users.
Chrome shipped its first public release 14 months ago and has managed to achieve a pretty large number of users in that time.
(For comparison, it took Firefox a full 8 weeks to add its most recent 30 million new users).
I've said this before, but really does deserve repeating that Google should go back to providing browser usage statistics for Google Search. They have a very large and globally distributed user base and that data would really help us all get a better picture of the global browser breakdown.
Remember when the Google Zeitgeist rocked?!
When the two primary sources disagree as much as Net Applications and StatCounter do, (Net Applications says Firefox has 24% of usage and StatCounter says it's almost 32%) adding a third big source seems like it could have nothing but a positive impact on understanding this world a little better.
Google, if you're reading this, please return to providing browser usage share in your Zeitgeist reports like you did before you started the Chrome project.
update: Wow. "Larry and Sergey recently gave the Chrome team a Founders Award, a multimillion-dollar stock bonus" That's pretty sweet. Lest anyone forget, Google has LOTS of money.
update2: Awesome tweet from @joedrew
