Browser Market Share; Who is Really #1?

It has been a long held belief, and data has supported it, that Internet Explorer, due in large part to its ties to the dominant desktop operating system, has been the most used browser out there.  Now, the data has shown that things are narrowing which begs the question, what browser is really #1?

Why do I ask this question?  I've been a long time user of StatCounter.com on my blog to track some statistics and focused primarily on page views, but I recently also set up Google Analytics to see what data it provides.  In light of the recent announcement about Chrome OS, I was also curious how the Chrome Browser was being adopted.

In browsing through what it has to offer I came across its browser report where not only was IE not #1, it wasn't even #2 with Safari beating it out.  I also found it interesting that Chrome is at nearly 4%.

But clearly, a handful of hits on my blog is likely not representative of the broader market.  Additionally, I likely have a significant audience from Sun which may help skew the results towards Firefox and Safari.  And the general audience that reads my blog is probably more technical and likely to be using alternative browsers.  So what else can we look at?

The May report from Market Share By Net Applications shows what one might expect with IE at 65.5% followed by Firefox at 22.5%, Safari at 8.4%, and Chrome at only 1.8%.

For another perspective, w3schools.com lists their stats and for the month of June, Firefox is at 47.3%, the sum for IE 40.7%, and Chrome beating out Safari 6.0% to 3.1%.  Again, a more technical audience leads to greater use of Firefox and Chrome.

Last, going back to where I started with my stat gathering, StatCounter.com has global stats for the past year and while the data shows similar results to Market Share above, approximately 60% IE, 30% Firefox, and everything else in the weeds, since it looks at the past year you can see a trend of IE losing about 10% points.



Will this gradual decline continue?  It's hard to say, but I can say that competition and choice is good and in the end the consumer wins.

It is also very interesting to see the platforms StatCounter.com reports.  This shows that 95+% of their traffic is coming from Windows meaning that even where the provided default is IE, approximately a third of those folks make the choice and effort to switch.

So what does all this data show us?  Clearly, IE is still #1 amongst the general population.  But technical audiences, those that both have the knowledge to make a choice and the aptitude and interest to execute on that and install something other than the default, are seemingly beginning to abandon IE in favor of the competition.

I'll continue to look at this in the future and report back!

Thoughts on Google Chrome OS - Not a Microsoft Killer ... Yet

Google dropped two bombs yesterday.  The first, that the beta tag was being removed from Google Apps was interesting but a non-event to me in many ways as everyone has been ignoring the beta tag for a long time anyway, but perhaps some enterprises were scared off by it so maybe this is news for them.  But regardless of what tag is applied, today's user is going to be more affected by the functionality, usability, and quality of the offering than if it has a beta tag on it or not.

But the more interesting and groundbreaking news was the announcement of the forthcoming Chrome OS.  There are some that see this as an all out assault on Microsoft.  When you combine their Google Apps with the Chrome Browser and now Chrome OS, you have a full stack for the end user.  But given that in their announcement they are clearly focused on the netbook market, I would stop well short of calling this an all out assault.  That's not to say that this isn't just the next logical step in a strategy that started with mobile and embedded devices with Android, moves to netbooks with Chrome OS, and someday could target the broader desktop and ultimately enterprise market with another offering.

There are also those that take a more pessimistic view of this complete stack and chances that it will be successful, both because the netbook market isn't that large and enterprises are not going to embrace it any time soon.  All valid points, but one doesn't go from having no OS to competing with everything Microsoft has in the OS arena overnight.  There are also other flaws in Dennis' pessimistic view.  He seems to think that because Google will open-source what they are doing they are washing their hands of maintaining it.  He clearly doesn't understand open-source as code being open-source certainly doesn't stop a vendor from providing full support to customers or OEMs and I'm sure Google would love to generate revenue from doing so.

So is just another variant of Linux on the desktop and should Google should have just joined or put their weight behind an existing Linux distro or just brought their version of Linux used in their infrastructure to the consumer?  The latter is just silly as the Linux they use in their data centers is clearly tuned and equipped for high performance search and serving up web applications, not a consumer's desktop or netbook form factors.  The former is a valid point as there are distros like gOS that have integrated Google gadgets and Google Apps into the desktop and users experience or Damn Small Linux that would serve as a good starting point for Google, but if Google is serious about this they aren't going to take a join an existing small community approach but need to own it and drive the direction themselves.

If one reads between the lines though, I think it is clear that this isn't going to just be another Linux distro and will be much more, and perhaps that systematic next step in the all out assault on Microsoft.  The key quote to me is:

"Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running
Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of
2010."

If this were to be just Google's variant of a Linux distro running on netbooks, they should be able to do that in a few months.  If we aren't going to see netbooks until the second half of 2010 (a full year-plus!), Google has designs on doing much more with the OS to make it truly focused on an easier to use, web-oriented, and faster experience to differentiate it from other Linux distros, Windows XP/Vista/7, and Mac OS X.  This is apparent in another quote (emphasis mine):

"The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel."

Clearly Google does not see Gnome or KDE as options (bloated) or other lighter weight alternatives like XFCE as sufficient so will be creating their own windowing system.  Look for this, and trimming the OS to just what is needed and perhaps some innovation around quicker startup, to be where the investment is made.

In the end, competition and choice is good.  I'll certainly be interested to see what Google does with Chrome OS and and how the competition reacts.

Update: Benchmarking the iPhone, and lots of other devices

I had several comments and requests stemming from my original blog on benchmarking so what better way to respond to them than another entry.  I also have an update from starting to create a full fledged app rather than the console one I wrote about earlier.

First, thanks for the comments and keep them coming.  I had one comment that the Java ME version didn't work on Sony K850i.  I created a new version created with the latest NetBeans 6.7 for the latest CLDC/MIDP versions but it too didn't work simply saying "Invalid application".  I know it worked on several BlackBerry's and a Motorola L6 so suggestions are welcome.

Another comment provided some numbers for an IBM T43 which I've added to the spreadsheet.

As promised, I started fiddling with creating a proper iPhone app using Xcode and have gotten an ugly but functional version of the app working and initial indications are that it scores better than the one compiled with gcc on the iPhone.  Where the gcc version had a score of 27.9 the Xcode version scores double that at 65.7.  This is running on the same phone/hardware so the difference has to be the compiler and Xcode must generate a lot better code.  I'm still researching to see what I can find out.

Last, as promised, I've made some source code available.  Take a look at the C version and I'll work on getting the others up as soon as I know they are stable.

I welcome more feedback and results from running the benchmark.

Benchmarking the iPhone, and lots of other devices too

Benchmarking has been around for years, and I started playing around with writing them back in college.  I recall an assembly language class were the assignment was to implement the Sieve of Eratosthenes in as few bytes as possible. I "won" the assignment by doing it in 24 (or was it 25, too many years ago!) bytes, but that got me started on benchmarking as I instrumented the code to time how long it took and then proceeded to run it on all the different machines I could to see which one was the fastest.

Clearly though, having a benchmark written in 8086 assembly language had limited usefulness, so in later years I rewrote it in C and added several other standard algorithms to the stable that were executed including calculating PI, a selection sort, and computing Ackermann's function to test recursive performance. I proceeded to run it on every machine I could from PCs running MS-DOS to workstations running Solaris to PPC machines running LynxOS and AIX. In later years, I ran the same benchmark on UltraSPARC, SGI MIPS, and DEC Alpha machines as well as today's dual-core Intel chips. Somewhere along the line I starting writing more in Java than C and I ported the benchmark to Java to see how it compared, and several years ago I began using BlackBerry's and wrote a Java ME version.

As you can imagine given the wide range of machines I've run it on in the past, having an iPhone was just begging to run it there too. While I have creating a proper iPhone app version on my list of things to do, thankfully a jailbroken iPhone makes it pretty easy to run the C and Java versions I already had. A sampling of results appears below, but the summary for the iPhone is that the native version is about 5 times faster than the Java one and ever so slightly faster than a 75 MHz Pentium 5 of yesteryear.

Machine	Language	Math	Array	Sort	Sieve	Ackermann	Total
Motorola L6	Java ME	0.11	0.19	0.23	0.13	0.19	0.17
BlackBerry Curve (OS 4.5)	Java ME	0.95	2.21	2.96	1.72	2.96	1.81
iPhone 3G	Java SE	12.4	4.79	4.64	3.28	5.01	4.95
Intel 486DX2-66 (Linux)	C	10	10	10	10	10	10
SPARC-20 (Solaris)	C	66.4	20.3	17.6	20.1	4.1	12.1
Pentium 5 75 MHz (Linux)	C	21.3	19.6	28.6	23.2	33.4	24.2
iPhone 3G	C	65.9	21	23.4	19.2	46.7	27.9
DEC Alpha 275 MHz (OSF/1)	C	111.4	93.6	63.1	41.2	76.1	68.6
Pentium 600 MHz (Linux)	Java SE	191.9	106.1	99.1	68.9	78.2	96.1
Pentium 600 MHz (Linux)	C	216.4	319.3	219.8	171.5	131.2	194.1
MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz	Java SE	655	1096	794	549	334	587
MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz	C	1089	2413	664	800	1356	1037

You may also view the full list that I have maintained over the years.  You'll notice that I did my initial calibration on a 66 MHz 486 DX-2 so that it scores 10 in each of the tests.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that my benchmark is pretty simplistic and thus shouldn't be be the end all be all testing to compare machines or platforms. The results can also be significantly affected by the quality of the C compiler or JVM being used. However, the results can provide a rough comparison and are at least fun to look at.

For example a SPARC-20 has terrible performance with deep recursion. And as noted above the JVM on the iPhone is about 5 times slower than a native app whereas on an x86 box the JVM is about half as fast as native.

While I've run the benchmark on quite a few machines, I'd love to add more to the list.  If you'd like to run it, here is the binaries in a variety of formats:

• Linux on x86 - Download the binary, set the executable flag, and execute with "./sci <iterations>". On most of today's faster machines iterations should be 10,000 to have reasonable results.


• OS X on x86 - Download the binary, set the executable flag, and execute with "./sci <iterations>". On most of today's faster machines iterations should be 10,000 to have reasonable results.


• OS X on ARM/iPhone - Download the binary, use ssh/scp to get it on your jailbroken iPhone, and execute with "./sci <iterations>". The default iterations should be fine.


• Solaris on x86 - Download the binary, set the executable flag, and execute with "./sci <iterations>". On most of today's faster machines iterations should be 10,000 to have reasonable results.


• Solaris on SPARC - Download the binary, set the executable flag, and execute with "./sci <iterations>". On most of today's faster machines iterations should be 10,000 to have reasonable results.


• AIX on RS/6000 - Download the binary, set the executable flag, and execute with "./sci <iterations>". On most of today's faster machines iterations should be 10,000 to have reasonable results.


• Java SE - Download the jar and execute it on any machine you have a JVM with "java -jar SCIJ.jar <iterations>". On most of today's faster machines iterations should be at least 5,000.


• Java ME devices - Point your phone/device browser at the link and it should prompt to install the application. Run the app and if it executes in less than a few seconds change the iterations to a larger number to make it more accurate in calculating the benchmark.

If you do run the benchmark, please post a comment on this blog entry with the chipset, clock-speed, operating system, and results from each of the tests that the program displays. As soon as someone jailbreaks an iPhone 3G S, it would be great to add that result to the list.

Enjoy!

 

If You Buy a Mac

My recent "Why Buy a Mac" blog about sitting next to someone on a plane running Windows on a Mac received a number of comments so I thought I'd respond to some.

There were several OpenSolaris related comments and I'm all for using it. I've installed the 200805 release in a VirtualBox VM on my Mac as well as native on an old Dell I have. And I recently had an opportunity to get a release candidate for the next release and it is improved but I don't know that it quite has all the apps I want/need. I'm going to continue using/tracking it though and would gladly switch to it as my primary OS when it is "ready". But I don't know that I'd go out of my way to run it on a Mac and certainly wouldn't spend Apple money to buy a new machine to do so.

Related to the above, there was a comment about using Ubuntu. I've used it (or its variants like gOS and Linux Mint) both in VMs and native and feel it is still ahead of OpenSolaris as a "regular user" desktop, but similarly wouldn't buy Mac hardware to run it.

There was also the comment about the person being required to use Windows or that he worked from Microsoft. Actually could have been considering it was a flight leaving Seattle!

And while I'm on the subject of Mac's, see Michael Cote's writeup on tips for a new Mac user. A good read.

Track and Olympics links for 2008-8-12

• Track & Field News Predictions: Men's Top 10s - Bolt predicted to complete the double. Lagat to get the 1500 but 2nd in the 5000 to Bekele.


• Track & Field News Predictions: Women's Top 10s - U.S. Women in the 100, 200, and 400, Dibaba to get the 10000 but 2nd in 5000 to Defar. Jamaica picked in the 4x100!


• Gay removes flash from 100m dash - Kudos to Kobe for knowing to ask about Gay's leg.


• Powell propelled by personal tragedy as he prepares for greatest showdown on earth - Speaking of his WR in his first race after Worlds last year where he shut it down early, "I definitely would have gone under 9.7 but I slowed down because it was a heat."


• Edwin Moses: An Olympic message - We should all listen when one of our greatest speaks: "Without a doubt, there is absolutely no other event on the planet that has so much meaning and can have such an enormous effect on so many people."


• Where have all the spectators gone? - An interesting dynamic that having lower cost tickets could result in people being more willing to buy but then not show up. Some blame is put on corporations that don't use their tickets too.


• U.S. men gymnasts get unexpected bronze - Finishing on Pommel wasn't pretty, but it held up. Women's team final tonight (lineup).


• Doping control is bleeding Asafa Powell dry - I'm glad they are testing, but this seems a little extreme: "About two days ago, I got pretty upset, because since I've been here, they have tested me four times, and took blood, a lot of blood, ... I'm saying that they are taking so much blood that we are going to be very weak for the finals of the 100 meters."


• Mac doesn't want to play Olympic Games - Microsoft apparently doesn't care about Mac PPC users. They don't care about Linux users either, but that is no surprise.

MacBook Pro, VirtualBox, and OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris was a big part of CommunityOne this year and as I mentioned in blogging about it, I was installing it and would be blogging about it soon. Well, it isn't as soon as I wanted (something about Java CAPS 6 has kept me busy) but here is an update of where I've gotten.



I'm running on a Mac, so went the route of installing OpenSolaris 200805 in VirtualBox 1.6. Getting and installing VirtualBox was straightforward, and then installing OpenSolaris also went very well. This blog entry goes into a bunch of detail on an identical type of configuration so I won't attempt to capture it all here again.



After the install, I wanted to get the desktop to use the full screen real estate I have and so went about finding out how to do that. Followed the steps and voila I can run full screen and have it appear that I have running OpenSolaris natively on the Mac.



So far I've installed OpenOffice.org via IPS which went just fine, and I'll be looking to install more things soon.



My outstanding issue is that I don't have audio working yet. By default audio was disabled in VirtualBox so I enabled it and tried both options it presents there but OpenSolaris hasn't recognized either. If anyone has any tips, please let me know.



I have also started installing OpenSolaris on a spare Dell D600 I have. I had LinuxMint on it already (Ubuntu based distro) and when I was done installing I could no longer boot to Linux! I found this blog that explained how to put the Linux Grub back and have it provide for booting to OpenSolaris which worked fine. I haven't gotten wireless working on it yet so that is the next project (any tips welcome!)

Olympic Thoughts

I am a big sports fan and look forward to the Summer Olympics every 4 years and this year is no different. Track and field is my favorite event but I'll watch most any sport and gymnastics, volleyball (indoor and beach), and tennis are high on the list. August 8th thru 24th will find me glued to the TV at odd hours of the day/night.



Why do I say odd hours? I'm sure most of you are aware but for those that have been holed up in a cave somewhere, this years summer games will be in Beijing, China. That means "prime time" events occurring in the wee hours of the morning, and I'm sure we can depend on NBC to delay the majority of the coverage so we can play the game of avoiding results all day long so we can watch it in our prime time. What fun.



When the games were awarded to Beijing, there were immediate concerns given China's less than stellar record on human rights, openness, and pollution, but all the right people said all the right things and the concerns went away ... at least for a time. As we grow closer (124 days) to the games, those concerns are coming back.



The pollution problem, while better, doesn't appear to be fixed, there continue to be human rights concerns, and there is talk that media covering the Olympics will not be allowed to have full internet access and take pictures of or report everything they see. There is talk that some may boycott the opening ceremony (which would be far better than boycotting the whole games!).



A sampling of stories over just the past few weeks includes:

• It's time for Rogge to speak out - "IOC president remains silent while world leaders express their discontent about China as the Olympics approach."


• Waiting to inhale in Beijing - "After a 45-minute jog on some of the same streets where the marathons will be run, this reporter experienced minor discomfort and heaviness in my lungs and griminess on my skin."


• IOC flouting Olympic charter by ignoring Tibet issue: HRW - "It also asked the IOC to publicly assess the extent to which current human rights violations linked to the preparation of the Games were violating the commitments made by China at the time of its bid to host the Olympic Games, and to establish a standing mechanism to address human rights concerns."


• Stop blocking the internet, Olympics committee tells China - "China routinely blocks access to certain sites on the internet and can implement at will a blacklist of words that cannot be found and will crash a search engine." and "Wikipedia remained outside the firewall — apparently because of its many references to such sensitive issues as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Dalai Lama and Tibet. Many international blogs cannot be accessed because their host servers are blocked." (by writing this blog I may be getting Sun's server on a blacklist?)


• China may ban live broadcasts during Games - "Earlier this week, however, officials with the Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee, or BOCOG, told executives at BOB that the live shots [of Tiananmen Square] were canceled, ..."


• IOC inspectorate confirms that games will not be censored - "China routinely uses 30-second to one-minute delays to control broadcasts on state-run TV. The Olympic torch lighting ceremony last month in Greece was disrupted by a protester who ran up behind a top Chinese official giving a speech. The image was seen around the world but has not been shown on state TV in China."


• Gebrselassie pulls out of Olympic marathon due to pollution fears - "The pollution in China is a threat to my health and it would be difficult for me to run 42 kilometers in my current condition"

On the plus side, it appears NBC is going to expand their digital coverage but I'm sure it will be at a price.



So there seems to be some movement and continued promises, so I am hopeful that the games will occur without incident, but I have to say I'm not optimistic. But we'll see.

Is Open-Source "Freetarded"?

Is open-source "freetarded"? I just ran across an article by Christopher Keene pointing out that open-source has to be about more than free and that vendors have to start thinking that way. And he is absolutely correct!



If software is only free, you are addressing only part of having software be valuable and having a low TCO. As the article above points out, if you can't get the software installed and working, or you can't find talent to be able to work with the software, that "free" software starts to get pretty expensive.



In order to fully deliver on the promise of open-source, software must have three qualities:

1. Free and easy access - This is kind of assumed with open-source, but must be stated so we don't forget it. For most users it isn't about the source, but rather is about free and easy access to a binary or distribution. While I have to confess that I have downloaded source and built my own binaries for a variety of apps and even newer versions of Linux kernels (and I'm probably even proud of this fact), most users don't have the aptitude or desire to do that, so having binaries is a must.


2. Easy to use - This is extremely important and sometimes forgotten with open-source projects. If you download something and can't get it installed, or after installation can't get it configured or working, you can end up wasting a significant amount of time losing the "free" aspect of the software. Worse, if that initial experience is bad you may not come back again to try it and worse yet, word of mouth and hmmm, blogging, can spread the word about a product being difficult to use very quickly.


3. Vibrant community - This last piece is also very important. Without it you don't get the collaboration and feedback that help drive innovation and help make the software better. Furthermore, if there is no community, adoption suffers and that leads to small pools of talent resulting in higher costs for organizations wanting to use the software.

You only have to look as far as the Apache Web Server and Apache Tomcat, or more recently GlassFish to see examples of where these three qualities have led to successful open-source projects that have had and are gaining widespread adoption and use and have driven down TCO for organizations that are implementing the software. And while it isn't as large or mature as those mentioned, Open ESB is also applying the qualities to create a successful open-source project.



A related question that deserves its own blog entry but I'll mention here is, if software is free, how does a vendor make any money off it? See Mark's blog from some recent interaction with our customers to see their views on paying for "free" open-source software, and stay tuned for more on the subject.