Regarding web browsers and User Interfaces
Filed under: Development, Frozentux.net, Linux, Windows
I had a discussion this morning with my wife regarding her new computer (Toshiba laptop). A few days back, I was contemplating the possibility to try and get rid of the Windows 7 license it came with the EULA disagreement argument and get my money back, but after much consideration and realizing that her school (Chalmers University) pretty much requires her to run Windows 7 and Office 2007 (all applications used are windows based with Unix/Linux alternatives only irregularly, and her lab professors more or less frowns on OpenOffice.org vs MS Office formatting problems), we decided to keep it. This is another story, how Chalmers went from being a very open University to a complete clusterfuck of a Microsoft bootcamp and something I’d love to write more about at some point, but not now.
The computer has arrived finally, and my wife had a little time to play around with Windows 7. I’ve personally not used Windows since Win XP and refuse to lay hands on it unless “forced” to at work. Her main gripes came with Internet Explorer 8, and I couldn’t help but laugh very loudly at her assessment of it. It incessantly keeps asking questions and giving hints and ideas like “How do you like this?”, “Did you know that IE plugin blah …?”, “We can help you do …?”, “Do you have herpes?” to the point where the only sane comparison she could make is a very horny and needy drunk boy at a club. It took her less than one battery charge to switch back over to Firefox. My guess is that they simply made the user interface a bit … too helpful, and tried to be too reactive to “possible needs in this context”.
So, on this topic, I thought it could be slightly interesting to see this months statistics and split between different operating systems and web browsers.
Operating systems
I can’t really say that this site is representative of the world in general, but I think it is interesting to see the level of windows users. I’m guessing this is a sign that many of the people visiting are reading about iptables and using linux for servers and firewalls, but aren’t using it as a desktop system (yet?).
| Windows | 59.1 % |
| Linux | 31.3 % |
| Macintosh | 6.4 % |
| Unknown | 2.7 % |
Web browser
Personally, I find this part the most astounding. That IE has gone so low is simply not something I had expected, and how big market share firefox has… incredible.
| Firefox | 60.7 % |
| MS Internet Explorer | 16.4 % |
| Safari | 11.4 % |
| Mozilla | 4.5 % |
| Opera | 4.1 % |
| Unknown | 1.2 % |
I will try to do some more work on this in the future, could be interesting to see this change over time. I know the reliability of my own source isn’t excellent and the error margin is probablythrough the roof, but it should be rather fun to dig in to.