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Reading Rough Cut On Safari


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Hi Larry, I'm reading a rough cut version of your new JavaScript book on Safari. So far It has been informative and interesting. This version only has the first 5 chapters so I'm anticipating getting the rest of the title soon on Safari. I'll will do a review on it at Amazon when I'm finished.

 

Oh, yeah, I did have a question. In chapter 3 under The Browser: Your Friend, Your Enemy, you listed some statistics for browser usage and I was wondering where you got the stats for August 2011?

 

 

• Internet Explorer, 38.9%

• Firefox, 25.5%

• Chrome, 20.2%

• Safari, 7.7%

• Opera, 2.9%

• Mobile browsers, 7.1%

 

For when I checked browser usage stats at the W3C page I get these stats for August 2011:

  • IE 22.4 %
  • FF 40.6 %
  • GC 30.3 %
  • Safari 3.8 %
  • Opera 2.3 %

Are your statistics from your site or some other site. I know these I have listed are for people accessing the W3C site.

Is there a place that shows more realistic stats for browser usage in general?

 

 

Regards....

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Thanks for the interest in the book. Much appreciated. As for your question, I forget where I got those exact stats from, but I do remember seeing roughly similar stats from a couple of places. The W3C stats aren't representative, in my opinion. They've got IE WAY low and FF WAY, WAY high. I would suggest that's because people going to W3C are Web developers who are much more likely to use FF and not IE than the general public. If you were to use Apple's access stats, I suspect the numbers of Safari would be disproportionately high.

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I'm currently reading through "The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications" (which is a great book by the way), and here are the stats provided at the beginning of the book:

 

Global browser market share, May 2011

IE6: 10%

IE7: 7%

IE8: 31%

IE9: 4%

FF3: 12%

FF4+: 10%

Chrome: 13%

Safari: 7%

Opera: 3%

 

Sadly, IE is still the undisputed "champ", but that does seem to quickly be changing. Chrome has been gaining a ton of ground recently, and support for Chrome by official bodies like the German government will only make that go up over time. Also, I wonder what's up with the giant number of Firefox 3 users?

 

Anyway, I think Larry hit the nail on the head in regards to the seemingly lopsided stats on teh W3C page.

 

By the way, can't wait for the JS book, Larry. Already have it preordered off of Amazon with super-fast delivery.

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Yeah, I stopped using Firefox as my regular browser. It was a Catch-22, because the extensions made it so good as a development tool but it became too slow to use regularly. I know a lot of developers have even turned to Chrome, but it only has Firebug Lite, and I don't think it's as good as Firebug.

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many multinationals use IE, the time and cost to them to upgrade/change is probably not worth the bother and I suspect will be the reason for IE's continued market dominance for some time. Still the decrease in its market share in just a few years is significant.

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Thanks for the interest in the book. Much appreciated. As for your question, I forget where I got those exact stats from, but I do remember seeing roughly similar stats from a couple of places. The W3C stats aren't representative, in my opinion. They've got IE WAY low and FF WAY, WAY high. I would suggest that's because people going to W3C are Web developers who are much more likely to use FF and not IE than the general public. If you were to use Apple's access stats, I suspect the numbers of Safari would be disproportionately high.

 

I suspected as much after I thought about it for awhile. I guess you have to collect stats from a lot of different places to get a better picture of the overall browser coverage.

 

I used IE for a long time when I first started with computers, then moved on to Netscape then they turned into Firefox. Started using FireFox for dev and Chrome for general surfing. I have IE, FF, CH, Safari, and Opera on by system for testing web apps but I use Chrome more than any of them.

 

At work I have to use IE because the Serena web app I work with only works in IE.

 

Great to see my Safaribooksonline copy is the full version now and no longer a rough cut!!

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