StatCounter says that it’s stats are based on tracking software installed on 3 million websites and that they have a sample size of 5 billion page views a month.  I’ll post the latest snapshot from their site here as well (figure 2), and give you the breakdown of each browser’s current market share according to them.  All of these numbers will change at the link above, as I used the latest week to get these numbers and StatCounter updates them every 4 hours.

Firefox 3.5 [ 21.74%]
IE 7 [20.26%]
IE 8 [19.25%]
IE6 [15.76%]
Firefox 3.0 [9.11%]
Chrome 3.0 [4.76%]
Safari 4.0 [3.32%]
Opera 10 [1.23%]

figure 1

figure 2

The WebGL Logo

3d graphics rendering is coming to a browser near you.  Khronos, which is responsible for OpenGL (among other things) has published the specifications for WebGL on their website.  The idea is to use the HTML5 canvas element to bring 3d straight to the browser without requiring third party plugins or proprietary code.  The technology itself is tied closely to the specs for OpenGL ES, which is a 3d rendering library largely used in portable devices (Android, Symbian and the Iphone all use it).  While Khronos itself is a consortium made up of companies such as AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Sun Microsystems, the WebGL working group has development support from all the major browser manufacturers except (guess who?) Microsoft.

While the technology itself is not ready for the masses, you can already start playing around with it in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari’s latest development releases.  Information on how to implement WebGL on each browser can be found on the Khronos website.  Be forewarned however, that WebGL is not for the faint of heart.  While people with experience working with OpenGL should feel right at home for the most part, this is going to seem a little foreign to your garden variety webmaster.  This is from the prerequisites section on the Khronos website:

WebGL is a low-level API, so it’s not for the faint of heart. OpenGL’s shading language, GLSL, is itself an entire programming environment. As a result, even simple things in WebGL take quite a bit of code. You have to load, compile, and link shaders, set up the variables to be passed in to the shaders, and also perform matrix math to animate shapes. Basic areas you’ll need to be familiar with include:

• GLSL, the shading language used by OpenGL and WebGL
• Matrix computation to set up transformations
• Vertex buffers to hold data about vertex positions, normals, colors, and textures

That being said, there are already tutorials popping up, and Khronos has a page showing off some live examples of what’s being done with the technology (if you are running a WebGL enabled browser).  And because most folks passing through here aren’t running a browser that can see any of what we’re talking about, we’ll end things here because you’re probably already watching the videos below anyhow.

I can't belive I'm defending Microsoft

The Internet chatter about the settlement that Microsoft reached with the EU that will result in Windows users being presented with a “browser choice” screen asking them which browser they would like to use is being heralded as a great victory for pretty much everybody but Microsoft, but we can’t help but wonder if the decision is actually going to change things.  There are a number of points we’d like to make that make us a little skeptical of labeling this sort of thing as progress.

First, there’s the issue of the monopolist being bullied by the little guy, which sounds like lots of fun in true David and Goliath form at first glance, but the fact that the EU was investigating Microsoft for antitrust issues (which were originally related to Media Player and had nothing to do with browsers) means that the settlement that was reached this week effects Microsoft, and only Microsoft.  There will be no similar browser choice screen for users of any other operating system (which is too bad, because I’m pretty sure there’s still a Linux distro or two out there that comes bundled with Konqueror or some such nonsense).  At least you’re allowed to install third-party browsers on Windows, which is more than we can say for most smart-phone OS’s out there.

Why is it okay for Apple to refuse Opera or Firefox a spot in their app store for some ridiculous reason about replication of features while at the same time telling Microsoft that they’re not doing enough to support the same companies?  This gets further muddied when we look at the soon to be released swarm of devices running Chrome OS who’s entire existence is based on forcing consumers to spend their whole computing experience tied to a single browser with no options for change.  When you look at all these issues together it seems that Microsoft has done more to support open software on the platform they dominate than the soon to be industry leaders in other markets.  It’s as if they’re being punished because they met everybody halfway, whereas a totally closed platform never gets scrutinized because the third-party vendors can’t get their foot in the door in the first place.  This is not to say that as these other markets become larger parts of our day to day lives that their feet won’t be held to the same fire, but why not force them to open up from day one and avoid the courtroom down the road, especially if everybody agrees that that’s going to be the end result regardless?

The issues I’m bringing up about other markets aside, I want to see third party browsers given as fair a chance as anybody else, but is this decision really going to change anything?  Under the agreement users are going to be presented with the browser choice screen via Windows Update.  So we’ve just lost everybody that has Windows update turned off.  We’ve also lost everybody who doesn’t want to be bothered with regular operating system maintenance that just clicks through all those silly update screens without reading a word of it anyways.  And you can throw out the folks who don’t really understand what a browser is or that it’s separate from the OS in the first place and just want to get to their “online thingy.”

I realize that list got a little long-winded and a slight bit silly, but read this next question carefully and answer it honestly.  Of the people that are left (the ones who are presented with the browser choice screen and take the time to read through it and make a decision), how many of them do you think didn’t know that other browsers exist and that they can download and install them for free?  That’s what I thought.

Fennec introduces mobile browser extensions

Are browser extensions possible on mobile platforms?  Will they be usable?  Probably.  And probably not.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s going to depend on a variety of factors.  For starters, mobile browsers are harder to use than their desktop equivalents out of the box.  Often times core browser functionality can be confusing enough for the majority of users out there, let alone bogging the interface down further with third party add-ons.  Then there’s the issue of screen real estate.  Some of the most popular browser extensions available on desktops come in the form of toolbars.  I don’t expect we’ll be seeing any of those integrated into the mobile market anytime soon.  Throw memory issues and resistance from many popular browser makers onto the fire and you’ve got yourself a real mess to clean up.

But then again, there are a lot of extensions that probably would translate to the mobile platforms well.  We can look at one example that’s already more or less usable today on millions of devices (albeit, not necessarily in a pure “extension” form).  The Delicious bookmarking service has a whole bevy of applications available on all of the major mobile app stores.  On the IPhone, saving a bookmark to delicious involves clicking a bookmarklet saved in the safari browser.  When clicked, it closes the browser and opens the delicious app, with the URL already filled in for you.  On android, the app gets added to the browser’s list of ways you can “share” a link with someone.  It then minimizes the browser and opens the delicious app.

These are examples of ways you can change your browser right now, and they aren’t terribly intrusive, but they’re far from perfect.  It’s not hard to imagine how seamless an app like this could be if mobile browsers opened themselves up a little more to third party development.  You could simply install an add-on that would replace (or complement) the browser’s core bookmarking feature.  Nobody wants to close their browser and open an app to handle bookmarking.  We want to be able to do it blind, just like we do on our desktops.

At any rate, love them or hate them, browser extensions are coming to mobile devices.  Fennec, the working title for Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox, is shipping with add-on functionality out of the box.  It’s only available on a select few devices for the moment, but both a Windows Mobile and an Android version are slated for release in 2010.  Firefox may seem slow to enter the mobile browsing race, but they weren’t exactly an early contender on the desktop either.  The thing that has allowed them to stand out time and time again is the sheer volume of add-ons available for their products.  The IPhone app store is consistently stated as the real reason that Apple has managed to pick up so much steam in the past year, and the release of quality add-ons in the mobile browsing market is absolutely going to turn some heads.

You can browse available Fennec add-ons already over on the Mozilla website.  And you can even download a desktop version of the mobile browser if you’d like to test it out (Windows, OSX and Linux).  Already available for download are the popular ad-block and no-script add-ons, as well as some that are extremely well-suited for the mobile crowd such as weave-sync (seamless sync of opened tabs, bookmarks and more from your PC to your phone).

And as for the add-ons that may seem hard to recreate in a mobile environment?  They just have to be repackaged a little.  The address bar seems especially well suited for some tasks.  In what almost seems like the first hints of a mobile ubiquity port (which would be amazing, btw), there’s an add-on that let’s you tweet right from the address bar.  No need to close your browser, open a twitter app and wait for it to refresh before typing.  You. Just. Type.  We don’t know if we’re on board with an app-less phone environment, but we’re pretty sure this is part of what Jay Sullivan, vice president of mobile at Mozilla, was talking about when he told PC Pro that developers were likely to move out of app stores and onto the web (He was largely talking about building traditional javascript web-apps, but I don’t see how tweeting from the address bar doesn’t apply either).

full disclaimer... we use firefox

Welcome to BrowserBlog.net.  The site is just getting off the ground and is as of yet a little on the disorderly side, but we’ll pull ourselves together soon enough.  If you didn’t know, we’ll be covering browser related news.  This includes everything from traditional browsing software to mobile and beyond.  There will be a heavy focus on web standards, usability and the typical design-related topics, but we’d also like to focus on industry news, experimental browsing, trends and other related topics.

Oh, and while we intend to keep objectivity in mind as much as we possibly can, the giant firefox logo tied to this post is just to remind our readers that keeping said objectivity in mind is a prerequisite to its subsequent dismissal.  (but seriously, we’ll do what we can – you guys can dig this post up a year from now when we claim that we don’t favor one platform over another).