Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Thursday, September 24. 2009

Browser & OS stats


I guess I should have expected it, but some activist wannabe cheated the survey and skewed the results.  All he or she had to do was delete a cookie and vote again, and over the course of a few hours both the Mac and Firefox stats skyrocketed way past the norm.  When the Mac OS, which officially holds 15% of the computer market, starts rivaling Windows in a survey, you know something's up.


Instead, here are the official stats from our Google Analytics page:




You Safari users should be using the Mac version of Firefox, available here.  Safari has a few bugs and the colors you're seeing aren't necessarily what everyone else is seeing.  And Firefox is better in a number of other ways.




To you 'smart-phone' users, don't hold your breath waiting for a mobile-friendly version of Maggie's to appear.  The guy who developed the software has long dropped support of it and there's no reason to assume anyone else will pick up the reins.  Such is life in the sleepy back hollow wherein Maggie's resides.

Posted by Dr. Mercury in Dr. Mercury's Computer Corner at 14:50 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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Hey Doc, I use them both, too - and Safari is better.
#1 Fred on 2009-09-25 00:10 (Reply)
Doc,

I, for one, find it both regrettable and insensitive that a farmhand would undermine the integrity of your survey. Have you determined what would be the appropriate penance to be administered?

The Canuck
#2 Garry on 2009-09-25 03:44 (Reply)
Fred - And why?

Canuckles - I suppose I could track down the person by IP address if I hunted through the site stats long enough, but it's not worth the effort. This was using the 'medium' security level with the polling site, so next time we'll use the 'high' setting and that should keep the cheaters at bay.
#3 Dr. Mercury on 2009-09-25 06:52 (Reply)
I am not a computer geek, so my observations probably don't count for much. I am surprised so many are using Firefox. I still have a dial up connection, though broadband is coming 'soon', have Vista and finally got Firefox about 2 months ago. The main thing I like about it is it does not crash everyday like Internet Explorer. OTOH Firefox seems to have problems opening some sites, particularly the NWS radar site. Internet Explorer has no problem opening that one.
#4 feeblemind on 2009-09-25 11:06 (Reply)
Feebles -

The bottom line is that -- like usual -- there's no one perfect program. I use Netscape Composer for web editing, but I use FrontPage for forms, Dreamweaver for site synchronization and GoLive for broken links and such. None of them do it all. With browsers, someone mentioned in the original survey thread that he uses four browsers for various purposes. I use IE for normal use, but I'll flip to Firefox for certain long pages where I want to search for a particular word (because IE's 'find' feature doesn't work on a number of sites) and I use Firefox for online editing because it does a whole bunch of things better than IE.

BUT...if I want to put a site into an editor, I'll use Netscape Navigator because that, in turn, allows me to edit the site in Composer. I can't save the remote site, of course, but I can use Composer to save the page (and accompanying graphics) to my computer and play with it there. So put me down in the "3 browsers" category.

One thing you note that's very true is how little Firefox crashes. I'm not sure if it's ever crashed or locked up on me. Maybe once or twice, but not for ages, and certainly not with the frequency that IE does.

Thanks for your input,
Doc
#5 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2009-09-25 15:23 (Reply)
I am also surprised at the high % of Firefox users. I recall Dr. M. saying a while back that at some site he worked with he had detected 8% Firefox users, though when I have Googled market share etc, I get considerably more than 8%. Such as w3schools: I had long assumed their browsers stats were biased towards computer geeks.

I had previously had a problem with copying and pasting data sheets from Firefox into Excel, but I figured out how to solve that.
#6 Gringo on 2009-09-25 15:31 (Reply)

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