No such thing as an obsolete browser or OS IV

This is a little update on Steve‘s suggestion. You can view past updates for OSes in 2008, browsers in 2009, OSes and browsers in 2009, and in 2011. And just as before, we still have a few hits from IE 2.0. Though in what seems to be common trend across a lot of sites out there, Safari and Firefox are far ahead of Internet Explorer. Don’t know if this will change with the proliferation of Windows phones and Safari most likely includes a sizable number of iPhones.

On the OS front, Windows is still ahead with XP having the same usage share of Mac OS X. I believe “Windows NT” includes Windows 7/8 and Server 2008.

Browsers visiting eksith.com in September

Operating Systems hitting eksith.com in September

 

A malfunctioning or malicious add-on has caused Internet Explorer to close this webpage

This disease suddenly started after I ran an update on my Windows 7 machine, but I’m not really sure if it was an existing addon compatibility issue before I ran the update. Although I am sure that it’s caused partly due to a new security feature in IE 8. (And speaking of diseases, I have the flu ;)

Here’s the real kicker : Microsoft’s recommendation is to turn off a protective feature of the browser itself. IE 8 Now comes with a flag in the advanced security settings…

Enable memory protection to help mitigate on line attacks : Yeah, that's totally not needed. That selection is greyed out anyway, because I didn't select Right Click > Run as Administrator on the IE shortcut.

Once again, encouraging people to turn off protection mechanisms (UAC comes to mind) rather than gracefully handling a misbehaving addon. Nice job, MS!

Obviously, my recommendation is that you leave this setting alone and try turning off some addons insteads. See if you can do without all of them, that isn’t from Microsoft, first and selectively turn them on one by one until you isolate the dud plugin.  I’m fairly sure the new Java VM has something to do with this so I’m trying that first.

There’s no such thing as an obsolete browser

In what seems to be a continuing trend here, a significant number of users seem to be unwilling or unable to upgrade their browsers.

Here’s what February of 2009 brought to eksith.com.

Be afraid! Be very afraid!!

Makes me question the whole purpose of designing sites with the latest browser in mind anyway. All this time, I’ve been thinking about users who have a browser with full CSS/XHTML capability and those with none. It seems there’s a whole multitude of them within a gray area between.

I’m mainly concerned with the Firefox 2.x and IE 6 groups, of which IE 6 causes the greatest concern as they present the largest group using an obsolete browser. Even the old Firefox renders pages to an acceptable degree. IE 6 presents no incentive whatsoever to design pages with semantics in mind. I have to use some kind of hack or other proprietary markup in the HTML or CSS to get it to work as it should. At least with IE 7, they’ve fixed some of the more egregious rendering issues.

And a little update on the OS stats from last year…

Downgrades?

People are abandoning Vista at a dramatic rate or there was simply a jump in XP visitors. Either way, Vista is at a minority this year. And, a bit of a plesant surprise, the number of Linux users have jumped dramatically as well. This would explain why there are a few K-Meleon and Mozilla users in the browser list.