I haven’t looked at a site for a bit in Internet Explorer. I just don’t like the program and since Firefox began, I have not used it except when working on a web page to see if it works well in IE.

Today I was working on my own site, Bestfoot.com — home of Bestfoot Web Design, and so I decided I better check it in Internet Explorer. I have not worked on my site in years. I have done many many website redesigns, but like the cobbler’s kids, my site had no shoes.

I redid the look a bit and thought, perfect, a new top banner that was crisp and clean — until I went to look at the site in Internet Explorer and it was pixelated and looked horrible. I had no idea I had changed settings a while ago. Fortunately I happened on to Ryan McFarland’s right away and it had the answer for me. Turns out my image was crisp and Internet Explorer was the problem.

Now people who need help with their web page may be able to see that I’m not stuck in 1998 with my former page that I had ignored for nearly ten years! The irony of this whole thing is my specialty might be described as taking your web site or pages that badly need to be updated and doing the job for you or your company. About time I did it for myself.

Great news! According to Net Applications Firefox has now crosses the 20 percent mark for worldwide browser usage.

Read more at the Mozilla blog.

It seems that not all of the users of Firefox 3 were previous users of Firefox 2 upgrading to the newer version. Prior to the release of Firefox 3, the Mozilla browser had roughly 48% of our browser marketshare, making it the clear leader. Post Firefox 3 release, our Mozilla Firefox usage is up to nearly 65%. It remains to be seen how this trend shows up on other sites but it’s looking good for Firefox to make up some significant ground overall. We’ll know more not long after the end of July.

In less than 24 hours, the latest release of Firefox has been downloaded more than 8 million (8000,000) times.

So far the reviews have all been positive, and while many themes and extensions are not yet available for 3, many have already been ported over and more are available every day. Additionally the default theme for Firefox 3 is much more eye catching than the corporate looking (read: boring) theme of Firefox 2.

Testing here at HTMLfixit.com over the release candidates and the final release show it to be an order of magnitude faster than Firefox 2 to load and to render, even on sub standard computers. It also doesn’t significantly increase it’s memory use over time as Firefox 2 did. The list of new and improved features is as long as your arm and has been detailed on dozens of sites so I won’t go into it here.

Interestingly Firefox 3 already accounts for nearly 10 percent of HTMLfixIT’s traffic, which goes to show that a good many of our techie visitors already know about it.

It’s been about 5 years since I released the first advx counter, so much has happened in my life that I had a hard time making room for the next version of the counter, but I finally got there.

There is a ton of new stuff in this release candidate, the following are just a few:

– Up to date browser and OS detection.
– Significant bug fixes and improvements throughout.
– Navigation changes include first/last/next/previous links when displaying large
volumes of stats rather than displaying all in one page.
– Search engine bot detection.
– Non JavaScript browser detection.
– Much better file locking and error reporting routines.
– Display collected URL strings encoded to stop XSS problems.
– Detailed displays are in alternating colour codes to aid readability.
– Updated country of origin library.
– Aided install. The script can check all of its required files locations and permissions and report problems.

This is a release candidate, but it is a fairly stable one as it’s been running endlessly behind htmlfixit.com for over a year.
Please try the newly upgraded demo to see what’s different. (Keep in mind that the actual statistics displayed in the demo are fake and fairly old except for a couple I added to show Firefox 3 and vista/ie8.)

Those of you with the current ADVX counter, can upgrade to the new RC just by overwriting the old files with the new. This
upgrade is of no use to people without the old ADVX counter because the upgrade doesn’t come with the configuration files
required to get it working. (you use your old ones unchanged)

The new advx counter 2.00 upgrade can be downloaded here. and the instructions are included in the zip file.

Anyone wishing to report an error or bug, please use the forum listed in the menu to the left. Assuming nobody finds any show stoppers, this release candidate will become the final 2.00 version in a week or two.

I knew I wasn’t the only one! News.com.au reports that the proportion of Australians using Mozilla Firefox to surf the web is among the highest in the world, according to internet trend research. The article goes on to say that almost one in three web users in the Oceania region – 31 per cent – were using Firefox, compared to 28 per cent in Europe and 21 per cent in the US.

Those are pretty interesting statistics, and I must admit that I was surprised at the comparatively low utilisation amongst US users. Any thoughts as to why?

Check out the full story: Australians embrace open source browser. The article has attracted some emotive comments on the News.com.au site, so it’s pretty clear that folks (I would guess a fair chunk of web developers) are still very passionate about their browser of choice!

It is very interesting to see a graphical explanation of when each browser came into existence, and what other browsers are in use at the same time period. It is also a very nice example of a presentation. Have a look for yourself at his graphical browser time-line.