The Inquirer has a story here, detailing that the Epox website has found that a massive 16 percent of it’s visitors are now using Mozilla Firefox. You can see the Epox stats here. They are not the only ones noticing a dramatic shift to Mozilla and Firefox, W3schools stats show that Mozilla usage has jumped by over 11% (to 18.6%) since this time last year, and HTMLfixit’s stats show that Firefox users make up nearly 25% of our visitors (which might be because I’ve converted many of the regular visitors by constantly going on about it. 🙂

So there you have it, most of the tech knowledgeable people are swapping to Firefox, that should tell you something folks.

Franki

This article from InternetNews.com points out an attempt by an advertiser to get regular references to their product/site from regular high traffic bloggers. Unless it is a clearly disclosed situation, I would be offended to find a post I am reading turns out to be a paid ad. The company says that the blogger can post a disclaimer if they like. Absent that, it has the elements of whoring your site. If you want sex for money at least yo u can say so! I hope the recipients do. They claim they will disclose who they are paying to post on the site FAQ.

The other interesting thing is that the advertiser says you don’t even have to say Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been along time coming, but European countries are starting to really think hard about the implications of the proposed software patent directive that is being discussed by the EU at present. Poland has just withdrawn their support for the directive in it’s current form.

This is good because it stops companies like this one who’s entire business is to sit around and come up with or buy ideas that they can patent. They then wait around for someone else to do the hard work, and then they go and hit them up for easy cash. It’s similar to domain cyber squatting, but legal and with allot more money involved. (Patent cyber squatting?)

Europeans have another reason to ditch the idea of software patents. Microsoft is an American company, and right now the Europeans seem to want to distance themselves from the US in any way possible. Being tied to MS software is not something they want forced on them. Microsoft has recently indicated that at some stage it or someone similar will come after Linux users for patent infringement, (thinly veiled threat?) Having a system like that of the US where people can patent ideas like computer to-do lists is going to cause massive problems to Linux uptake in the future, even if they patent threat is non-factual. Read more about Poland dropping out here.

Franki

This article on Wired makes for an interesting read. One of the biggest age groups has become much more likely to read their news online rather then via magazines and newspapers.

That’s good news for web masters because the great thing about being on the net is that you don’t need to be a multi-million dollar company to get valuable content to a big audience.

Franki

For the first time in many years, Internet Explorer has dropped below 90% usage according to Onestat. The reasons for that are mostly people getting smart and converting to Firefox. Tech sites show Firefox usage to be as high as 25-30% (like HTMLfixit for example)

The official Firefox 1.0 release is only a couple of weeks old and has already been downloaded well over 5 million times.

People are getting sick of constant Microsoft security flaws, and a lack of respect from MS for users of Win98/2000. (no SP2 for you.) Speaking of IE bugs, a couple of big new critical security flaws were found and Microsoft will be patching at least one of them. So sometime soon you should start the Windows update process again.

More on the new Firefox stats here and here.

Franki

Having tried this new excellent program for a couple of weeks now I have found some super new additions and improvements. Number one for me was that you can now create easy vertical text and borders. The optimisation of images for use on the web is also improved.

It loads a lot faster than version 8 and whilst I’m still discovering more and more additions, I think this is the best version yet.

You can also get excellent add on plugins from http://www.digitalworkshop.com

I still have Windows 98SE as my operating system and you don’t get told if you have any problems that you should really update to XP. This can be really annoying if they sell it to you saying it works in Windows 98/2000/XP etc.

Its going to take me a few more weeks to even get round just some of this program, but if you have version 8 you will have no problem with 9. Give it a try.

Hazel

Flash based sites almost never rank as well in search engines as traditional HTML/XHTML sites, and the reason is pretty simple, search engine bots are simple little programs and for the most part have no idea what to make of Flash based content. That may be about to change. Some enterprising lads are creating a framework to allow the extraction of content from flash based sites. Read about it here. I think I’ll wait until I see clear evidence that it works before I’d be converting sites to Flash.

Franki