Archive for October, 2008


Review Of Chosr, A “Quicksilver” Startpage


Thursday, October 30, 2008

This was news to me. I stumbled across this article about Chosr, a web based command like interface that works just like Quicksilver. (Read more about Quicksilver here.) The idea is that as soon as you open a new tab in your browser, the startpage (Chosr) appears and lets you type in what you want to do next. This alleviates the problem of always changing input medium (keyboard/mouse), and you can do more just using the keyboard.

Let’s take an example. You are watching the election closely, and want to see his latest ad that aired on several TV stations yesterday. Normally you would open a new tab, move your cursor to the address field, click, type in “youtube.com”, wait for it to load, move your cursor to the search field, type in “obama ad”, press enter and wait for the search results, click your preferred video, wait for it to load, then watch it. (I’m fully aware that there are several other ways to speed up this process, I’m using search keywords myself, for instance.)

If you were using Chosr though, you would do the following. Open up a new tab, type in “obama ad”, tab to the next box, type youtube, hit enter to load the list of results, then enter again to play the video. A much faster process, just because you don’t have to go back and forth from the keyboard and the mouse.

You don’t even have to sign up to give it a test run. Just go to www.chosr.com and take it for a spin! They also have a bunch of tremendous videos that teach you about the possibilities of the startpage interface.

Jospressen - Hacken Mixen Pulverizen


Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Best song this week. Once again mysterious Swedish tunes..

Web Browser Market Shares


Wednesday, October 1, 2008

I found this awesome site that compares market shares globally between browsers. As of 2008-10-01, these are the biggest browsers in the world:

46% - Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
25% - Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
19% - Mozilla Firefox, any version
7% - Safari, any version (most likely including other browsers built on WebKit, such as Camino)
3% - Other browsers (Google Chrome, Opera, Netscape, etc)

Notable is also that Safari versions below 3.0 are at less than 0,02% of total market share.

Click here to go to marketshare.hitslink.com to read more.

At least in my job, knowing what browser your customers use to browse the web is crucial. Yet, you hear many different numbers from many sources, and you end up just making up your own numbers that seem somewhat correct. Different sites can be browsed by completely different browser users. For websites aimed at very tech-savvy people (think digg.com) generally Firefox has a much larger market share, whereas a site like myspace.com probably has less Firefox users than even the overall average market share of the browser.

When making a web service, it’s very important to recognize your limitations - but also your possibilites. Modern browsers support features older browsers don’t, and if you know that 75% of your audience uses a modern browser (such as Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 2+, Safari 2+), it’s sometimes acceptable to design a feature aimed at these people, and doing a light version for the others. For me as a designer, a classic example is PNG-24 images, semi-transparent wonders that makes IE6 totally crap out. Therefore I do a less pretty version of the semi-transparent images for that browser, and most people that actually cares are happy in the end.

It’s an interesting and forever evolving topic, that’s for sure.