blog.s11n.net

Is MSIE dead? It certainly seems so…

i was just processing my web logs and stumbled across a very interesting detail regarding web browsers. It goes a little something like this…

Webalizer reveals that of the top 25 user agents to visit wanderinghorse.net in October, less than 3.3% of the agents were MSIE. Those were about equally divided between MSIE 6.0 and 7.0. However, of those top 25 user agents, a whopping 37.4% of them were Firefox, mostly version 2.0.0.7 with some 2.0.0.6 and 2.0.0.8 thrown in for variety. (Even though 2.0.0.8 is only a week or so old, approx 4% out of that 37.4% are using it, which speaks well of Firefox users’ up-to-datedness.)

That’s 11 TIMES as many Firefox visitors as MSIE visitors.

Interestingly, the vast majority (approximately 30% out of that 37.4%) are Windows users, revealing that MS may own the desktop, but they certainly don’t own the browser market any more.

My guess is that only a few major sites (e.g. microsoft.com) are seeing an opposite trend.

What about the rest of the 100%? No single agent outside the top 25 accounted for more than 0.65% of October’s traffic, so they’re not being counted. They’re scattered amongst all sorts of flavors of all user agents, including bots and OS/X (which we can also safely categorize as bots, since Mac users tend to do whatever Apple says they should).

If we average out the numbers, ignoring those agents not in the top 25, Firefox accounts for nearly 90%(!!!) of the traffic and MSIE accounts for a measly 8% or so.

While i’m not naive enough to say that the browser wars are over, it does indeed seem that MSIE’s dominance is truly a thing of the past.

s11n 1.2.4 building under Visual C++ Express

This looks like a Unix environment, but it’s really a Cygwin shell running an application built with Visual C++ Express:

stephan@ludo ~/WinHome/navigating.de/s11n-win32/test
$ ../Debug/s11nconvert.exe -K
51191011 compact funtxt funxml parens simplexml wesnoth

stephan@ludo ~/WinHome/navigating.de/s11n-win32/test
$ for i in $(../Debug/s11nconvert.exe -K); do

../Debug/s11nconvert.exe -f in.sxml -s $i -o in.$i; done

stephan@ludo ~/WinHome/navigating.de/s11n-win32/test
$ l
total 256
drwxr-xr-x 2 stephan Kein   0 Aug  7 22:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 stephan Kein   0 Aug  6 18:18 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 stephan Kein 263 Aug  7 22:24 in.51191011
-rw-r--r-- 1 stephan Kein 263 Aug  7 22:24 in.compact
-rw-r--r-- 1 stephan Kein 223 Aug  7 22:24 in.funtxt
-rw-r--r-- 1 stephan Kein 343 Aug  7 22:24 in.funxml
-rw-r--r-- 1 stephan Kein 214 Aug  7 22:24 in.parens
-rw-r--r-- 1 stephan Kein 241 Aug  7 22:24 in.simplexml
-rw-r--r-- 1 stephan Kein 239 Aug 28  2005 in.sxml
-rw-r--r-- 1 stephan Kein 253 Aug  7 22:24 in.wesnoth

stephan@ludo ~/WinHome/navigating.de/s11n-win32/test
$ cat in.funtxt
#SerialTree 1
s11n_node class=streamable_map
{
item_0 Item #0
item_1 Item #1
item_2 Item #2
item_3 Item #3
item_4 Item #4
item_5 Item #5
item_6 Item #6
item_7 Item #7
item_8 Item #8
item_9 Item #9
}

At some point i’ll release a zip file containing the project/solution files and source code.

[A few hours later...]

A zip file containing a VCExpress solution file and a precompiled copy of s11nconvert can be found here:

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=104450

Why not Windows?

i’m not the traditional Microsoft-hater: i am not at all anti-Microsoft. However, i honestly do find Windows painful to use because it’s so dumbed-down, making life for a power-user far more difficult than it needs to be. Aside from that, i can’t afford to buy all the software needed to make Windows usable (which it is not, out of the box) and refuse, on grounds of principal, to use an operating system composed of 80% cracked versions of commercial software (which is the alternative to buying MS Office, MS Dev Studio, decent CD burning software, etc.).

So… i use Open Source operating systems whenever possible, primarily Suse’s distribution of [GNU/]Linux.

1.1.3 and Win32

So far we have no Win32 port of libs11n 1.1.3. What we need is… A WINDOWS USER TO DO IT. i don’t own a copy of Windows, refuse to pay lots of money for their development tools, and refuse to use illegal copies to publish Win32 ports of my software.

So… if you’re a Windows user and an s11n user, and willing to commit to 1-2 hours of work, i would be happy to walk you through the necessary steps of porting. Alternately, provide the s11n.net project with legal copies of the required tools (e.g., Windows XP, MS Dev Studio 7.1+, and a hard drive to put them on), and i will personally commit to the port.