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By the way... I think the number of Linux users is probably already higher than any of the hypothetical numbers you threw out.

It's obviously impossible to know for sure how many people use a given OS... especially when that OS is distributed freely and requires no kind of registration. However we can get some vague ideas from a few sources. The Linux Counter estimated 29 million in 2005. This was in part based upon verifiable numbers from Red Hat indicating 8 million installs in 1998 (yes, this is including corporate installs, not just home users).

Another (again not totally reliable) way is to use browser stats. W3school reports ~3.4% of browsers are running in Linux. Since there are 1 billion internet users, that means 39 million Linux users.

Again, these numbers are open to massive debate. But I think the real number is somewhere in the ballpark of 10 million to 40 millions users. Alot more than most people think.

It stands for Cascading Style Sheets.

(That link was the first hit on google for a search on CSS, incidentally...)

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

"W3Schools says 33% but I'm guessing that's inflated quite a bit."

Maybe for their web logs that is entirely accurate. Their website even says something to that effect:

"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user."

A new browser - that will target a different userbase to FF & divide the market up a little more, will make the web a better place for everyone.

I agree, but the IE 7 story shows that you don't have to worry much anymore. Despite being a forced upgrade on most Windoze platforms, IE 7 still has less than 20% market share even for tech markets. Design to real standards and everyone wins.

The only stuff that still sucks is video, but the average windoze user can't see it either. Patented and restricted junk works that way and will be ignored by the vast majority of people for the duration.

The only thing that matters is using real standards, not M$ fakes which will burn you because they churn so often and are split into several minor sub categories. Show your PHB this one day.

May 2007
IE7 19.2%
IE6 38.1%
IE5 1.5%
Fx 33.7%
Moz 1.3%
S 1.5%
O 1.6%

After you get past the browser divisions, you start to see plug-in differentiation which is always worse in the haves and have not world of non free software. There is no 90%, not even a 50%. Developing to a specific browser is worse than developing to a coin toss.

Some stats on vista:

http://boingboing.net/stats/awstats.boingboing.net .osdetail.html - 4% (june 4, 2007)
http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp - 2.6% (may 2007)
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?date=2007 -05-30 - 1.91% (May 30, 2007)

Varies a bit by site, but even 4% is quite low...

No links forthcoming to back up the claim that "Linux isn't taking more ground"?

Frankly the statistics vary greatly. IDC said in 2004 that Linux market share exceeded that of OS/X. Other research focusses on hit counts to their sites and generate statistics as vaired as the content and readership demographic. We can conclude that Linux seems very popular amongst web developers. Independent statisticians place Linux and OS/X at about the same on the desktop while IDC's own competitor says Linux sales are at less than 1% of other operating systems.

Given 'market share' is often mistaken for actual install base (very few home users pay for Linux) a more reliable means of counting is perhaps provided by reading package repository server logs. ">Here's one case of that in action regarding a distribution very popular amongst this so called 'average user'.

It's tricky without the benefit of more probabistically centric records like those of Google's Zeitgeist anymore.

Linux, while a better OS all around, is simply not intuitive enough for the average user. Note the use of the word 'average' here. Even the most user-friendly flavor is light years away from the masterful intuitiveness of Vista (even with all its flaws, Vista remains the most user-friendly OS ever produced to date)

Users want basic behavior in an OS, not complication. Users want to click one button to make something happen. This behavior is evident throughout Vista. To get the same effect in a Linux distro, you must click ten buttons, stand on one leg, learn how to mount \dev or \root, or whatever, learn some bizarre or arcane switch command language, and pray to God that in the end you don't wind up hosing the thing.

While YOU may not have a problem doing any of that, Grandma Wilma or Uncle Frank simply don't have the time nor inclination to learn or mess with it. They want the simplicity of one button, and they'll pay bucks to get it.

In 4 years, Linux has managed to capture a mere 1%of the OS market , and that even with the big corporate names backing it. It simply hasn't caught on. There must be a reason as to why, and I'd bet the farm that its this unecessary complication that keeps Linux languishing at the bottom.

In 5 months Vista has been out, it managed to steal several users from 2k and 98, while Xp userbase has increased in the time period. Link

Most people skipped win2k and went straight from 98 to Xp because the great functionality and stability improvement, something Vista doesn't have over XP and with a price tag significantly bigger than XP.

Every ad I see about vista shows the 'Wow effect'. Well, if you have the hardware capability, you can Wow Vista's Wow easily and free.

And also, is your boss is really that flippant about %31.8 of users (Firefox market share)? http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

, here's the figures for March and Feb in CSV.

OS,March,Feb
Windows XP,83.57%,84.33%
Windows 2000,4.71%,4.75%
Mac OS,3.94%,4.29%
Mac Intel,2.14%,2.09%
Windows Vista,2.04%,0.93%
Windows 98,1.36%,1.50%
Windows NT,0.80%,0.71%
Windows ME,0.70%,0.76%
Linux,0.57%,0.42%
Nintendo Wii,-,0.05%
Windows CE,0.03%,0.04%
Windows 95,0.03%,0.03%
PSP,0.02%,0.02%
Hiptop,0.02%,0.02%
WebTV,0.02%,0.02%
Series 60,0.01%,-
All Wintel,93.21%,93.01% All Windows only went up 0.2%, so Windows other than Vista went down 0.91% and most of the bites Vista is taking are coming from other versions of Windows... mostly XP, Linux went up 0.15% (Computerworld didn't mention that), and all Mac went down by 0.3%. And look, the Nintendo Wii went from 0.05% to nothing. I wonder what the story is there... maybe Vista is responsible?

Or maybe... well... other surveys referenced by Wikipedia and elsewhere show considerable variation, with figures as much as 25% lower for Windows... so changes less than a percent are probably not worth getting worried about.

That is a pretty big IF.

Win 98 still held a 10% market share in the w3Schools stats for January 2004.
IE5 a 2.5% share in February 2007.Browser and OS Platform Statistics

Isn't it great how Microsoft's suggested workarounds only say "View E-Mail in plain-text, don't visit untrusted sites" (even though they claim beforehand an attacker might also try to hijack trusted sites to deliver the exploit).

Guess they can't write the obvious, "Use an alternative browser and/or email client.". Hah, what a Dubya-ian world they're living in.

So I'm assuming the way to exploit it is with CSS's cursor property:
cursor: url('some-bad-file.ani');
I'm guessing Firefox has its own animated cursor rendering engine? Are they even allowed in CSS...

Ah, the irony of something that is unnecessary other than making the GUI look pretty being responsible for endangering the system...

Check out these statistics that show how many people are using Linux when web browsing:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

Although nothing comes close to Windows XP (76.1%), the numbers clearly show that Linux (3.5%) is nearly as popular as Apple Mac (3.8%). Well, Apple is certainly giving Dell a run for their money in hardware sales with that 3.8%. The market is there and Dell would be stupid to ignore it.

W2K was never a mass-market OS.
In the February W3Schools stats at a 2% share it barely edges out Vista. OS Platform Stats

W2K's strength wasn't in media play or gaming.
Licensing and rights management issues in-house were headaches for your employer, not you.
But if you want to watch Forbidden Planet in HD at home it won't matter much whether you chose the stand-alone player or the PC drive. The movie will still be protected against casual redistribution.

The pastels of Luna may have been an irritant for the Geek, but the felt green of corporate Classic was fatiguing for others.
On some fundamental level, the GUI will always be a "toy," since its job is to provide a relaxed, familiar and unintimidating connection between the user and the machine.

So what does Vista do for me? How will Vista make me more productive? How will Vista save me money? Seems like paying money for an additional annoyance. I am not saying msft sucks, I am not saying vista sucks. But, this seems to be the worst "upgrade" imaginable.

Most Windows users upgrade when they see significant advantages in bundling new hardware and software at OEM prices. The dual or quad core CPU. The 50 GB Optical Drive. DX10 Video. The 500 GB Hybrid SATA HDD. ReadyBoost Flash... There's no help for it. The Vista drivers will mature. The hardware will be cheaper and more advanced. Developers will push the limits of the new platform as it gains market share. Your W2K system will be "the horse and buggy."

Because JavaScript can create content. Since 99% of people run with it enabled, they will see this content, so it makes sense to index it.

your the best. I have yet again been saved from bothering to learn basic html formatting.

Hm, after checking http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp I must say I overestimated their market share. It seems to be around 58.6% if we are to trust w3schools for Jan 2007.

I estimated that it'd be around 70~80%, in which case I would still have considered my argument valid (after all, they don't have a complete monopoly on dekstop operating systems either). I must say that with new statistics considered, my argument fails.

Sorry for making such a definitive statement without checking my assumptions first. Then again, that is default behaviour around here. :P

I tried to send the message below, but both FireFox 2.0 and Safari 2.0 (on OSX 10.4.8) threw back errors. I have no idea if WalMart even got my message...
---

Well, it looks like I won't be doing any online video downloads from WalMart.com. I find it odd, that one of the largest retailers in the world would *assume* that everyone who visits their video download site is using Internet Explorer 6+ on a PC! I use a Macintosh with FireFox as my browser, and I use Linux as well as other flavors of Unix, also with FireFox as my browser. IE6 isn't even available for Mac OS X.

While I don't expect WalMart to try to cater to absolutely everyone under every possible computing condition, I do expect that you would not exclude such a large segment of your customers by limiting us to 1 browser on 1 operating system.

How do I know we're a large segment? Look at the stats... http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp
FireFox is currently 31% with Internet Explorer not that far ahead at 42.3%.

I think you should consider expanding your horizons when deciding what browsers you support on your web site.

Actually, the reason it uses ActiveX is because the XMLHTTP request is an ActiveX function in IE. Something like this: http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/ajax_browsers.asp sorts through that specific issue. Well-developed AJAX applications are cross-platform and work in IE, Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror. Just because "Web 2.0" site developers don't know how to code properly doesn't mean AJAX isn't cross-platform.

Wtf is wrong with y'all? Haven't you heard of W3Schools? There's your answer:

W3Schools Browser Stats

Full breakdown, data going back to 2002, good selection of sources... what more do you want???

Daniel

He is probably getting the 35% from w3schools.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

Which was a definitive resource at one time (used to be touted to prove FF was dying). But the fact is that the sites are monitoring their stats and are basing it on that. With w3schools it is where the developers go.

You would need to know the volume of the sample and what it is based off to get something anyway accurate.

Hi, Twitter! Good to see you. Farming with this account again, after you managed to get eight Troll mods in a row with your main one, eh? I was very impressed at that, good going! Anyway, to business, we can't sit around here, chatting about 'old times', eh?

These stats seem to show that Windows XP is at 75% usage and thus did, in fact, manage to 'grab marketshare' in a way that any OS manufacturer would intend it to. Apparently for you 'plenty of users' is 9% of the market share, which I will concede to you with as much grace as you have ever shown.

Unfortunately for you though, according to these figures, even Mac usage is increasing more than Linux usage is, which I find to be a great pity, as I'd much rather people were using Linux. Oh well, eh? And this is from one website - others suggest Windows XP has an 85% market share, or even in some cases as much as 90%! Obviously 'not good enough', so I'm wondering how Linux's 3% marketshare ranks on that incredible scale of yours?

MS credibility? Better than ever! Sorry to break it to you.

Finally, Vista doesn't suck. I should know - I'm using it. Have you? Don't answer that, it's one of those rhetorical questions you've heard so much about.

The PHP syntax is very similar to Perl and C.

From the PHP Tutorial

The author of that article says you'll want to use the magic of perl and XML::Simple because "XSLT can't do arithmetic" and proceeds to do magical things like increase numbers by 20%.

That's just ... bizarre. Of course you can do that with XSLT! <xsl:value-of select="whatever * 1.2">

Then he formats a number -- because XSLT, of course, doesn't have a format-number() function.

Next article -- why you should commute to work in an airplane because, as everyone knows, cars can't turn corners.

it has been updated to account for IE7's ideosyncracies, but does it also cover the other browsers well?

Good question, each browser has different levels of support. If you check out some browser usage you can see a decent estimate of what browsers are most used. Then you can check out browser CSS compatibility.

Besides IE6 (I'm not supporting IE5 Mac), I do not see issues across (modern or heavily used) browsers very often, unless I'm trying to do some sophisticated, multi-column, nested, floating DIV design. Also, in my experience, complicated float designs usually can be simplified with other means to avoid X-browser issues.

The biggest problem with CSS is that it also required good (X)HTML markup. Sometimes your CSS is sound, but the HTML code is not proper or designed by design instead of designed by content. A good book on working through this is Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design whose authors are also well known in the CSS/Website world and quote from Eric Meyer (the author of the book being reviewed on this page) as well as others.

I've been starting to learn that lots of my CSS frustrations of the past have mostly been part of my fault not thinking about CSS properly and trying to make easy things more complicated. Though, it can still be said, there's still lots of room for improvement, in both browsers and CSS specs.

Cheers,
Fozzy

No, here is the page in question -- be sure to scroll down past the first table. Also note, that those three paragraphs were probably written by one person, and published by another person, because they should have been published above the table for the word I highlighted in bold to fit the context.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.

These facts indicate that the browser figures below are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users.

Anyway, our data, collected over a five year period, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends."

Where did you get your numbers?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp [w3schools.com]

Aggregate IE: 59.9

Firefox: 29.9

Mozilla: 2.5

Netscape 7/8 .2

Opera 1.5

The stats at www.w3schools.com are not representative of what most people are using, they represent what Web developers and other technically inclined people are using. Think about who visits www.w3schools.com.

This is the market share for browsers as of Nov 2006:

Microsoft Internet Explorer, 80.56%
Firefox, 13.50%
Safari, 4.03%
Netscape, 0.83%
Opera, 0.67%

Not sure where you got your numbers???
Mine are from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

2006------------IE7-----IE6-----IE5-----Fx------Mo z*----N7/8----O7/8/9
November--------7.1%----49.9%---2.9%----29.9%---2. 5%----0.2%----1.5%

2006------------WinXP---W2000---Win98---WinNT---W2 003---Linux---Mac
November--------74.9%---8.0%----1.0%----0.4%----1. 8%----3.3%----3.5%

Mac and Linux seem to pretty close....No?

Allow me to quantify that. The combined market share of IE, FireFox, Opera, Netscape and Mozilla is 94%. I'm willing to be most of the remaining 6% were also a browser that supports JS (Konqueror, Safari. Yes there are even text browsers that support it.) If you scroll further down, that have statistics showing 9/10 people browse with JS enabled.

I personally think JS as it stands today is dandy in terms of what be accomplished on the client side. There is a tendency to forget that most people still have a modem, and adding 70kb worth of libraries to every single page load is simply ridiculous (scriptaculous, I'm looking at you.) But some of the newer lightweight libraries are just amazing. Everything is moving in that direction; hell, even /. recently picked up some JS functionality, so you know it must be ubiquitous :)

I wish people would stop complaining about the lack of 1080p, 720p, etc. At least the Wii has 480p (had to since the Gamecube also had it, at least with selected games).

Also, what's so hard about browsing in 480? Last time I checked, computers were also using 640x480 years ago. Heck, there was still some 640x480 users at the beginning of 2004. Stop acting like 480 pixels of vertical resolution is the end of the world.

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on browsers. Right now, IE makes up little more than 50% in all the flavors it comes in, with IE7 barely pulling 7% (as of the end of November, the most recent stats I could find).

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

50% is not a monopoly, sorry. And public roads and power companies are VASTLY different, given that the government (be it state, federal, or local) maintains public roads. And do you really want the government to have MORE control over the internet? What about the rest of the world, which the US government has no business policing?

td,th,tr{
                                align:left;
                                vertical-align:baseline;
                }

select.mini {
                                width:10em;
                                size:1;
                }

td,th,tr{
                                align:left;
                                vertical-align:baseline;
                }

select.mini {
                                width:10em;
                                size:1;
                }

Subject: Summary makes a flawed assumption, MS another

millions of Internet users who will soon be running IE7

This depends on millions of new Intel machines being purchased after January 30. Febrary and March are the slowest period of the year for any non-essential item, as people are recovering from their holiday spending binges. Retail box sales of Vista will be all but limited to hard core gamers who want DirectX 10 a year before any games actually take advantage of it.

Ok, so IE7 is available on XP if you have SP2 installed. Still not staggering market share if you ask me.

Internet Explorer 7 was released in late October 2006 and added to the "high-priority" section of Windows Update in November. W3Schools's Browser Statistics show IE7 with 2.5% in September (when it was still in beta), 3.1% in October, and 7.1% in November (IE6: 49.9%, Firefox: 29.9%).

Despite IE6's flaws, it still has 49.9%. Despite IE7's current flaws (which you commented on), I'd bet my right thumb that millions will be using IE7 by March.

The majority of web developers I know develop on the mac anyways.

Nope not trolling in the least!

From the WC3...
"Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere."

Hmmm moving data...., I guess I am not far off the mark.

Lets see and there is this which goes on at length about whay its a cool way to, wait for it..... Move Data!

But wait, there's more! You guessed it ladies and gentlement, the WC3 goes to great pains to tell you that only XML is X-Platform and is an excellent way to store, manipulate and transmit data! I would site this as a major push for XML to do exactly what I said it was trying to do.

As to you, fucktard, I was moving data between systems, more then likely, while the best part of you was running down your momma's leg. So shut your fucking cakehole and READ up.

The issue with coding is not compliance with CSS standards (those are well published) but rather in how the various browsers interpret those standards.

The code is standard; the parsing and rendering methodologies are not.

I, for one, appreciate a book that addresses these non-standard behaviors when parsing standard code. The review posted by samzenpus exposes these insights, and contrasts them from the plethora of "standards reference" books. (many from the same publisher)

Sometimes, hacks are the way to do it. (conditional HTML comments, like CSS itself, are only partially effective) It's not that any, given book leads us to write "non-compliant code", (unless you count FrontPage) but that the differences of current browsers in-use require the "non-compliant" variations.

In my book, when the page you create works for everyone viewing it, it is compliant.

I would argue that it's common knowledge
that Firefox
doesn't have
anything like
50% of
the browser market,
with most estimates
coming in
at less than
25%.

For 99% of the websites, all you need to know as 'the difference from HTML' is: http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp

That is for XHTML 1.0, though. XHTML 1.1, and the remaining 1% of websites which go deep into further XHTML functionality are a different matter.

Last time I checked, the term 'most' meant a majority.

Firefox, Safari and Opera may have significant market penetration, but 30% a majority does not make.

Now for my slashdot rant: I remember when slashdot used to post news. You know, 'news for nerds. stuff that matters'? Lately, the tagline might as well change to Slashdot: "Some idiot posted this somewhere on the web. We'll ride their coat tails."

These days, slashdot hardly has as much credit as celebrity gossip sites such as What Would Tyler Durden Do? and The Superficial. At least they're honest about the fact that they are posting little more than rumors.

Try this: http://www.w3schools.com/html/

Also, in case you didn't notice, slashdot automatically detects URLs and turns them into links, so you don't need to use HTML for the link unless you want it to look like this. (For reference, that was <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/html/">this</a> ).

And <br> makes a line break, but it seems you figured that one out. As someone else mentioned, if you use the "preview" button, you can notice mistakes before they get posted.

Try this: http://www.w3schools.com/html/

Also, in case you didn't notice, slashdot automatically detects URLs and turns them into links, so you don't need to use HTML for the link unless you want it to look like this. (For reference, that was <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/html/">this</a> ).

And <br> makes a line break, but it seems you figured that one out. As someone else mentioned, if you use the "preview" button, you can notice mistakes before they get posted.

I'll again point out my parallel with IE, which was also a very expensive to write program integrated with the OS for free.

That doesn't seem to have hurt Firefox. I don't think it's a bad thing that Microsoft has made it impractical to charge for a web browser. How is it a bad thing if they make it impractical to charge for anti-virus software?

I would have thought that by now this problem wouldn't still be as bad as it was 20 years ago. I think if your looking for alternate resources to learn then you have chosen the right approach. Get out there and ask! The internet is full of information. I read one post that said you should try to narrow down what your looking for and I agree. Technology is a term that covers a universe of opportunity. Whether you looking to learn coding, hardware, electronics circuitry, or whatever YOU find interesting. You can also join groups of people just like yourself on the net that take on small projects in the spirit of learning. I could sit here all day and dig up links for you but I'll just offer up these. http://www.w3schools.com/ http://planetsourcecode.com/ Do you already know what direction you want to go in?

I'll believe that when I stop seeing "I edited my profile with BACARDI'S Myspace Editor V3.6!" on the end of everybody's about me.

There are several pages where the code is simply copied and pasted, and the html is extremely sloppy. If anything I recommend the basic html and css tutorials over at w3schools to those that want my help with their page, so at least they know what I mean by "opening and closing a tag".

/.02

I'd have to say that from my limited sampling, these numbers are very possibly off and a .2% downward change is likely statistically insignificant, especially given their sampling methods. Traffic from my blog primarily from the US shows about 19% of traffic is from the Macintosh (200-900 unique visitors/day). ... shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.

They were actually reporting a 0.02% change, which most people would consider noise. Claims of accuracy to the five places are silly, unless you have millions of hits.

w3schools.com OS index shows a growth in share for September of 0.2%, though they have a less generous estimate of 3.8% total share.

Everywhere I look, I see more people using Mac and Linux. It's hard to believe the combined share is less than 1 in 10.