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This is a lot like saying that computers that run Windows outsell computers that run Linux. Well, yes, they're both operating systems, but no one really sells computers that run Linux, they sell computers that run Windows...

Thats like saying that more people use Internet Explorer over Firefox since most use Windows that has it by default and aren't given Firefox. They are both web browsers, but no one really sells computers that have Firefox, they sell computers that run Windows Internet Explorer.

I looked up browser shares yesterday, the w3schools collection of stats tells yet another story - it even shows chrome as picking up a lot recently. Personally, I'd go with "IE still on it's slippy slope, Firefox taking over, Chrome might be next".

Couple points:

1. You have to get your mind in the 'programming' mindset. Learning programming isn't necessarily purely about being a techie. You need to have solid logic skills. Much of programming is spent just getting logic right. Check out Boolean Logic for an launch point. The knowledge you gain from briefing this area will carryover into many, many programming languages. Programming *is* logic.

2. Learn what you want to program for. Pick a startup project. Is it a website you want to make? HTML & CSS is very different than learning C or C++, likewise, SQL is very different than assembly. Not that certain concepts don't carry over, but much of being a jack of all trades is simply having the ability to have good conditional logic skills, and the ability to Google things quickly and learn to apply them as you go. You don't have to become a master of all languages, or hell, even one language, but if you are truly *interested* (thats the keyword, if your not interested, its just not going to happen), and you have done a little programming in a couple of simple languages, then you will be in a good position to progress to more difficult projects.

3. Learn what you want to program for. Again. Repeated point. There are hundreds of programming languages, platforms, architectures, styles, libraries, etc. Pick something you are interested in, read about it a little bit, and if it looks like the learning curve isn't too ridiculous, start there. Perhaps a simple text based JavaScript browser game. At the end of the day you will know a bit of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript if you put your mind to it. But thats just one example.

4. W3C. This website is a good starting point for all things web.

5. Chrome Experiments If you really like web, check out the future of browser bling. Heavy JavaScript and HTML5

6. Databases. Not the most mentally entertaining, but you will need the knowhow to connect, select, insert, update, and delete data if you are doing anything with data. I am a Microsoft guy, and I can tell you that the Express Editions of Visual Studio are a greating starting point for a newbie, at zero price-point, and bundled with SQL Express, thats a good place to begin.

7. Also, places like CodeProject, StackOverflow, and CodePlex are great tools for questions ranging from the most basic to the most advanced of topics, and downloading sample code and live projects for tinkering around with.

Yeah, even W3Schools, which is aimed at web developers, and thus is notorious for having high non-IE users, still has 33% IE. Of course, their IE6 numbers are down to 7%, still more than Safari and Opera combined, but only half the size of Chrome.

I could see a strong case for dropping IE6 support, as its numbers are steadily dropping, and it's not supported upstream, and it is disproportionately difficult to support (to put it mildly), but no IE support in general is an idea for hobbyists and the most niche of sites only.

I have to ask what you mean by "minority". I hate IE as much as anyone, but the fact is, it is used by more people than all other browsers put together. I don't tailor my view of reality based on what I like, and you should get out of the habit.

Whoa - I went looking for a link to give my claims some weight - and I found this:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

I guess if you are only measuring home users and technical users, you might get figures like that! But, when you include ALL COMPUTERS, you get quite different results.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0

Hitslink numbers for Linux are suspiciously low.
Wikimedia: 1.8%
W3Counter: 2.78%
W3Schools: 4.5%

Are you sure? This shows as your exact description of proper in Opera 10.6...

Still rather warm.

The problem I foresee is supporting multiple versions of the same browser. IE6, a 10 year old browser (in August) still holds 7.1%, IE7 (nearly 4) holds 9.1%, IE8 holds 16% and now yet another IE version on the way. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

How many conditional statements will I need to support 4 versions of IE?

If anything, it's getting hotter (for developers)

Please do not force your user into using whatever browser you can get your application to run correctly in. Your application should work in whatever browser(s) your target uses. If it's IE6 (I'm really sorry if it is) then it needs to work in IE6. Here's a list of browser statistics from the W3C. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Typically I would recommend all IE versions as well as Firefox (Windows & Mac) and Safari. Good luck.

DING! Please mod parent +1. Malware writers go after the low-hanging fruit that is easy to exploit whenever possible, since they're lazy good-for-nothing bastards to begin with. That said, if you're lazy and profit-motivated, even if OSX was easier to hack (and I'll grant all day long that OSX is much harder to remote compromise than Windows on a number of levels), the fact remains that regardless of any market share claims, there are VASTLY more computers world-wide running Windows than OSX, period. Don't argue it, you can't; if you're so inclined, here's some proof for you.

Why would anyone waste their time on less than 7% of the total number of computers available to compromise, especially when doing so is rather more difficult? Much easier to go after the much less secure ~85% of the market that will net considerably more value in return for each hour of coding or attacking.

Parent is wrong about one thing though: there are *some* of us left who do indeed care about the challenge of the hack, but most of us have gone grey-hat at worst because we've found there is pride and joy in doing good work, as well as plenty of legal monetary compensation for those of us who are actually good at what we do. Sadly though, as above, the kiddies aren't inflicting others with penis ascii and annoying screen-savers: the kiddies are running botnets to DDoS anyone with the temerity to tell them how juvenile they are on IRC, or using trojans to steal credit card info, and the adults who lack either ethics or real skills are buying up exploits and databases and using them for large-scale fraud and espionage. Especially in China, where programmers trained in US colleges then denied citizenship are sent back home to a country where the only job available to them is a government sponsored black-hat outfit. Still, there *are* a few of the "good guys" and "propellerheads" left like Schneier, et al, who take great joy in the art of the hack and then have the ethical fiber to share their knowledge with the world, rather than hoard it to use against others for personal gain.

And from its sub-pixel resolution, to its developer tools, to its 'write once, play everywhere' functionality, Flash has too much going for it to fall by the wayside.

What write once, play everywhere functionality?!?!

Plays on Windows, Mac and Linux computers that have the flash player installed Which is well over 90%.

Now I'm sure we'll eventually ditch the player, but looking at browser adoption stats I'd say it'll be some time before a standards compliant browser ever reaches that kind of install base.

Flash by the way will also play on most new Symbian and Maemo smartphones and the newest version of Android as well as WebOS. That's the write once play everywhere funcionality, if it can't play it'll point you towards the plugin, not a new browser. And it'll play as long as someone doesn't it want it to, like, say Steve Jobs.

Check the stats: http://www.w3schools.com/

W3Schools is known to be biased toward web developers, who are less likely to be using an outdated IE as the primary browser compared to a company that has standardized on the version of IE that a particular subscription SaaS application requires.

IE is still only at about 53%

Throwing away 53% of your potential customers is what we in the business word call "suicide".

which is not what I'd call 'well over'.

Google Analytics on my employer's web site show IE a bit higher than 53 percent, though I can't give an exact figure due to NDA.

Check the stats: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp http://www.philoking.com/2007/11/10/suprising-browser-statistics-people-are-actually-using-safari-on-windows/ According to some, IE already has far less than 50%. Even by the highest estimates, such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_usage IE is still only at about 53%, which is not what I'd call 'well over'.

Depends on whom you ask: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp (go Firefox!)

That argument is about as good as that guy with the chip in his hand saying he could catch and transmit a computer virus. I'm sure if you ask him, he really did catch a computer virus...

Depends on whom you ask: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp (go Firefox!)

More aggresively -- WINE is one of the best ways for Linux to embrace, extend, and extinguish -- beat Redmond at their own game.

But not very successfully, it would seem:

Top OS System Share Trend [June 2009-April 2010]
  OS Platform Statistics [March 2003- April 2010]

How many FOSS projects - and how many proprietary/closed source programs available for Linux - are ported to Windows or begin as native Windows apps?

call me when you can script a GUI as easily as a CLI.

http://www.autohotkey.com/
http://www.autoitscript.com/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t0aew7h6(VS.85).aspx
http://archworx.wordpress.com/2006/11/05/how-to-create-a-vista-sidebar-gadget
http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp

Your ignorance doesn't change facts.

You know, things like proper namespaces, exceptions, static typing, a sensible object model

See it in action here. If you're talking about that mess of cluster that is subclassing from Exception, yes it doesn't have that (perhaps Dojo or other js frameworks do?) However, unlike Java and the like, this language at least has closures.

On the other hand, Chrome has grabbed 20% market share in one year which is no small feat.

Source? even W3Schools.com which has been traditionally biased towards non-IE browsers only gives it ~13%.

As I understand it, the codec type isn't hardcoded in the HTML, but it's still up to the browser to implement decoding and playback. This is where the Firefox/h.264 problem comes in - Mozilla has said that they won't implement h.264 decoding in FF because of patent issues. HTML5's video tag acts pretty much like an img tag - it points to the source file for the video but doesn't say a whole lot about what kind of video it is. More information here: http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_video.asp

There may have been that many download or installations, but if you look at the usage statistics here the numbers tell a much different story.

For March 2010-
46.2 % Firefox
34.9 % IE
12.3 % Chrome
3.7 % Safari
2.2 % Opera

So while a lot of people may have used Opera at one time or another, there are not nearly as many regular users as your 100 million number may suggest.

According to 3 different browser stat usage, Safari and Chrome are too tiny a market to consider. Which means its more likely to be a battle between Google/Firefox and Microsoft more then anything.

Anything in particular the matter with roseindia.net?

It seems sort of like http://www.w3schools.com/ for Java, i.e., a tutorial site other than the canonical resource (Sun and W3C).

I believe the newest browser you can put on Windows 98 is IE5 or IE6. I went through that practice in a virtual machine. IE7 supports only XP and above.

Vendors on the MS side tend to support their 3rd party products longer. Browsers like Firefox, Opera, etc are 3rd party applications, not MS supported apps. You would be hard pressed to find any vendor that sent out software with Windows 98 software support listed in it's specs. Firefox no longer supports Windows 98 either.

Jaguar 10.2 was released 8 years ago. It is not unreasonable that it is no longer supported. They have replaced the processor architecture since then, switching from PPC to Intel. The same goes for 10.3, which was supported under PPC. At some point, it makes sense to drop support for a hardware platform that is no longer actively being produced.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Considering Windows 98 doesn't even make the chart, would you spend time supporting it? What about Windows 2000? It has .6% of the population, which is a fraction of even Linux numbers.

Your argument sounds good on the surface, except for the fact that I don't know a single person who still uses 98, ME, or 2000 for that matter. Why would a company waste dollars supporting an infinitesimal population of hardware when an upgrade is only a few hundred dollars. Add to that, the popularity of laptop computers, which are prohibitively expensive to service. It's usually cheaper to replace them if you have any sort of failure outside of the 'disposable' components like HD's, Memory Sims, or optical drives.

Every business I have worked for in the last 15 years upgrades their PC hardware every 2-4 years. I'm betting most home users do the same but at twice those intervals (4-8 years), either due to desire, or component failure.

The business model would certainly work well for businesses, and also works well for home users. Mac users tend to have more disposable income. It certainly isn't hurting the Apple bottom line, and you get a leaner OS in the bargain.

In the end, the 3rd party vendor support is far more important than the OS itself. The oddest thing is that Apple is far more popular with the home user crowd even though the support model would seem to be more in line with business practices in regards to sunsetting old hardware. I can only assume the Mac users have more disposable income is a factor. Although I'm sure there are still PPC's out there still ticking along, the bulk have probably long since upgraded to an Intel Mac.

You will note that IE6 is still the most popular browser on the market

No I will not.

So they work in 99% of browsers (source).

Not only is this no where near the penetration rates of HTML5, it's only true for those HTML4 features which exist in the venn intersection of all features between IE8 + IE7 + IE6 + Firefox + Chrome + Safari + Opera (source).

but it could eventually encompass all of it (or, gasp- exceed Flash functionality)

I welcome that day - please don't get me wrong. I'm just saying it's too early to sound the death knell.

will do so in all HTML5 browsers

Do you really think that's true? How has that worked out for HTML4 so far? Major differences between browsers and browser versions. Some of these browsers in their most modern form still can't pass CSS ACID tests.

Flash offers ubiquity and consistency that has so far simply not existed in the HTML arena, and HTML5 has not offered any sort of standards verification. If HTML5 wants to do that, it should create a set of ACID tests for HTML5 features, and any browser which wishes to claim HTML5 compatibility needs to score 100% on them.

"Pride comes before a fall"

It is the height of hubris to think mozilla has the power to order around IE, Chrome, Safari, etc, with only ~47% (or is it only 25% and already falling ?)

The trick is to visit a site that uses SVG correctly, instead of invoking the plugin explicitly. Try something like one of the w3schools examples or others.

According to your numbers, Windows 7 has a 33% market share. That's a little difficult to believe.

W3 Schools, who I'd assume have a mostly geek audience, report Windows 7 having a 13% market share among their users.

Comparing XP's worthless out-of-box installation to any other OS which comes with (and MAINTAINS) hundreds of third-party apps is an extremely invalid comparison.

The geek trots the old gray mare out for another run around the track.

The "market value" of the Linux repository has proven to be as close to zero as makes no difference. The Windows user can shop for apps anywhere he chooses. There are risks in that. But rewards as well.

_____

The W3Schools OS Platform Statistics offer a quick look back over seven years.

Linux with a 2% share in March 2003.
5% in February 2010.

Win 7 Beta/RC 2% in July 2009.
  Win 7 13% in February 2010.

The Net Applications stats are - typically - less charitable. Top Operating Share Trend

Why wouldn’t it work in Safari/Chrome? W3Cschools says it’s supported in all major browsers except Firefox (which is no longer true; Firefox supports it as of version 3.6).

Anyway, I think the standards-compliant way of doing what you need is probably one of the following:

a) Call the function to process the objects that have been laid out, and call it again in the window onload event to pick up the objects that were missed the first time (if the page was loaded the first time, onload won’t fire and call it again).

b) If you’re looking for particular DOM elements, process immediately if they exist, otherwise register the onload event.

Wow, you live in a different world than me then because all the friends and family I know that got Vista asked me to give them XP back :/

I think perhaps he does.

The Net Applications stats show Vista with a 17% share in April 2009 and a 16.5% share in February 2010. Top Operating System Share Trend

WeSchools has compartive stats for Vista and XP from January 2007 on.

Vista enters the lists at 0.6% with XP at 76% - its high water market. Vista closed February 2010 with 14%, Win 7 at 14% and XP at 58% OS Platform Stats

What is important here is not the percentages - which differ - but the trend lines, which do not.

Vista as a consumer OS took - and held - about 20% of the market in less than two years.
   

lol @ Chromefanbois

By "everyone" you mean "everyone except for 4 times as many as Chrome.

Or perhaps you're using a non-standard definition of "everyone" or "left?"

There's no such thing as semi ubiquitous, the term is an absolute. It's either ubiquitous or it's not. H.264 in the browser is not ubiquitous. ~15% of the market supports H.264 natively in the browser. That is not ubiquity. And as long as HTML5's success is pinned to this encumbered spec, Mozilla won't support it. So for as long as that continues to be true, or until Firefox's upward momentum switches direction for a few years, HTML5 is a solution exclusively for ideologists and not for pragmatists.

Because Firefox doesn't come with Flash support either

The point isn't the relative difficulty of installing one plugin vs another plugin. The point is the likelihood of one already being installed before a user comes to your site (or the willingness to interrupt what they're doing to go and get it). Besides, Flash is easier to install in Firefox than a video codec (at least so far). Click the button that says, "Click here to install the missing plugin," click through a EULA (decidedly the suckiest part of the experience), and you're done.

It *can* be done. It hasn't been done yet

Nor is the platform in a state that all of the major players are yet behind a single standard. If Mozilla changes their mind about H.264 (maybe if MPEG LA offers them a royalty free license), then it might succeed. But until that happens, you've got a cart with horses on either end pulling in different directions. Maybe it gets somewhere eventually, but it won't be quick. That's a terrible way to usurp an established presence.

Flash is good for two things: Games and embedded video

This is not the entire domain gap between Flash and HTML5. Just in the video frontier, HTML5 has not yet started to tackle streaming audio/video (dynamic bitrate, real time navigation / seeking, and so forth) - these are things which require a protocol with appropriate support (thus fall outside of HTML5's purview and start needing to involve updates to the HTTP standard which so far HTML5 has not yet even talked about). Nor has it tried to tackle 3D, video cameras, microphones, desktop sharing, or rich application support. Sure, HTML5 has some more advanced user controls, but they're nowhere near what Flex offers under the Flash umbrella. And where is the desktop runtime environment that Flash offers under the Air platform? Let's not forget language updates to JavaScript to support static typing, data binding, packages, real classes, or a host of other high order OOP design principles supported today in ActionScript, let alone the assurance that your layout and code executes exactly the same no matter what the user's desktop experience is like.

As I've said, HTML5 is moving in the right direction. But in the very first of Flash's many strengths (albeit arguably one of its biggest strengths) that HTML5 is trying to take on, the major players can't even agree on something silly like a choice of codec.

Also, forgive me for citing Wikipedia, but the H.264 implementation in open source products like VLC is of dubious legal status: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing.

I personally believe that individuals will make the difference.
But people are now starting to feel enough pain - be it software costs, inefficient use of hardware, viruses and other malware, etc. - that Linux and open-source software, generally, are getting plenty of attention. The cure, in other words, now outweighs the effort of applying it. Yes, Microsoft will do its part to thwart this progress,but even so I've seen broad and ever-increasing government adoption of open source

He believes that individuals will make the difference - but the progress he sees is in government adoption of open source.

The top-down solution.

The mandate from on high.

Nothing much seems to be happening at ground level.

In the Net Applications stats, Linux struggles to hold on to a 1% share of the global desktop. Top Operating System Share Trend [March 2 Preview]

In the W3Schools OS Platform Stats W2K held a 42% share in March 03, Linux 2%.

W2K was never a mass market OS.

This February, Win 7 had 13%, Linux 5% and W2K 0%. You could legitimately argue from these stats that Linux hasn't gained much of a grip - on the desktop - even when you look at usage by the pros.

As for the general gaming market, yes, gaming is a weakness on Linux, but addressing that is not a priority for Canonical.

The PC game is the quintessential client app.

The machine that can play games is a powerhouse for all forms of media, interaction and communication. It sets the standard. Games and gaming tech can change the way you think about the PC or the console. How you use it.

It astonishes me that basic audio play and mixing could still be problematical for the Linux user in in 2010.

All About . . . Sound Cards for Windows [July 1997]

Open Source is inherently cross-platform. The Windows port is inevitable - and it has visibility. Download.com is one click away. The quality and ease of use of the Linux repository is unknown until you install the OS.

The sample apps on the typical Linux Live CD clearly aren't setting the world on fire.

Slashdot will eat any greater-than or less-than signs as it assumes they're used for tags. You need to use the HTML special entities codes for them to show up.

Windows is not at fault. Hardware or 3rd party software always is

That's generally a fair assumption with any OS.

Win 7 has about eight to ten percent of the global market. OS Platform Statistics

That translates into a hell of a lot of laptops and a good many batteries that were well past there past their prime before Win 7 was installed. But there have been only a few hundred complaints.

It was the first google result.

Looking for something current I get this:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Opera actually shows a better number for March 2009 than Ars Technica: 2.3%.
And the result for December 2010 is: 2.3%.

It was also 2.3% for January 2009.

I haven't been able to pull an all-nighter since college (though I've come close playing Civ or Starcraft), but I'll give it a try!

More likely, they mean "Teach yourself HTML/CSS in 24 1 hour lessons" or something like that. I found I was able to learn the basics of HTML & CSS in about an 8 hour day. The problem is the moving target HTML has become over the years, though even that is a minor adjustment. I think this type of books is probably o.k. for most people, but it would be better if they used a free resource like W3 School's free tutorials.

er... I had some less than greater than signs in that /. felt the need to edit out.

You need to use HTML character entities:
 
< is &lt;
> is &gt;
 
More info: HTML character entities

IE market share is below 40%

Anyone who uses w3schools's browser stats as a reference for general browser usage needs to get knocked on the head a few times. That is a perfect example of biased results due to the nature of the sample.

A better number is about 62%.

80% of home Windows computers have been compromised by one or more viruses.

IE market share is below 40%

You do the math.

Interestingly, even though most of those apps you mentioned as sources of vulnerabilities exist on other platforms, the rates of infection of anything other than Windows remains at zero or close to it. I'd say that points to a platform problem, not an application one.

In this past decade Microsoft lost market share

OS Platform Stats W3 Schools

Mar 2003 Linux 2% OSX 2%
Dec 2009 Linux 4% OSX 6%

Jan 2009 Win 7 0% OSX 6%
Dec 2009 Win 7 9% OSX 6%

Vista and Win 7 combined hold a 25% share in the December W3Schools stats. That ought to silence the geek who insists on calling Win 7 a "Service Pack."

But when Best Buy starts selling Chrome OS netbooks with a big Google brand on it, Microsoft will start shitting themselves.

Microsoft and the big box retailers have had a mutually profitable relationship for thirty years.

Strong after-market sales are A Good Thing.

Dual inventory and support structures are A Bad Thing.

Strong representation at every price point is A Good Thing. Being firmly anchored as a bottom feeder is a Very Bad Thing.

These are the basics. But almost no one enters the mass consumer market without learning the hard way.

Haha, you sound like that figure is fixed and not going down. How about this one: 55.66% or this one: 50.3%
There, and I didn't even have to go to the w3schools site like so many people mistakenly do.

Online Services Let Virus Writers Check Their Work

Already done

It's only been out since October 22nd, 2009.

Net Applications and w3Schools have been tracking Win 7 since January.

If there were any show-stoppers for Win 7, it seems reasonable to assume they would have been exposed by now.

In round numbers:

Net Applications:

Win 7 Jan 0% Nov 4%
In daily tracking 5%

Linux 1% Through Jan-Nov 09.

W3Schools:

Win 7 Jan 0% Nov 7%

Linux 4% Unchanged since January 2008.

Top Operating System Share Trend, Windows 7 Breaks 5% in Daily Tracking

OS Platform Statistics
 

According to the Anandtech article, only the pretty much end-of-life Windows XP is out of luck. Linux, OS X and modern Windows versions all work ... Non news?

According to many estimates that is 3 out of 5 computer users have XP as their OS. That is pretty big. The lowest estimate that I have seen is that XP is only running on 1 out 5 daily use computers. Another way of looking at it is that there more XP users than there are, Unix, Linux, Mac OS (any version) and any other non-Windows OS combined.

Sources: (62.2%): http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

(69.05%): http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10

(48.47%): http://gs.statcounter.com/press/encouraging-start-for-windows-7

(70.48%): http://gizmodo.com/5398689/reality-check

Also the expected end of life is no earlier than April 8, 2014, four years from now...

OK, ABP has 11 million users. That's great. Can we compare to another open source project? VLC has a few more downloads than that. (I know I can't compare downloads to users, so I won't).

Let's try this instead: 1.7 billion people running web browsers, 47% running Firefox (815 million FF users), and only 11 million people choose to install ABP? That's 1.35%. Most of those are tech savvy people who are harder to brainwash with ads anyway. It's noise.

Totally agree, it's a pitty out of the 132,000 hacked sites that are written in Classic ASP that the coders havent done this :) It totally depends on the methods used in the code and, unfortuntly, there is A LOT of bad ass coding about :( Example: http://www.w3schools.com/ADO/ado_update.asp Checkout the second window, "UPDATE customers SET...", oh dear!! BAD coding and w3schools is well recognized! I bet a lot of coders have fallin into this HUGE hole.

Maybe we can compare how much technically savvy are the users of different sites by looking at the share of different browsers. We can compare the data of Ars with the data of w3schools (monthly data since 2002).

W3S's share of Firefox is larger that all the IE's together. FF overtook IE at about the beginning of this year.