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Chrome Beats Internet Explorer On Any Given Sunday
tsamsoniw writes "Over the past three weeks, Chrome has beaten out Internet Explorer as the No. 1 browser in the world — but only on Sundays. In fact, according to data from StatCounter, Chrome usage is higher on weekends than it is during the work week, whereas IE usage drops on Saturdays and Sundays. Evidently, end-users prefer Chrome at home, which might be helping the browser get a foothold at work." (So apparently it's not just a freak occurrence.)
It's obvious this is home versus work usage. What's interesting is the Firefox doesn't show the same peaks and valleys as Chrome, IE and Safari. Maybe it's already used more in corporate computers? That's certainly the case where I work.
I work at one of those places and I'm one of those IT control freaks. There's a good reason for it - we don't have the time or the people to troubleshoot five different browsers. Just because a user prefers Chrome over IE doesn't mean they know how to use it. Even the simple stuff, like displaying a PDF in a browser. I wasted a half hour trying to teach a user how to print a PDF from Chrome because the buttons were slightly different than they were in IE (which she was already familiar with). It'd be great to standardize on Chrome or Opera, but then there would be more retraining involved and IE has a lot of (admittedly artificial) advantages, such as vendor support, AD control, etc. Then there's the fact that even if we did standardize on Chrome, some people would want Firefox. If we did Firefox, some people would want Safari. So in the end, IE is by far the easiest, cheapest and least time consuming option whether or not it's your favorite browser.
Which makes Firefox's share quite impressive considering that it was acquired on merit.
ayottesoftware.com
The only reason IE is so popular at work is because of Active X Scripts. Many of the work related websites require it, especially financial sites, and schools. Until other browsers can fully support ActiveX, IE will always dominate. Microsoft's way of monopolizing the browsers.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
What version are they up to now? 38?
Those add-ons don't count for shit when version creep keeps breaking them every 3 days.
Yep acquired on merit and lost on bloat and bugs. I quit using firefox when pages with flash videos would lock it up for 5 seconds at a time but it was my favorite browser for a good 3 years. Now I much prefer chrome...granted wired.com's BS adds and delayed pop ups play havoc with chrome from time to time so nothing's perfect.
My workplace requires IE for one specific (but very important) reason. Everyone here uses Powerpoint (way too much, IMHO, but that's another issue), and Powerpoint has a built-in tool for converting presentations to webpages (meaning they can be posted on our intranet with forms and other pages). But those webpages only look right in IE. Pretty sneaky on MS's part. The alternative would be trying to convert tens-of-thousands-of-slides worth of presentations into html by hand. So it's a lot easier to just force people to use IE rather than having to deal with either the conversion costs or 2,000 phone calls with conversations like this:
Caller: "These slides don't look right"
Tech: "What browser are you using?"
Caller: "I'm using the internet"
Tech: "What is the picture you click on to get to the internet look like?"
Caller: "I don't know, JUST FIX IT!!!"
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Firefox nightly has a very fast pdf reader built in, so if you wait long enough it will make it to the ESR.
There's ways around that too. At Boeing we had an interesting setup. No one had admin access to their own computers, but we had a piece of software on that allowed installation of a wide and varied library of vetted software with sudo like privileges. You opened this tool, and it took you to a library of software: pretty much most of the popular web browsers, a large number of useful free (or Free) tools, and a few licensed tools that we had site licenses for. You clicked on the software you wanted to install, and a privileged installer process started up and installed it. it was pretty cool. You couldn't exactly stay bleeding edge up to date with it (not exactly a bad thing), but you could get a lot of useful tools and software without IT having to worry about infection vectors (obviously they vetted anything that went into the library).
Lots of software (like Firefox, maybe Chrome?) can be installed in a non-privileged mode anyway. It puts all the files in the user's directory and doesn't write anything to the registry. Hell Firefox has a portable mode that you can just install on a Thumb drive and run without even installing it.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Don't forget what ever the hell the FF Devs are smoking as I just upgraded to 11.02 and they decided that if you don't trust a root C/A then you can't add exceptions to accept any certs. This completely fucked my security policy as I don't trust any C/A and am willing to add exceptions for those few sites that I absolutely have to trust such as my bank, merchants I frequently use along with several websites that offer https connections like Google and my ISP. Because of this change, I'm forced to use IE as I can still access those websites that are now blocked by FF w/o the ability to add exceptions. (error - connection refused due to untrusted issuer cert) was the message FF gave me and refused to provide the exception button. God Damn Devs. Think they control My Computer. Fucking idiots get kicked out the damn door as I refuse to use their P.O.S. software. So Long and thanks for nothing Mozilla. You used to be great but you've gone down the damn toilet like any other brown turd
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