Microsoft lost the second place to Firefox

Marcus Österberg — Mon, 23 May 2016 07:10:00 +0000

For the first time ever, Firefox is passing Microsoft’s web browser(s) measured globally. This is according to Statcounter’s data for April this year. Their data should be quite credible, despite the sometimes strange local variations in the choice of browsers, since they collect data from three million websites and has had fifteen billion page views.

All in all, Firefox accounted for 15.6% and Microsoft’s browsers had 15.5%. As you might figure out, there is a giant hiding in plain sight, namely Google Chrome, which has over 60%. The really small browsers like Apple’s Safari, Opera, and others, together account for 8.4 %.

Why are Firefox successful all of a sudden?

Now I’m speculating wildly, but I think there are Windows users, mostly on Windows 10, that have noticed that Microsoft is phasing out Internet Explorer in favor of Microsoft Edge. Perhaps they are making an active change. Suddenly they notice that the Internet may not be synonymous with Explorer.

To call it success is not entirely fair. It is, after all, so that Firefox has lost a smaller market share compared with Explorer & Edge, while Google Chrome continues to increase their.

How does this matter to my website?

Presumably, this is not something that determines how you work with your website. But it is absolutely worth trying to keep track of the market shares so to make representative measurements on one’s own website.

To some extent, a change in the distribution also may affect how web users behave. Let’s say that many of those who come to Firefox for the first time, is noticing ad blocking – well, then it can start to affect some websites.

Source: Statcounter

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Tools to troubleshoot performance issues on your intranet

Marcus Österberg — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 19:13:20 +0000

An obvious hurdle to troubleshoot your intranet is that it is not accessible from services on the web. For instance it’s quite hard for Pingdom’s Website speed test to reach your intranet and many more appreciated tools are useless. But don’t despair, there is still some great tools. Some of them act as plugins to your web browser, other is stand-alone applications for your computer.
Come along!

It’s worth mentioning that my book, Web Strategy for Everyone, also covers backend aspects of intranet performance optimization. Check it out, only cost you ten bucks ›

Speed test for your intranet

For reference when testing your intranet from a mobile device you can use the app Speedtest.net on Android phones and Speedtest for iOS. Some plugins for Firefox requires a plugin called Firebug – you can find Firebug here – which is of great use in other scenarios such as inspecting cookies etcetera.

l.o.r.i (Life-of-Request Info)

Lori is a plugin for Firefox. It shows initial latency (time before first byte), total load-time, page weight and number of connections for every page you visit.

Firefox addons »

Yahoo! YSlow

Analyses a page and give you suggestions on how to better the performance. Install as a plugin in Firefox. Requires the plugin Firebug.

YSlow at Firefox Addons »

Google PageSpeed

Google offers a browser plugin for both Firefox and Chrome to examine pagespeed factors of pages you can access with your browser (logged in, VPN, what-have-you).

Google PageSpeed for Chrome and Firefox »

IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit

If you happen to have a Windows Web Server you can install an extension called “IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit” to do local analysis of factors such as performance and SEO, and get a report of eventual issues.

Get the extension for IIS »

Did I miss any of your favorite tools?

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