Safari is certainly helping keep the browser wars hotter than ever. If you haven't already heard, Apple is bringing Safari to the Windows platform, and a beta version is already available.
This is going to make things very interesting. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I heard developers and business owners alike say that they don't worry too much about how their site works or looks on the Mac.
Their rationale? They claim their site has known issues with Safari, but given its relatively small market share, they have higher priority tasks to focus on. That's bananas if you ask me, and all about to change.
Although Firefox climbed to over 400 million users in just a few short years (which was an amazing feat all in itself), Apple is positioned to climb higher, faster. How? Well take those ear phones out for a second and I'll tell you in one word - iTunes.
Did you know that there are already over 500 million installations of iTunes, and that over 1 million more copies of iTunes are downloaded each and every day? How about a web browser to go with that download? Sure, if its a good browser, why not.
And indeed it is. Safari for Windows looks great and works well too. And in fact, just recently a study found that Safari is easily outperforming both IE and Firefox in terms of its raw speed in loading and rendering pages. Not too shabby.
Firefox grew in popularity due to its improvements over IE and became quickly well known among the tech savvy. To this date if you find someone with Firefox on their machine, you can pretty much bet they are either tech savvy or someone in their household is.
This means that Firefox needs to bank primarily on tech savvy individuals to spread the love, and has no free ride onto a user's machine. Safari on the other hand could be spread at the rate of 1 million+ copies a day, every single day, without even trying. Of course, not all users will opt to use the new browser, but nonetheless the exposure is unprecedented for a vendor other than Microsoft.
And, there are already 500 million installations of iTunes that can give Safari on Windows a huge boost at launch. As a quick comparison, Firefox downloads are at about 430 million total and seem to average about 500,000 downloads a day.
Whether Safari can overcome Firefox in the #2 position remains to be seen. But based on the math alone it seems possible this could happen, if Safari can indeed deliver the goods.
However this plays out, one thing's for sure - the days of ignoring Safari users and treating their market share as insignificant will soon be history.
We've been recommending for a while now that developers embrace Safari (both for Mac and Windows) and ensure all the bugs and kinks are ironed out. No more monkey business - it won't be long now before Safari users on Windows come swinging wildly in to a site near you.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Saturday, October 20, 2007
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
Fresh on the heels of the BrowserHawk 11 release, I suddenly found something on my schedule this weekend I hardy recognized - "Free time".
What a great opportunity to spend some time with the family. I popped the question to the kids, and before you could bat an eye they were buckled up and waiting in the car.
We were headed to a farm about an hour away that has a great pumpkin patch and festival this time of the year. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I had to hop on the farm's web site and get the address.
"I'll be right there." I called out as I fired up Firefox. But to my surprise, the site was taking forever to load. The cries from the garage grew louder, "Can we GO ALREADY??". "Just a minute." I replied.
Only thing was, that minute turned into about ten. I could hardly believe it, but the site was loading about as slow as possible without going in reverse. I was seriously sitting there wondering whether their web "server" was located in the back of a dusty barn with a few chickens and pigs circling nearby.
This experience reminded me all to well that today's web site visitors have no tolerance for web sites that fail to work properly. This applies to all sites. Yes, the year is 2007, and even the local deli or flower shop's site is no longer exempt.
Poor performing web sites costs businesses billions of dollars every year. Yet most businesses remain unaware of performance issues with their site. Yes there are page load time monitoring utilities, and such utilities are great for making sure the site is up and kicking.
But what really matters most in terms of performance is how long the pages take to load for your actual site visitors, not "bots" that are measuring synthetic transactions. Our patent-pending Page Load Time (PLT) technology delivers this capability, and has been a huge hit with small and large businesses alike. We have some interesting studies on this data that we will be sharing with the market as well.
All in all it was a fantastic day with the family. The weather was beautiful, and everyone had a great time. Although, I must admit, I found myself a bit preoccupied at times, looking around corners in the stable and opening a few sliding doors in the barn. I know that server is around there somewhere...
What a great opportunity to spend some time with the family. I popped the question to the kids, and before you could bat an eye they were buckled up and waiting in the car.
We were headed to a farm about an hour away that has a great pumpkin patch and festival this time of the year. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I had to hop on the farm's web site and get the address.
"I'll be right there." I called out as I fired up Firefox. But to my surprise, the site was taking forever to load. The cries from the garage grew louder, "Can we GO ALREADY??". "Just a minute." I replied.
Only thing was, that minute turned into about ten. I could hardly believe it, but the site was loading about as slow as possible without going in reverse. I was seriously sitting there wondering whether their web "server" was located in the back of a dusty barn with a few chickens and pigs circling nearby.
This experience reminded me all to well that today's web site visitors have no tolerance for web sites that fail to work properly. This applies to all sites. Yes, the year is 2007, and even the local deli or flower shop's site is no longer exempt.
Poor performing web sites costs businesses billions of dollars every year. Yet most businesses remain unaware of performance issues with their site. Yes there are page load time monitoring utilities, and such utilities are great for making sure the site is up and kicking.
But what really matters most in terms of performance is how long the pages take to load for your actual site visitors, not "bots" that are measuring synthetic transactions. Our patent-pending Page Load Time (PLT) technology delivers this capability, and has been a huge hit with small and large businesses alike. We have some interesting studies on this data that we will be sharing with the market as well.
All in all it was a fantastic day with the family. The weather was beautiful, and everyone had a great time. Although, I must admit, I found myself a bit preoccupied at times, looking around corners in the stable and opening a few sliding doors in the barn. I know that server is around there somewhere...
Friday, October 12, 2007
"This one goes to 11"
That famous line from Spinal Tap (listen) couldn't be more fitting at the moment. That's right - in just a few short days we'll officially release BrowserHawk 11.
Its especially gratifying to see all the hard work our team has invested over the past year come together so nicely, and I'm both proud and excited to share with you some highlights on this major release.
With each version of BrowserHawk I've had my personal favorite new feature. Looking back to BH 9.0 in 2005 it was Automatic Session Caching (ASC). With BH 10.0 in 2006 it was Page Load Time (PLT). And this year, hands down it's our Rules Enforcement Technology (RET). Say - what's with all these Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) anyway? : )
RET is BrowserHawk's "killer-app". It greatly reduces the time and coding effort needed to ensure every visitor meets your site's minimum system requirements. In fact, it simplifies things so much, that what used to take days or weeks for our customers to implement is now accomplished with just 3 mouse clicks - watch this! Other video tutorials are also available.
I want to personally thank all our beta testers that helped us shape, test and refine RET. This has been on our product road-map for quite some time, and believe me its an understatement to say we are thrilled to deliver this powerful and exciting new technology to you.
We've also made several other big changes and enhancements in BH 11, including:
I hope you are as excited about BH 11 as we are. Please post a comment to share your thoughts. What features are you most interested in? What would you like to see added? Will the no-cost development licenses add flexibility to the way you work with BH? Your feedback is very important to us. I look forward to hearing from you.
Its especially gratifying to see all the hard work our team has invested over the past year come together so nicely, and I'm both proud and excited to share with you some highlights on this major release.
With each version of BrowserHawk I've had my personal favorite new feature. Looking back to BH 9.0 in 2005 it was Automatic Session Caching (ASC). With BH 10.0 in 2006 it was Page Load Time (PLT). And this year, hands down it's our Rules Enforcement Technology (RET). Say - what's with all these Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) anyway? : )
RET is BrowserHawk's "killer-app". It greatly reduces the time and coding effort needed to ensure every visitor meets your site's minimum system requirements. In fact, it simplifies things so much, that what used to take days or weeks for our customers to implement is now accomplished with just 3 mouse clicks - watch this! Other video tutorials are also available.
I want to personally thank all our beta testers that helped us shape, test and refine RET. This has been on our product road-map for quite some time, and believe me its an understatement to say we are thrilled to deliver this powerful and exciting new technology to you.
We've also made several other big changes and enhancements in BH 11, including:
- full support for installation and use on Windows Vista
- native 64 bit support for use under x64 operating systems
- automatic logging of all JavaScript errors on your site
- the new cyScape Update Service (replaces BDF Service)
- detection of the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in
- several new examples that demonstrate PLT and RET
- expanded and improved documentation
- and lots more.
I hope you are as excited about BH 11 as we are. Please post a comment to share your thoughts. What features are you most interested in? What would you like to see added? Will the no-cost development licenses add flexibility to the way you work with BH? Your feedback is very important to us. I look forward to hearing from you.
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