Category Archives: IE

Browser wars 2

Who’s winning this time round? Is Firefox having any impact?

Here’s the stats for my most heavily trafficked site, top 15 agents:

Hits	Percent	User Agent
30815	11.88%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)
23816	9.18%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
14375	5.54%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1
10701	4.12%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
8880	3.42%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
8330	3.21%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)
8092	3.12%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
6784	2.61%	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/
5190	2.00%	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/2004
5144	1.98%	Program Shareware 1.0.0
4832	1.86%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1
3825	1.47%	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko
3314	1.28%	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko
2982	1.15%	Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProd
2362	0.91%	Atomz/1.0

Interesting that after all these years, IE5.5 is still the top hitting browser.

Gecko is Firefox and Mozilla and their derivatives. Probably a few copies of Netscape 7 floating around as well.

Atomz and Yahoo are spiders, obviously, though I’m not sure why Yahoo decided it would be good to tell us their spider is Mozilla compatible, ‘cos I bet it isn’t. Google comes through every so often, but doesn’t appear in the top 15 provided by my web site’s default report.

I have no idea what “Program Shareware 1.0.0” is. Any ideas, anybody?

No sign at all of Mac users, or indeed any OS other than Windows. Maybe if the list showed the top 50…

Getting these into some basic groups, we have:

Hits	Percent	User Agent
82008	31.60%	MSIE 6
30815	11.87%	MSIE 5.5
12329	4.75%	Gecko

I could show you the two party preferred figures, but I scarcely need to: IE still rules the roost, though I’d bet Gecko/Firefox is slowly gaining momentum.

(Obviously I’m going to have to look beyond the top 15, because there must be an awful lot of minority combinations of OS/browser out there.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few months.

File not found

Back when IE4 came out, Microsoft trumpeted the integration of the Web and the desktop. Active Desktop, remember that? One of the other things they did was to make Windows Explorer look a bit more like the Web, and make Internet Explorer capable of doing Windows Explorer-type things.

I was doubtful that it was very helpful, but in any case they went too far. We now have the ridiculous situation of Windows Explorer showing the following message if you try to go manually (eg by typing) to a path that doesn’t exist.

Windows path not found error

The path doesn’t exist. Adjusting my browser settings is not going to help.

Refreshing or trying again later is not going to help.

Checking my Internet connection settings is not going to help, nor is getting Windows to do its magical check of my connection settings.

Checking if I have 128-bit security it’s definitely not going to help, for F’s sake.

Click the Back button? Try another link? I wasn’t clicking on a link!

And it says it can’t find a server, or had a DNS error. Bullshit. WhatTF use is that?

(This was in Windows 2000/IE6. Have they fixed this in Windows XP?)

A few snippets

Clinging to IE, but wishing there were more security zones, so you can tighten the thumbscrews to varying degrees where appropriate? Add a fifth security zone to IE. (via Greg)

Once upon a time to display JPEGs in DOS, you had to run an obscure JPEG Viewer program, and on my ancient rattling 286, it took a good few seconds to look at the file and actually show it on the (16 colour) VGA screen. Nowadays JPEG display is built into practically everything. Which makes Microsoft’s JPEG display vulnerability doubly-scary. Affected software: just about everything they sell. (Microsoft thanks those who work with them to protect customers, by putting their e-mail address on their web page so they can be bombarded with spam.)

Looking for a freebie FTP client for Windows, but sick of CoreFTP’s vagaries, WSFTP’s oldness (is it even Y2K compliant?), and IE/Explorer’s astounding lack of functionality? FileZilla rocks.