Browser Wars and Microsoft Word Alternatives


A couple interesting news tidbits were announced today. The first is that Firefox 3.5 is now the most used browser on the Internet according to StatCounter, but that is only because they are breaking up all the browsers by version. If you look at the chart, Firefox 3.5 just barely tops IE7 which is dropping quickly as most IE users are switching to IE8. I bet most Vista users are using IE8, and all Win7 users should be using IE8 as well, helping to boost its numbers since any new PC should be running IE8 now. If you add up IE6, IE7 and IE8 they still add up to about 55% where all the Firefox versions add up to about 30%. Safari has slowly increased to about 5% and the "Other" category climbing to nearly 10%, probably fueled by Chrome/Chromium which are not listed specifically. I checked the latest stats on our own very popular Washington University Meteorites site, and on that very scientifically oriented site, over 35% of our users use Firefox and about 57% use IE 6, 7 or 8, so we are very close to the StatCounter statistics. Interestingly, 57% of our Meteorite visitors are from the US, and the second most popular individual country is France at a distant 6.3%, followed by Canada at 5.4%, Germany at 2.9% and the UK at 2.5%.

The other big software news today is the federal patent lawsuit verdict against Microsoft telling them they have to stop selling Word, which means no more Microsoft Office sales anywhere. I guess anyone receiving a new laptop or netbook over Christmas will not be able to purchase Office to install on their systems. Instead they can try better open source alternatives like AbiWord or OpenOffice.org. It does not hurt that the alternatives are free and very compatible with Word documents, including the annoying DOCX format introduced with Office 2007. I love cool, free software!

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