The Answer to Schenk’s Question
In the post in the quickthoughts section today I beckoned the MikeDiDonato.com readers to switch to firefox. Ryan Schenk asked what the browser stats are for this website.
Great question Ryan!
Let’s take a look at the last 100 visitors.
Oooh, exciting! let’s add the varieties together for a better picture.
Firefox: 47%
IE: 46%
Safari: 7%
FIREFOX WINS! but… just barely. That means that 46% of my readers are looking at a broken Internet Explorer page. It’s not pretty! let’s get some screen shots so y’all can see the differences.
First, IE.
Notice the poor colors in the Quickthoughts and the Features section? NASTY! Even more disturbing is that if I post a picture… the post flies down to the bottom of the screen. WEAK!
Now, Firefox.
Oh what elegant colors! And all the posts are lining up just right. Let’s make 2008 a great year for MikeDiDonato.com
Let’s all get rid of Internet Explorer.
Firefox is the sweetness… however I can’t use it at work…. Opera is allowed which can be better than internet explorer, but sometimes it blows up the internet.
One should keep in mind that it is possible for a browser to identify itself to your server as a different browser than what it really is. Nerdier and/or more obscure browsers will even let the user pick which user agent they’d like to identify themselves as, so for instance I might be able to configure Opera to identify itself as IE 6 if I wanted to. (Not sure if Opera can really do that, just picked it out of thin air.)
When I request this page with Safari 3, it tells your server that it is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/523.10.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.10.6
Interesting. Why?
Some sites — like Sony’s Connect store — will only render if they think you’re the “correct” browser (often IE). You can fool them into rendering in Firefox by changing your user agent.
You can do it in Firefox by:
Type “about:config” in the address bar
Right click, “New >” “String”
Type “general.useragent.override”
Then put whatever you want in, this would be IE6 on WinXP “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
Here’s a list of junk you could put in there if you wanted:
http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/browser_ids.htm