FireFox Overtakes IE

How come I didn't hear about this until today? (Click on the graph above to see it clearer.) Perhaps it just went past my radar when I wasn't watching. As a (semi) oldtimer I remember the huge news it was when IE overtook Netscape (see - I told you I was old). Originally Netscape owned the browser market, and not just by a small margin, but by huge margins. Then MS, who up till then seemed to have missed the fact that the Internet was going to be important, released IE. The original Windows 95 did not include the browser, but later OEM versions did. Since then it has always been bundled with Windows, although some court cases that MS lost required them to change how integrated it was. In it's heyday it apparently held 95% of the market share, mostly because until more recently, the collapse of Netscape left no viable contenders (as with several other products AOL managed to kill off a successful product by mismanaging it - IMHO).

A few years ago FireFox appeared on the scene (ironically rising from the ashes of the Netscape code). Besides FireFox, Apple has been promoting its browser Safari (and of course that is the default browser in Mac OS). A few other browsers appear as viable alternatives, especially Opera and Google's Chrome. Despite this however IE has held dominant. FireFox for example was released (final not beta) in 2004 - and five years is a long time on the Interwebs. However IE has been slowly losing ground. At one point though it seemed as the competitors were poaching from each other and not affecting IE.

Now, in 2009 we see that IE has finally been toppled from the king of the pile. Although me not hearing about this before now (May) really surprises me. FireFox is definitely my favourite browser, but I truly support multiple browsers in that I want them all to be successful enough to survive. I do not like monopolies of any sort. It may be hard to see in this chart because of the scale, it is interesting to see that the three "other" competitors listed above all have positive trends (this is more obvious if a logarithmic scale is used - see the closeup below). Despite the fact that I have no love for MS I hope that we can see a levelling off where multiple browsers trade the king of the hill position but essentially remain equal. This might actually lead the developers to make them all render pages the same (a holy grail for web developers).

For the record - my bet is that Chrome will be the next to the top (although it could take a couple of years).
Links:

• Wikipedia on Internet Explorer
  
• Wikipedia on FireFox
  
• Wikipedia on Opera
• Wikipedia on Safari
• Wikipedia on Chrome

I heard about this through Twitter via @kmesiab
Chart data from W3Schools.

Logarithmic scale applied to make the trending more obvious for the "other" browsers.

Let your mind coast

You can still get somewhere coasting.

I've long been an advocate for letting the subconscious do some of the heavy lifting when trying to solve problems. Many times my mind has solved problems for me - when I wasn't thinking about the problem. In extreme cases I have even woken from sleep knowing the solution to a problem (in the most bizarre example I dreamed I was a piece of data that had to navigate an algorithm). In any case - my advice has been to work on a problem until you seem to have hit a dead-end or impassable obstacle. At that point you should do something else - preferably something else that does not require heavy thinking (but at least make sure it is something else).

Recent research shows that this idea works. This new study (see links below) specifically examined when your brain is involved in a fairly repetitive or automatic function. In the study participants were given a fairly easy, repetitive task that the researchers knew led to mind wandering. The participants brains were scanned and the researchers discovered that the part of their brain that works on problem solving was quite active while they were involved in the given task. This is interpreted as meaning that while they were involved in the given easy task, they put their brain in neutral. And, the brain noticing that it had some free time decided that it would work on some of the harder problems it had been storing up (no indication of what exactly these problems were, but we always have something going in our lives on that needs to be fixed or organized).

Here is a link to a GizMag description of the study, and even better, a link to an interview given by one of the researchers (Dr. Kalina Christoff) on CBC's Quirks and Quarks science show (radio show, so audio only).