funkatron.com

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years as a grown-up, it’s this: Don’t make assumptions. All too often, things I’ve thought were no-brainers turned out to be questionable at best, like:

• John Romero will make an awesome game on his own
• Sony and Microsoft have made Nintendo irrelevant
• Women will find my company tolerable

I often see techie types making assumptions based on their experience, like “program A is unusable” (because on his rather oddly set-up system, it crashed on install) or “no real programmers write in Ruby” (because he doesn’t know anyone personally who do) or “only a tiny fraction of Mac users browse with Firefox” (because it’s the default browser out of the box, and average users always use the default, right?).

It was this last assertion, and the accompanying statement “I don’t have to prove something so obvious” that inspired this article. I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if Safari had a majority of the Mac browser market, but my personal experience had been that a fair number of non-techie Mac folks use Firefox. Beyond that, I wanted to get some real data, and not make assumptions. If you can’t provide some basis for your assertions, they’re not worth much. It’s a clear sign of a bad argument, and little gets me more worked up than weak logic.

The audience for a web site has a pretty significant impact on what browsers we see visitors using. Tech-oriented sites tend to have a higher percentage of users running alternate browsers like Firefox. You’ll get more Camino users on a Mac-oriented site, and Konqueror will show up more often on sites with content for Linux users. That means we have to at least take into account the content of the site when drawing conclusions from the numbers.

Here’s what I’ve found myself, and what others have shared with me, so far. Understandably, some folks shared their stats with me asked to remain anonymous, or that the site they come from not be revealed. I’ve described them as best I can. Also note that in some cases I received just info on Mac browsers, and others I had data for all browsers. I’ve calculated a ratio and “winner” at the end of each entry.

Is this data conclusive? Of course not. It’s a small sample of a handful of sites, and not particularly popular ones at that. But, it does seem to at least indicate that Firefox may be quite a bit more popular among Mac users than I – and certainly other people – thought.

If you’d like to contribute data, just drop me a line or leave a comment.

Funkatron.com

This site, obviously strongly tech-oriented, but also gets a decent amount of sport-oriented search engine traffic

Approx ratio: 1.5/1 Firefox

• Screenshot

Sorority web site

Non-tech focused, active site for members of sorority

Approx ratio: 1.1/1 Safari

EricaBaker.com

Personal blog, significant tech/mac content

Approx ratio: 1.3/1 Firefox

Abandoned non-tech subculture site

Very low, mostly search engine traffic

Approx ratio: 1/1

• Screenshot

Abandoned personal blog

Some tech/mac content

Approx ratio: 1.7/1 Firefox

New sports blog

Approx ratio: 1.1/1 Safari

Abandoned sports web site

Very low, mostly search engine traffic

Approx ratio: 2/1 Safari

• Screenshot

Low-traffic, non-tech site

Approx ratio: 3/1 Firefox

I’m not dead — I’m just busy. Spaz has had a few long-standing issues since the upgrade to AIR Beta 2, and this new version (0.3.0) fixes many of them. If you already have Spaz, just go to the Prefs tab > Upgrades > Check Now. If you don’t have Spaz installed, you can install it from the Spaz homepage.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s new in 0.3.0:

3.0 (2007-10-30)

• All timelines now retrieve all data, not just from last 24 hours (including DMs, @s, sent messages, followers/following lists)
• New theme: “Dumb Terminal.” Works best on Windows with Bistream Vera Sans Mono or Iconsolata font; OS X has readable mono fonts by default
• New window behaviors: Minimize to systray (on by default), minimize when in background, restore when in foreground
• Added Native Shell Menus under OS X
• Added System Tray Icon in Windows w/ context menu
• Added Dock item menu
• User-defined CSS tweaks file now works again
• Tweets can now be “selected.” Hit ‘@’ (SHIFT+2) to send reply to selected tweet’s user
• Prefs that require restart to be applied are now indicated
• Better descriptions of data retrieval errors; should properly determine if response timed out or if request limit is exceeded
• Fixed charcount to reset properly after successful send
• Added simple DOM context menus - currently allow user to copy URLs to clipboard
• Use ‘-khtml-user-select’ to limit selectability of elements; should eliminate many problems with onlick operations
• Popup panels should work a bit better; center properly and drag more easily. Popup panels will be moved to modal windows soon
• Upgraded to jQuery 1.2.1
• Dumped Interface lib, added jQuery.UI lib
• Fixed size of protected post icon
• Lots of code cleanup and refactoring

I’ve also created a simple screencast in Jing to show off what I think is one of the coolest, most underused Spaz features: User CSS tweaks. It lets you load up your own CSS file to modify the current theme. If you don’t like the font size or a color, you can change it yourself, without having to author a whole theme.

• Screencast: UserCSS in Spaz - a simple example (Flash required)

I didn’t record any audio with this screencast, as I didn’t have a decent mic handy. Hope it’s still helpful!

As always, direct bug reports, questions or suggestions to Spaz at Twitter.

Update: This is fixed in Speed Download 4.1.12

Suckers Early adopters like me have already downloaded the Safari 3.0 beta, because it pays to be super cool like us. However, it’s hard to be awesome when your browser crashes on startup, like mine was. It looks like the Speed Download plugin I had installed was at fault.

To remove it, I went to <My Home Directory>/Library/InputManagers/ and trashed the SpeedDownload Enhancer folder. Now Safari 3.0 starts nicely.

I wrote up a short review of the 2.0 release of the Siira web browser for OS X. Check it out over at Ars Technica.

I’ve uploaded the source code for LameBrain, my LAME-based mp3 encoder for OS X.

It’s been (ugh) nearly 4 years since LameBrain was updated. It was an enjoyable project, but I simply lost interest: I didn’t use the program myself, moving to encoding most of my music with the iTunes AAC encoder. I also had pushed the app feature wise as far as I ever intended.

Still, people continue to search for and download LameBrain every day from this site. It evidently scratches an itch for some people, and that’s a source of pride for me. So I’d hate to just sit on the program and not give others an opportunity to run with it. I think there are some valuable bits in the horribly structured code I wrote back then, and maybe someone with more drive than me will build on what’s here.

Thanks to everyone who has used LameBrain, and especially to the folks who donated money for its development. It’s been a lot of fun.

Get LameBrain source code