So what will happen to Firefox will they ever pass 25% or is this a downward spiral and within a year Chrome will have that 25% and Firefox will be at 15% or so? With all the new stuff like the Google's App Store that Google is adding to Chrome its usage will have to grow fast.

Well Firefox never reached 25%, as a matter of fact Firefox is at less than 20% market share today. Here is what the stats look like for the last 12 months according to NetMarket Share

As you can see Chrome has almost surpassed Firefox, I think that in 2 or 3 months Google will have surpassed Firefox. A lot of people still use Firefox because of the fact that some extensions don't exist on Chrome. NoScript is a big one, Chrome has actually somethign similar, it is called ScriptNo. FireBug is another reason that people stick with FireFox for now. Even Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is recommending Chrome now, they did not pick FireFox.

A lot of people are ranting about the fact that Firefox has become bloated, yes compared to Internet Explorer it might look lean but compared to Chrome it certainly does not. We have to wait and see what happens, I will revisit this again early next year.

I also wonder if the release of Windows 8 will do anything to make Internet Explorer gain some market share again?

Here is what was posted on the com.googlegroups.google-caja-discuss list

Javascript has fundamental flaws that cannot be fixed merely by evolving the
language. We'll adopt a two-pronged strategy for the future of Javascript:

- Harmony (low risk/low reward): continue working in conjunction with
TC39 (the EcmaScript standards body) to evolve Javascript
- Dash (high risk/high reward): Develop a new language (called Dash) that
aims to maintain the dynamic nature of Javascript but have a better
performance profile and be amenable to tooling for large projects. Push for
Dash to become an open standard and be adopted by other browsers. Developers
using Dash tooling will be able to use a cross-compiler to target Javascript
for browsers that do not support Dash natively.

A new language will be announced at the goto conference named Dart, the keynote will be: Opening Keynote: Dart, a new programming language for structured web programming

Assuming that Dash is now called Dart, here is what it is supposed to do, again according to the posting on the com.googlegroups.google-caja-discuss list

Dash is the leapfrog effort that is designed to be a clean break from
Javascript. It will seek to keep the parts that have made the Internet so
successful, but fill in holes everyone agrees it has.

Dash is designed with three perspectives in mind:

- Performance -- Dash is designed with performance characteristics in
mind, so that it is possible to create VMs that do not have the performance
problems that all EcmaScript VMs must have.
- Developer Usability -- Dash is designed to keep the dynamic,
easy-to-get-started, no-compile nature of Javascript that has made the web
platform the clear winner for hobbyist developers.
- Ability to be Tooled -- Dash is designed to be more easily tooled (e.g.
with optional types) for large-scale projects that require
code-comprehension features such as refactoring and finding callsites.
Dash, however, does not require tooling to be effective--small-scale
developers may still be satisfied with a text editor.

Dash is also designed to be securable, where that ability does not seriously
conflict with the three main goals.

Dash will be designed to be consumed in a number of locations:

- Browser VM -- Our aspiration is that Dash will ultimately be a viable
substitute for Javascript as the native client-side language of choice
across all browsers.
- Front-end Server -- Dash will be designed as a language that can be
used server-side for things up to the size of Google-scale Front Ends. This
will allow large scale applications to unify on a single language for client
and front end code.
- Dash Cross Compiler -- Dash will be designed so that a large subset of
it can be compiled to target legacy Javascript platforms so teams that
commit to using Dash do not have to seriously limit their reach. Platforms
that have a Dash VM can operate on the original Dash code without
translation and take advantage of the increased performance. One of the
ways we will evolve Harmony is to be a better target for such compiled Dash
code.

So far we don't know much about this new language except for what they say about Dash, we can assume that it will address some of the points that were posted in the list which I shared in this post earlier

Even if this new language is better than JavaScript will all the other browser vendors be on board? Remember that Google launched the Go language last year, what happened to that?

I am skeptical about all of this but of course I could be dead wrong

Time will tell.........

We just released the first Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Despite its name, the update also works for Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1. You can read more on our team blog.

In this first release of the update, we have focused on bringing the HTML5 support up-to-date, adding CSS 3 support and bring more new API’s to the JavaScript intellisense. The plan is to make a release about every 3 months to keep Visual Studio updated with the changes made by W3C.

Here are some of the features that the Visual Studio Web Standards Update provides you with intellisense and validation for
HTML 5 features

Video & related tags
Audio & related tag
New input types like email, url, date etc
Drag & Drop support
Accessibility standard WAI-ARIA
Microdata
Schema.org

CSS3

2D Transforms
3D Transforms
Animations
Background & Borders
Basic Box Model
Basic UI
Behavior
Color
Flexible Box Layout
Fonts
Generated Content for Paged Media
Hyperlink Presentation
Line
Lists
Marquee
Media Queries
Multi Column
Namespaces
Paged Media
Presentations Levels
Ruby
Selectors
Speech
Syntax
Template Layout
Text
Transitions

Download it here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a15c3ce9-f58f-42b7-8668-53f6cdc2cd83

Read more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2011/06/15/web-standards-update-for-visual-studio-2010-sp1.aspx

Here is the info

Today we’re announcing schema.org, a new initiative from Yahoo!, Bing, and Google, to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. With schema.org, webmasters and developers can learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in search results on Bing, Google, and Yahoo!. Information and tips are available on schema.org, a one-stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to make their pages better understood by search engines.

What is Schema.org?

This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.
Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.
A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

Main site here: http://schema.org/

getting started site is here: http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

An example

Orginal HTML

With MicroData

What do you think, will you start implementing this?

These are the top beta features

• XAML Debugging with breakpoints for binding debugging
• Implicit data templates for easy UI reuse
• Double (and multi) click support
• GPU-accelerated XNA-compatible 3D and immediate-mode 2D API
• Low-latency sound effects and WAV support
• Real operating system windows and multi-display support
• Significant performance improvements, fixes and much more

More info about new features here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future/

There are also these items for download

• Silverlight 5 Beta Tools for Visual Studio SP1 (required)
• Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5 (optional)
• Silverlight 5 Features Document (optional)

Download Silverlight 5 Beta and the optional downloads here: http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-5-beta/

Here is what they say on the channel 9 site

Just when you were expecting to hear more about IE9 on this opening day of Mix '11, and today we'll be talking about the IE10 Platform Preview. IE10 builds on IE9 with support for even more standards like CSS3 gradients, multi-column, and grid layouts. In this video Rob Mauceri walks us through some of the new features of IE10 including an example of flowing of content in multi-column layouts.

Here is Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president in charge of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft wearing a shirt with the IE 10 logo during the IE keynote ate Mix 11 today.





Developers can download the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview at http://www.IETestDrive.com and provide direct feedback through new code refreshes approximately every 12 weeks.

I wonder if they are going to do a more aggressive release schedule like the Chrome browser. Anything is better than the waiting period between IE6 and IE7, that was insane.

Make sure to check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/First-Look-Internet-Exploer-10-Platform-Preview

Also make sure to check out Mix 11 here http://live.visitmix.com/ for the keynotes over the next 3 days

Smart phones

As you can see from that chart, in January iPhone was at 70% and it ended up in December at 34%, Android went from 13% to 40%, Android activations are almost double now compared to Apple's in the last quarter. My predictions is that Android will have at least 55% share by the end of next year. It is not all doom and gloom for Apple however, the iPad managed to rise to almost 19% since April. Below are the numbers that were used to generate the chart.

Browsers

The year 2010 was a very good year for Chrome, Chrome has more than doubled its share, FireFox lost about 8% and IE lost about 5%. Now that Chrome has a lot of the Extensions that FireFox has I think even more people will switch to Chrome, I have been using Chrome since the first beta version and have never gone back to fireFox or IE. My predictions is that Chrome will capture a third of the market by the end of next year.

Below are the numbers that were used to generate the chart.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 6 is slowly going to below 5% share, IE8 is the most used browser with almost 70% share. I tried IE 9 a couple of times, I like the speed and the other improvements it has but it won't be enough to make me switch from Chrome

Below are the numbers that were used to generate the chart.

Windows

Windows 7 has been the most used version of windows for the past two month on this site. XP is still going strong..especially in corporations. Vista's share dropped in half.

Below are the numbers that were used to generate the chart.

That is it for this post...what are your predictions for the next year...what will Chrome, Android and iPad end up at. What about windows phone 7..will that platform have a chance? Let me know in the comments...

Some info:

This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability in ASP.NET. The vulnerability could allow information disclosure. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could read data, such as the view state, which was encrypted by the server. This vulnerability can also be used for data tampering, which, if successfully exploited, could be used to decrypt and tamper with the data encrypted by the server. Microsoft .NET Framework versions prior to Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 are not affected by the file content disclosure portion of this vulnerability.

And a little more info:

An information disclosure vulnerability exists in ASP.NET due to improper error handling during encryption padding verification. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could read data, such as the view state, which was encrypted by the server. This vulnerability can also be used for data tampering, which, if successfully exploited, could be used to decrypt and tamper with the data encrypted by the server. Note that this vulnerability would not allow an attacker to execute code or to elevate their user rights directly, but it could be used to produce information that could be used to try to further compromise the affected system. In Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and above, this vulnerability can also be used by an attacker to retrieve the contents of any file within the ASP.NET application, including web.config.

Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-070.mspx

The Padding Oracle Exploit Tool is available here http://netifera.com/research/ in case you want to see how it works

Here is a video of the attack in action

Again, get the patch here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-070.mspx

I decided to look at some stats for this site and compared April of this year to April of last year. The image below has this information.

As you can see FireFox lost about 10% while Chrome gained 9% and Safari gained almost 1%. So what is going on, are the early adapters switching to Chrome from FireFox? Take a look at the NetMarket stats

FireFox had 24.72% of all bowser traffic in November, in April it had 24.59%, FireFox didn't gain anything in the last 6 months.

So what is going on? When Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant browser it was very easy for FireFox to grab market share. Internet Explorer 6 was a mess, Internet Explorer 8 is better but still not as good as either FireFox or Chrome in my opinion.

So what will happen to FireFox will they ever pass 25% or is this a downward spiral and within a year Chrome will have that 25% and FireFox will be at 15% or so? With all the new stuff like the Google's App Store that Google is adding to Chrome its usage will have to grow fast.

What browser do you use and did you try Chrome and if so did you like it?

Internet Explorer 9 is available for a test drive

Microsoft detailed its support for a number of HTML5 specifications, including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and the video and audio tags using industry-standard (H.264/MPEG4 and MP3/AAC) codecs, among others. In addition, Microsoft demonstrated a new JavaScript engine that uses the multiple cores of today’s modern chips to effectively manage computing resources and improve Web performance. By combining increased interoperability with a new JavaScript engine and Direct 2D technology, Internet Explorer 9 enables Web developers to provide users with richer experiences that render more quickly and consistently.

The new IE 9 script engine is codenamed "Chakra"
Internet Explorer 9 focuses on three key themes:

• Best interoperable HTML5
• Hardware Accelerated Graphics
• High Performance Browser

There are a bunch of HTML 5 demos available, below is the list of these demos
Border Radius
CSS3 Selectors
DOM Events
DOM Style
HTML5 T-Shirt Designer

Webkit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results

If you look at the SunSpider results in the image below, you can see that IE 9 is much faster than IE 8.

Microsoft also announced increased support of client development through the jQuery JavaScript Library

As part of Microsoft’s broad engagement with open source communities, Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie today announced that Microsoft is investing resources to contribute to the development of the jQuery JavaScript Library to help improve the development process of standards-based Web applications. Microsoft will also work to provide better interoperability between ASP.NET and the jQuery JavaScript Library by enhancing ASP.NET so .NET developers can better incorporate jQuery capabilities. In addition, Microsoft will actively promote and distribute versions of the jQuery JavaScript Library by packaging it with popular products such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2. As a first step, Microsoft will contribute a templating engine to the jQuery JavaScript Library Team to simplify Web applications.




You can take Internet Explorer 9 for a test drive here
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

If you want more info then take a look at the press release that went out earlier: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/mar10/03-16MIX10Day2PR.mspx