Create striking data visualizations with Axiis

Image via Wikipedia

How do you present data or statistics in a way that makes an impact on the audience?
They've all seen histograms, bar charts, pie charts and 2d axial graphs so many times before, all you're going to do is provoke a yawn - at best.















Take browser market share statistics.
Add Degrafa and Adobe Flex 3.
What do you get?

Google Chrome on the march - overtakes Safari

Image via Wikipedia

It's official - Chrome is now #3 in the browser charts by number of users, nudging its way past Safari, Apple's browser offering.

In a little over a year Google Chrome has risen to 4.63% market share and has overtaken Safari, at 4.46%. One possible factor in the swing of about 1% that took place in December 2009 is that Google released Chrome for OS X giving Mac users another, possibly better, lightweight and fast browser to choose from. However, since the total market share of OS X really isn't that high, it was more likely the result of steady growth in Chrome uptake, while Safari stood still.
Mashable covered this in an article yesterday, and the graph they provided shows clearly how Chrome has been steadily growing in popularity. After all, Chrome is technically faster than Safari, and was since the early days, as this chart shows, so it was only a matter of time before it overtook it in terms of its user base.


Of course, Internet Explorer is still king. Then again, my recent acquisition of a new laptop running Windows 7 came with IE8 pre-installed, just as it would have done in Windows 3.x, 95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista. The anti-trust, anti-anti-competition brigade didn't manage to change anything in that respect. Until they do, it's not a level playing field, and IE will continue to dominate. Firefox weighs in with 24.61% of the popular vote, and this is what Google are really chasing, so much so, that I think they're starting to really worry Mozilla's CEO John Lilly, and the gloves are coming off - in a way that can only hurt the interests of both companies.

Further reading

• BROWSER WARS: Google Chrome Overtakes Apple's Safari (mashable.com)
• Chrome Overtakes Safari in Browser Wars (appscout.com)
• Apple up, down in end-of-year report (tuaw.com)
• Open source browsers gaining market share (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)
• Chrome grabs market share from IE and Firefox, passes Safari (arstechnica.com)

Help beat keyloggers on public computers

This is a very good tool to use to avoid your passwords being intercepted by keyloggers.
Read this:
http://windowssecrets.com/2009/09/24/01-More-tricks-to-evade-keyloggers-on-public-PCs

Related reading

• Strong Passwords Not as Good as You Think (it.slashdot.org)
• Webroot unveils new consumer security suite (ubergizmo.com)
• Password and Phishing Protection (chris.pirillo.com)
• Email Passwords Easy Prey For Hackers (huffingtonpost.com)

Firefox 3.5 really is faster and better

Image via CrunchBase

I know, this isn't exactly news, but if you haven't upgraded to Firefox 3.5 by now, you probably should - and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

All the good things that made the majority of users choose Firefox (other than those who just blindly accepted IE because they had no idea how to do otherwise) are still there. But there are a few new features. Some are new (native JSON support, web worker threads), and some are just new to Firefox (private browsing). Other features were available in add-ons, such as Tab Mix Plus and Session Manager (closed tabs, closed windows, tab tearing).

These new or borrowed features are important factors that will contribute to Firefox staying ahead of the competition, but I think I'm not the only one who was starting to get tired of every bell and whistle slowing the browser down. Safari wasn't going to tempt me away, but Chrome - while it didn't impress at first - started to really grow on me. Thanks to Chrome View, I could set certain sites to load up in Chrome instead. I'd noticed that Firefox 3.0.x, while it felt like an improvement at first, seemed to have terrible trouble with sites with deeply nested links. It simply took a ridiculously long time to load such sites, making the browsing experience pretty unbearable in the process.

So, the main area for improvement for Mozilla to look at, for me, was speed. Chrome and Safari had it. Chrome had some neat features too (even if Safari had nothing), but it had no add-ons (and probably never will). Once I heard that Firefox 3.5.x was much faster than Firefox 3.0.x I was very nearly sold. It was just a matter of time before all my favourite add-ons were confirmed compatible with 3.5 and then I'd be on my way.

My favourite add-ons (all FF 3.5 ready :)
- Ad Block Plus (essential)
- Greasemonkey (essential)
- Personas
- Tab Mix Plus (quite redundant now though)
- Selenium IDE (essential)
- Flashgot
- Firebug (essential)
- Speed Dial (essential)
- Stumbleupon
- Forecastfox
- Zemanta

Now that I have upgraded, since all the add-ons listed above are supported, I can vouch for greatly improved performance. The claims from Mozilla were that FF 3.5 is over 2x faster than FF 3.0, while benchmark tests on many sites claim it's up to 2.5x faster. All I can say so far is that I can feel a huge improvement. Most of the frustration has been removed, and I don't think I'll be reaching for Chrome quite so often from now on.

Performance index comparative (OS: Win Vista) from lfie.net

Futher reading

• Tab Mix Plus Beta For Firefox 3.5 (techie-buzz.com)
• New hint of gallery for Chrome themes emerges (thaibrother.com)
• Firefox 3.7a1pre Portable lets you try before you install (downloadsquad.com)
• Google building 3D hardware boost into Chrome (thaibrother.com)
• Firefox 3.5 performance 250% (lfie.net)
• Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 (mashable.com)
  

Improving Firefox Performance

You may or may not have noticed, but since the heady days of late FF2, Firefox has apparently gotten slower on some websites with deeply nested links. I don't know why this is, but it just seems to hang for (sometimes) several seconds on such sites. Friends and work colleagues have complained of exactly the same thing, on exactly the same sites.

This bugs me. There's not much I can do about it (except wait) and I've moved to FF3 now, like most people, so I'm not too enamoured with downgrading. IE7 and 8 are simply awful, Chrome is... I'm not really sure yet, and SeaMonkey, Flock and the rest are not at all bad, but not great.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm an add-on junky, and I'm not going to go cold turkey no matter how slow it gets.

FF3 is also woefully slow to start up. So what to do about it?

For the slow startup:

• Add /Prefetch:1 to your the end of your FF3 shortcut target, e.g. right click on the shortcut, click properties, add /Prefetch:1 after the target (put a space between them)

For the general slowness:

Open a new tab, type about:config in the address bar. You can either change the following values (if they exist) or change them:

• Enable pipelining to get pages to load faster - it might not work well for you, so if changing away from the default settings, be sure to take note of them so you can revert to them later if needed:

1. network.http.pipelining : true
2. network.http.proxy.pipelining : true
3. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests : 8

• Change the initial paint delay to get the page to render faster:

1. nglayout.initialpaint.delay : 0

Now, if any of these parameters don't exist, you'll have to create them. Simply right click and select the relevant parameter type, e.g. 'boolean' for a parameter that can have a true or false value, and 'integer' for a parameter that takes a numerical value. Much less common is 'string'.

Finally, I recommend this add-on:

Tweak Network

You'll see FasterFox in the search results too, but I don't really recommend it, since with the manual tweaks and Tweak Network you have it covered, and I thought it messed with FF3 a bit too much, seemingly making things worse on some occasions. Tweak Network also gives you some extra benefits when a page doesn't load, bringing up some diagnostic tools on the offending page. Try it out, it's pretty smart.

See the latest on the Browser Wars

Google Chrome is not doing so well, but it's steadily growing and has overtaken Opera. Interesting to see that some people still use Netscape too. One mystifying thing is the absence of Seamonkey and Flock - unless they are counting them under the umbrella of Mozilla. It's also interesting to see that Safari still has 7%, which, by today's standards makes it a major player (?).

Tried Google Chrome yet?

Google has revolutionized search, and made the email client seem rather unwieldy and unnecessary, but there they have been wide of the mark on a few things.

Google Desktop wasn't very good in the early days. It started out seeming a bit slow and a bit intrusive, both in terms of system resource usage and privacy.

However, I downloaded the latest enterprise version at my workplace, with a private encrypted index and support for Lotus Notes search and I was very impressed. Admittedly, the index got corrupted once and had to be rebuilt, but it has made things easy to find. This is very important when you have one hand on the phone and only one on the keyboard ;-)



So, I approached Google Chrome with some interest. I say some, because I'm not really in the market for a new browser. I love both Firefox and Opera and I can't see how much improvement can be made in this area. However, Google claimed that their browser would have a small memory footprint and wouldn't leak memory either. This sounded tempting because Firefox 3 has only improved on Firefox's tendency to hemorrhage tens of megabytes of lovely memory by a small amount. Opera leaks too, but less so. In addition to this, Google claimed that their new browser was going to be optimized for web applications, especially for gmail. This sounded good, so I decided to give it a whirl.

I was whelmed.

It's not all that special from what I've seen so far. It doesn't suck, but it doesn't blow me away, either. I've used gmail in it - it's OK I suppose, but it hardly seems all that "optimized". What's the difference between it's layout in web application mode than just hitting F11 in FF, Opera or IE? It loads quickly, sure, but then so does FF3 with no plugins. So does IE7 for that matter, but that's a steaming puddle of horse pish. The history search is nice, as you'd expect from Google, but searching your bookmarks and history in FF works well enough for me.

Remember Seamonkey? I still use it quite a bit, mainly because it reminds me of classic Mozilla - my second browser love, after Netscape. Flock has a Photobucket edition, but that's no big deal. Most people have never used Flock or Seamonkey, and never will. Chrome will have to really stand out to have any chance of making a dent in the established browser user base* - the trouble is, I'm still just not sure what makes Chrome so special.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Read this superb review at InfoQ

* I saw a BBC News report this week that stated that IE still holds 80% of the browser market

Flock goes from strength to strength

Despite being another gecko based browser, there's something different about Flock. Features like mini toolbar, Media Streams, My World, Photo Uploader and Blog Post (which, as you probably guessed, I'm using to post this) feel more substantial than the average "add-on". The general browsing experience is good - as you'd expect from any Mozilla "flava", while the bugs are few and far between.

So it's great then. Wonderful. But is it as good as Firefox or Opera? Well, no. Firefox just rocks, thanks to being the biggest, meanest gecko on the block. If you want to be able to do something, chances are that there's a Firefox only add-on that will do it for you. You can harden Firefox up and tweak it just about as much as you could possibly need and there's the real sense of ownership you get when you take that basic Firefox shell and customize it to the hilt. On the other hand, Opera puts everything you could realistically need right at your fingertips without there being the slightest suggestion of clutter or claustrophobia (which is probably Flock's ultimate failing). Opera fills you with a warm glow and puts a serene smile on your face that makes passers-by think you've gone all weird and enlightened on them. So many Firefox add-ons are just trying to mimic something that The Big O does natively, while the IE7 extension suite IE7Pro tries desperately to turn IE into Opera - and pales in comparison (plus, they can't do anything about IE's continued instability and dismal CSS support).

It's an extremely pretty and useful browser: definitely better than Internet Explorer 7 (but let's face it, IE7 sucks something awful), possibly better than Seamonkey (but we like that one for it's plain, no-nonsense approach) but still not as good as Firefox or Opera. The great thing about browsers is that you can find a use for them all, and Flock has found it's niche in the area of photo account management and social browsing. I use it to keep tabs on my Photobucket and Flickr accounts and upload new photos there. Firefox is my general use browser and Opera is for mail and blogging (it has the best password wand in the business, so it's great for switching accounts).

Perhaps I should be comparing Flock to Maxthon... but I'll get to that browser in another post.

Blogged with Flock

Free popup killer

Someone asked me today if I knew any programs that did a good job of killing popups.
I made three recommendations:

1. Switch to Firefox, or better still, Opera
2. Make sure popup blocking is enabled at the browser level
   
3. Install Ad Block Plus (a Firefox add-on)*

As for a program that will kill popups for you - this simply isn't necessary. If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, then get Spysweeper - it is a great anti-malware program that monitors your system for changes and blocks popups, amongst other things. Whether you have the moula or not, however, there is a no-cost solution for Windows users:

Edit the hosts file
Win XP: Click Start, Run and type "notepad c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Win 2k: Click Start, Run and type "notepad c:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Now edit the file to map the domains of the nasty popups you want to block, like this:


Note the lines are composed of two columns. The left column is the IP address you want to map the hostname to, while the right column is where you enter the hostname/domain name.

The hosts file is basically a text file that maps hostnames to an IP address - it will be the first place your computer will look when a hostname needs to be resolved, so it overrides anything obtained from the DNS server.

So, when a popup from www.partypoker.com is triggered, it maps to 127.0.0.1, which is your computer's loopback or localhost address, but since the page does not in fact reside there, it cannot load, and you will at most see a page not found instead of a nasty, annoying and potentially malicious popup.

The downside with this approach is that it is manual, and you have to get the popup at least once to add it to the list of "blocked" domains. The upside, of course, is that it is free.

* if you insist on persevering with Internet Explorer, then get "IE-Spyad", a registry file that will add a massive blacklist to your restricted sites list in IE.

Firefox or IE? Strange answer to security question

Here's the jist - "not-for-profit", "independent" Honeynet Project undertakes study of browser security, using 30000 known exploit servers and find that Firefox shows up more remote code execution vulnerabilities than IE and Opera put together.

Thing vs. thing demonstrating that Firefox does more of something than IE and Opera put together (like ruling and not sucking, for example):


Yet, despite these amazing findings, I still use Firefox. Why? Well, because it's more useful, a pleasure to use and, in my experience, more reliable and secure. Oh, and it doesn't suck ass.

Opera is one hell of a good browser, but it won't be my first choice for some time. It may be high on security in this test, but that's probably because nothing is quite sure how to attack it - or its user base is so small it's not worth figuring out its vulnerabilities. Besides, there are a few sites and gadgets that don't work well (or at all) in it - though that probably says more about the way they are coded than it does about Opera compatibility. No SeaMonkey or Safari in this study.

Not convinced? Join the debate.
Preaching to the converted, am I? Join the debate anyway. Just for japes.