The rise of the Chromebook?

Chrome as an operating system has been around for a while but has never seemingly taken off. This may be due to the fact that the cloud based nature of it has been too big of a jump for people moving away from Windows and the supposed 'safety' of Office.

However, now that the Chrome OS has had a little time to mature there appears to be far less barriers to jumping on board.

Firstly, the cost of the hardware makes it look very appealing, starting at just £199 for the lower spec model. Although their new flagship model, the Chromebook Pixel (video below) will set you back £1,049...

Secondly, the option for offline editing has improved vastly with Documents and Presentations being available to edit offline with them syncing when a connection becomes available again. Although there is still a way to go, Spreadsheets and Drawings aren't available for editing yet, this is far better than it was last year.

Lastly, it's easy to use. The Chrome OS is a 'light' version of an operating system that focuses specifically on browsing the web, document creation and portability. Ideal for taking to meetings and using as a laptop in front of the TV. If you're a diehard gamer then it's not for you but for the day-to-day browser this could prove to be a very useful machine.

The big question now is, do you feel brave enough to leave Windows behind?

Anyone surprised that IE is on the decline?

So, IE now has less than 50% of the worldwide browser market share... anyone that surprised?

With Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera as the main opposition players on the market it was only a matter of time until IE fell to less than half the market usage. The big surprise of the report from StatCounter is that it's Chrome that's eating into their share and not Firefox! With Google as a serious player in pretty much everything now (watch out for Google TV!) it really shouldn't be a massive surprise that they are keen to take the majority share of the browser usage. After all, it is pretty quick!

The drop in usage has been partly attributed to the European Commissions ruling on Microsoft offering an easy way to select your preferred browser. But, can IE9 save the day or could this really be the beginning of the end for IE dominance?

Having looked at the Browser usage stats for beds.ac.uk we have seen a decrease in IE usage of 13.5% in the last 12 months with a 10% increase in the usage of Chrome and a 3% increase in the usage of Safari! So we're reflecting the stats within our own sites as well.

I've pulled off some stats from StatCounter showing the browser usage for Worldwide, Europe and the UK separately:

Worldwide IE usage

European IE usage

UK IE usage

Mobile devices... should we be worried?

I read an interesting posting by Mike Nolan at Edge Hill University about the use of mobile devices to view their website. So, in the interests of sharing information I thought i'd not a similar exercise for us! I've matched the dates used to run the report, 14th April – 13th June 2010 and included the resulting pie chart stats of unique visits below.

What you might notice is that we are also seeing a large number of visits from iPhone and iPod users to the website. In fact, the only really difference seems to be that we have more SymbianOS users, probably due to our selection of company mobile phone more than anything else.

So, should we be worried about the increase in mobile usage? Probably not just yet, our site is optimised to work rather well on Apple devices and by the time mobile browsing really takes off, things will have changed again! Just to put the sizes in context the total amount of visits for that period is 454,186...

One last thought though... poor LG...

Opera Mini for the iPhone

In a move that no-one was expecting Apple has allowed the Opera Mini browser onto the iPhone. As someone that uses Opera Mini on my current mobile I can vouch for how well the browser displays content. If you're lucky enough to be an iphone owner head over and download a copy.

Opera Mini 5 for iPhone

Firefox goes mobile...

We're big fans of Mozilla's Firefox browser and we have 22% of our site visitors using the browser. So, we're all looking forward to the release of Firefox for mobile and the interesting features that will be available! The one we're looking forward to is the ability to share your Firefox preferences, history, and bookmarks between your desktop and mobile. Creating a seamless browsing experience will allow users to continue their browsing on the commute home from where they left off at work. There's also a rather nifty way of displaying tabs which you can see in the video below.

We've seen a rise in the use of mobile browsers to access our websites, the most notable being the iPhone's Safari browser and Opera Mini, to the point of having 1.42% of all our visitors on a mobile device. Not a huge amount but up considerably on last year and we're expecting it to continue to rise as mobile browsers and browsing speeds improve.

The Firefox mobile browser will initially be available for Nokia's N900 but other handsets are expected to follow shortly. Check out the highlight video below or visit the site for a Beta version if you're lucky enough to have a Nokia N900.