Friday 20 June 2008

Firefox 3 is out

I've been looking through some of the site stats here on CairnsBlog.

I run server software that monitors visitor activity, recording where the traffic is coming from. I also use Google Analytics which tells me way too much about everyone that logs, their patterns, and who they shagged last Saturday night in City Place. I rarely bother trawling deep down into the data, but it's sometimes nice to have a peep.

During the run up to the Council election, I had two formal requests to track users who posted objectionable comments. This is provided done in very extreme cases, where something seriously defamatory is posted by a reader. It is always only up to my discretion if I supply such info, unless the police get involved, which is hardly likely to occur. Anyway, I didn't want to freak anyone out, but if you haven't already, my Privacy Policy highlights this. Out of 130,000+ unique hits to CairnsBlog, only two baddies isn't that bad.

The stats engine gives me all kinds of stuff, like when a Councillor or staff were reading CairnsBlog at 10:34pm at night, a week out from the election!

The majority of folk have embraced this new media in Cairns, which has allowed instant dialogue debate and rebuttal. 99.99% of comment is not censored, edited or banned. So long as commenters who write follow the Posting Comments Policy, I'll encourage any debate. I'll even allow you say rude words on here like Floppy Bananas, Rate Rises, Big Pussy (ABC's Pat Morrish did that on air!), even 'Bryan Law is a nutcase' (however, he will tell you he's the most peaceful nutcase in Cairns).


Back to the purpose of this wee rant. At times I hark back to my school days of being a data nerd, so I'm going to publish on a semi-regular basis, the site stats, for all to see. I did this in November. So, I was looking at the type of web Browsers visitors to CairnsBlog are using and here's the breakdown of the main web browser that read this site....
I use both IE and Firefox. At times, FF is way more stable, even on Vista. The IE browser is getting smarter, which predictive searching in the search bar, as you type. Some of these features are powered by Google Apps plug ins I have to admit.

Firefox pioneered multiple tabs. It also remembers what you have opened if your system crashes, and if you're like me, I have around 10 pages open at any one time. Gosh, where were we all pre-Windows! Oh that's right, WordPerfect 3.1 !

I've just installed the new Mozilla Firefox today, so will let you know how it goes. The folk behind Firefox, were aiming to set a world record for most downloaded software in a 24 hour period, with its release of version 3.0 (this happened on Tuesday just gone!). Over than 8 million downloads were recorded.

Those already who use Firefox will need little encouraging to get the latest version. You’ll love the new plug-ins. For net freaks, here's a tech review of IE 7 and the new Firefox.

Anyway, if you're reading this at the office, get back to work, or I'll tell your boss!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you havn't already, I would encourage you to try Opera, some of the plugins that are so popular with Firefox users are basically copies of Opera features.

http://my.opera.com/community/blog/opera-9-5

Anonymous said...

i hate mozilla/firefox soooo much, has dirty spyware in it!