5tags

For the almost the past year I have been tracking the visitors of this website with Shaun Inman’s Mint Analytics program. From the end of summer 2006 to December 2006 70% of my visitors used Firefox. After just checking my Mint stats I now see that 50% use Internet Explorer and only about 38% use Firefox. What Happened? Did IE7 really turn out “some what” decent and a significant potion of the web audience switched?

I have been designing my websites with Firefox in mind. To be honest I don’t even know if this site works in IE, I always just assumed that if something tiny was broken in IE, only a tiny percentage of the audience would see it. Now it is 50%! I need to get to work.

For the past 4 months Nintendo has had a trial version of the Wii internet browser available for free. This version worked very well but there were some problems that made browsing a lot harder including:

• you couldn’t zoom far enough
• you cant remove the bottom bar
• it is quite slow to load
• you can’t use a proxy
• you can’t change screen “size”

On Wednesday Nintendo released the full version of the browser. Right now the browser is available for free in the Wii Shop and requires a system update in order to download. The download is actually quite large, it took about 10 minutes to download, on a 1.5 MB/s line. This version will be free until sometime in June 2007. After that date it will be available in the Wii Shop for a reported 500 Wii points, which is about $5.00 USD.

The new version is very very good. Every single item I listed above was corrected. You can zoom in so far with perfect resolution. It also lets you zoom all the way out to see nearly the entire page in the screen. The zooming works great on video sites like You Tube and you are also able to hide the bottom taskbar so you can watch flash video 100% full screen. I am really impressed with the video quality on most You Tube clips but you have to keep in mind that they are heavily compressed and meant to “look good” on a tiny section of a computer monitor. The pages seem to load a lot faster and links are now highlighted with a blue box. This blue box “ruins” the style of some websites but it easily distinguishes the clickable links from the plain text.

Being free I highly recommend every Wii owner download it now. It will cost money within the next couple months so not only will you save money but you will have this great browser now. Get on your Wii and download it now (from the Wii Shop Channel).

I just received my Ordered List shirt from Steve Smith today. I am very impressed with the quality from Mammoth Print Shop and will consider them if I ever need shirts, buttons, or other gear. The shirt is high quality American Apparel, and of course is not made in a sweat shop. If anybody needs a shirt I suggest checking them out at Ordered List.

The following images were taken with my camera phone, i apologize for the poor quality.