Best Practice Ezine #96 - IE 7 Beta 3 Statistics and Update

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Best Practice Ezine #96 - IE 7 Beta 3 Statistics and Update

This week I want to give you an update of Internet Explorer 7 and provide an insight into website statistics for browsers.  However, firstly, I want to thank those who have sent details of handy tools, utilities and programs, their recommendations will feature in a future ezine.

Topics for Ezine #96 Internet Explorer 7

• IE 7 Statistics
• IE 7 Beta 3 update
• A Scam to avoid
• Review of Google's Chrome

IE 7 Statistics

I thought that you may like the inside story on the uptake of Internet Explorer 7. The official average usage of IE 7 is 1.7% (as supplied by W3School for June 2006).

However, here is a comparison with the IE 7 stats from my sites (June 2006):
Computer Performance 9.1%.
Fashion-era 0.3%
Will and Guy's Humour 1.3%

My conclusion is that as Computer Performance readers are IT professionals, they are more likely to try IE 7 than the average internet reader.

What is also interesting from the W3School statistics is that use of Mozilla peaked in May at 25.7%.  I wonder if IE 7 will halt the uptake of Mozilla Firefox?

On the Computer Performance site Mozilla's share is still rising but has only reached 18%.  Amazingly, on Fashion Era just 6% of the visitors use Mozilla, on 'Will and Guy Humour' the share is 17%.   As Fashion-era's visitors are mainly female, I cannot help wonder if there is a gender bias whereby women avoid IE 7 and Mozilla and favour IE 6.  Incidentally, Fashion-era has 3 times the visitors of the other sites, therefore the figures are not a fluke.

If you are looking for handy network utilities, try some of the free downloads at Tools4Ever

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 Update

When I decided to update from Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 to Beta 3 I was miffed that you had to uninstall IE 7 Beta 2.  I was so annoyed that I almost decided to wait for the final product.  In the event, I should not have worried that I would lose all my favorites because the uninstall  of beta 2, followed by the install of beta 3 worked incredibly smoothly.

Since I wrote last about IE 7 I have got the hang of the tabs.  What I now do, is what Microsoft designed users to do, namely to open only one instance of IE 7, but add tabs as I browse.  With IE 6, I was a devil for opening zillions of instances.   What I also like with IE 7 is the ability to have multiple home pages, thus when I launch my browser at the start of the day, my 4 favorite pages open automatically (you can have more than 4 favorites if you wish).

The killer reason to update from IE 6 is printing, IE 7 is really intelligent at calculating the margins and thus not chopping off pieces of text.  As I mentioned in my earlier article if you have a CRT monitor, as opposed to an LCD then you may wish to turn off IE 7's 'Clear Type' font display.  If so, this is what to do: Open IE 7, select Tool's menu (far Right), Internet Options, Advanced (Tab), then scroll down and remove the tick from 'Use Clear Type'.

I have not found much new specifically Beta 3, I can concur that Microsoft have cured the rendering bugs which caused Beta 2 to issue nasty error messages then close.  Microsoft have made improvements to RSS, not surprising as RSS seems to be a fast growing technology.  They have also added add the email button back, but I don't use this feature.  However, I did download the new version of Windows Defender from Microsoft's site.

In my 3 months of browsing I have only come across one phishing site, and even that looked like a false positive.  This leads me to believe that you are never going to beat the bad guys.  This does not mean that we should stop blocking each scam as it arises, it's just that I never have complete confidence that ingenious baddies won't get around any security system.

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A Scam to Avoid

On a matter vaguely related to security, my old friend Mad Mick has just returned from a holiday in Riga, Latvia.  Mick explained that the currency in Latvia is the Lat, moreover, one Lat is very nearly equal to one British pound, which makes the conversion maths easy for Mick.

After Mick arrived at his holiday apartment, situated on the bank of the river Daugava, he unpacked (did not take long) and headed for the nearest bar.  Being a sociable type, Mick soon fell into conversation with Ivan (luckily everybody seems to speak some English).  They got chatting and Ivan explained to Mick that in Latvia there is a tourist Lat and a Local Lat.  With the tourist Lat, vodka cost 6 Lats a bottle, but paying with Local Lats the same bottle cost only 2 Lats.  Ivan took Mick to a shop where they made some amazingly cheap purchases funded by a big bundle of Ivan's Local Lats.  Mick calculated that the goods Ivan bought only cost about one third of the tourist Lat.

Now for the scam; Ivan offered to change Mick's British Pounds not for 1 tourist Lat (Official rate), but for 2 Local Lats.  The shop keeper is on the scam, and the 'Local Lats' are either worthless old communist currency, or else modern counterfeited notes.  I mean would you know what a 100 Lat bill looked like?

So far I believe Mick - more or less.  But what happened next I am not sure, Mick insists that he saw through Ivan's scam and high-tailed it back to his apartment.  However, I am not sure that Mick didn't fall for the trap.  My point is that you take all sensible security measures currently known, but when the baddies invent a new scam (or virus) it's hard for the people not to fall into the trap until it widely known.

See more on Internet Explorer 7.

Will and Guy Humour

From our many pages of jokes and funny pictures, this week I have selected the Urban Myth of =rand(200,99).

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