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Plangarden looks at browser wars
By roystahl | August 20, 2008
It is always interesting to see how an advanced technology website designed for vegetable gardening, a low technology hobby does in the browser wars.
Plangarden.com is a website to help vegetable gardeners plan and manage a vegetable garden. But behind this is the most advanced web site and application.
First the browsers:
Just two short years ago IE had the lead with 82% of the web viewers while Firefox was just under 14%. Today that has changed to 66% for IE and 28% for Firefox and Safari has posted real numbers at 5%. Apparently IE7 which was released in late 2006 only showed the world what browsing ‘could be’ as it was implementing features that Firefox already. While I am not an advocate of one over the other, it has been interesting to watch the trends over the year. It has gone from “Nothing can stop Netscape” to “Netscape is dead” to “Wow, I didn’t think Firefox would make a dent in market share any more”. Not only has Firefox made a dent, but Safari is posting some pretty impressive numbers for Plangarden considering what Apple’s overall market share is.
Flash:
Back in 2006 Flash 9 was only 9% of the Plangarden users. At the time over 14% of the vegetable gardeners where clinging to version 7. In the course of just one year that all changed. By August 2007 the numbers had changed to only 10% of the people using 8 or below. Still as I started working on a version that would only work on Flash 9 players I was a bit concerned that 10% of the people would have to upgrade or not be able to use the application. But since it has taken a year to get the whole application migrated the number are now tipped so that only a percent or two are on a version below Flash 9.
Finally OS:
All you have to do is watch the silly Apple commercials to know what is going on in the PC vs Apple war. While Apple is still a LONG ways from being a serious threat to Microsoft’s dominance, they have taken a considerable amount of market share as Vista deals with many hiccups in the new OS. Plangarden has seen a huge up tick on Macs as well. In 2006 only 3% of the gardeners where using Mac now it is up to 9%. A sizable jump for a two year period. I am now looking at getting my first Mac just to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Again, I am not here to pass judgment on IE vs Firefox or PC vs Mac. I am simply reporting on trends of vegetable gardeners. And while vegetable gardening may be a low technology activity, the vegetable gardeners themselves are fairly high tech and seem to follow trends of high tech and are more on the leading edge then the trailing edge of technology.
Go Veggy Gardeners!!!!
Topics: Vegetable Software News |
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August 26th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
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