In 1752, September had only 19 days.

Trend in browser usage, as seen by w3schools (or predicting IE6's death)

I've had my share of venting out my frustrations on IE6 for the last few weeks. Feeling frustrated, I googled for "predicting IE6 death". A few minutes later brought me to w3schools' web browser trend page:

w3schools publishes the web browser used by people visiting their website here from 2002 up to now (2008).

I was bored, and wondered how the data would look like. So after a few minutes of eating BeautifulSoup, massaging a vim script, grokking gnuplot, spitting some perl phlegm, and waving the imagemagick wand, here's the result:



From left: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2008 (chrome).

The red line at the beginning is IE6. The green line at the beginning is IE5.
We can see IE6 dominating from 2003 up to 2005, in which year it drops due to a new kid on the block: Firefox, which is a reincarnation of Mozilla (the blue line, and later purple from 2006 onwards). The green line at the end (from 2006 onwards) is IE6. The colors are the default ones given by gnuplot.

2009 would be an interesting one to watch out for.

Until the next post, happy new year!