browsers

I have recently been advancing my work in mobile theming and architecture for a few different websites, as I agree with many others who have said before that the web will become mobile (meaning it needs to display equally well on a smartphone, a tablet, and the desktop) in the next 5-10 years... and we need to be ready for that!

Here are some device usage statistics for the past month on a variety of websites I maintain (I only mention the top three - Blackberry, Symbian, etc. are too low to worry about them at this point):

Archdiocese of St. Louis

• iPhone - 1,253 visits, 2.43 pages/visit
• Android - 434 visits, 2.76 pages/visit
• iPad - 296 visits, 3.98 pages/visit

St. Louis Review

• iPhone - 479 visits, 1.74 pages/visit
• Android - 171 visits, 1.57 pages/visit
• iPad - 148 visits, 2.45 pages/visit

For the past year, I've watched the HTML5 <video> element debate (mostly over video formats/containers) with a great interest—I abhor having to use Adobe Flash on my sites to embed video, especially since that means many videos don't work on my Linux workstation (which doesn't have Flash), or on my iPhone/iPad.

The HTML5 <video> element (and similarly, the less-supported <audio> element) promises to take away the stress of having to have flash players, FLV-encoded video, etc. just to show a viewer a non-static piece of content.

In its simplest form, you can add the following code to embed a video on your page:

<video src="video-file.m4v"></video>

On my Drupal sites, I've been wanting to be able to simply grab an m4v video exported from iMovie, QuickTime, or straight from my camera, attach it to a post via a filefield, and have it display. In the old days, I would use SWFTools to embed the video using Flash.

I've found a solution that, in my opinion, is much more elegant, using the <video> element, with a Flash fallback for Internet Explorer:

1. I set up a filefield with which I can attach an m4v file to a piece of content.
2. I enabled Custom Formatters (an excellent Drupal module for CCK), and set up a simple formatter for this filefield with the code below:

Despite Microsoft including Internet Explorer in all its operating systems, people are installing FireFox as their default browser at an astonishing rate. I take pride in the fact that all but two of the sites I help maintain have already seen FireFox (and sometimes even Safari) overtake Explorer (all versions combined) as the most used browser.

FireFox far surpasses IE on any even remotely tech-oriented website.

The sites that still get more Explorer traffic are parish and Archdiocesan websites (which are typically visited by an older demographic, and/or people who are using office computers).

Germany, apparently, is the first country in which Explorer's long-standing crown as the most-used browser has been taken away by FireFox.

Of course, having 99% of the web use FireFox would be just as bad as 99% using Internet Explorer. I'm hoping Safari, Chrome, FireFox, and Internet Explorer all stay around awhile and help spark more innovation and speed in the browser arena.

Are you still using Internet Explorer? Why? The only thing I've used it for in the past two years is to test sites and make sure they work for the underprivileged part of the population who is forced (willingly or no) into using the sadness that is IE 6, 7 or even 8. Hopefully 9 will be an improvement... but it might be too little too late.