It's been over a year since our last browser wars poll, so it's time for another one! This always-popular subject (over 17,000 votes last time out!) is one of my favorites as well, and we've run enough of them to see some trends over time (click for a larger version):
(Note for the chart purists out there: the time units on the X-axis are not linear, even though they are shown as such. They reflect the dates of the previous eight polls, not identical time spans on the calendar.) As you can see, Safari leads the pack, but Firefox is cutting into its lead, and may even surpass it with this poll.
To make things a bit simpler this time, any browser that received less than 25 votes in the last poll (DeskBrowse, Netscape) was lumped into Other for this poll. I haven't added any new browsers to this poll, primarily because I'm not aware of any major new releases in the last year or so.
So have at it -- let's see if Firefox surpasses Safari this time out. Spread the word, and let's see how many OS X users we can get to reply this time.
With this week's renewed attention on "Mac clones" -- we published five articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) on the subject this week on Macworld.com -- I thought it'd be interesting to gauge the interest level in these machines, so I've posted a new poll on the subject.
You'll note that one of the poll answers is "Yes if Apple makes it legal to use OS X on one." What this means is that Apple would offer a version of OS X that was legal to use on a generic PC, and that they would do their best to insure that system updates didn't break OS X on these "generic Macs."
As a side note, calling these machines "Mac clones" is quite a misnomer. A clone is an exact copy of something, which clearly these machines are not. Instead, they're more like "Generic Macs" -- OS X-running machines that are made up of a collection of generic PC parts. Regardless of what you call them, though, it will be interesting to see if Psystar gets off the ground, and what, if anything, Apple decides to do about them.
The 2008 April Fool's Day edition of macosxhints.com has now vanished into the sands of time. For those who are curious and weren't around earlier today, for a few hours this morning, Mac OS X Hints went retro:
That's just a bit of the home page; click the image for the large version -- but be warned, it's a huge (1024x3824, 513KB) PNG file. If you'd like to see the hints with the comments that were posted, just download this 960KB archive; each story and its comments are stored as an individual PNG within the archive.
(For those who may be new here, I have a long history of doing something different each year on April Fool's day. The intent isn't necessarily to fool anyone, but just to have a bit of fun to counter the other 364 days of the year. If you're interested, here are all the past April Fool's Day posts: 2003 • 2004 • 2005 • 2006 • 2007).
The feedback on this year's stunt was generally positive, and it was actually quite a lot of fun to work on -- as someone commented, it's amazing to glance back and see just how far we've come in a relatively short amount of time. While searching for OS 9 information, it became obvious just how different things were back then, and how really nice it is to be working with OS X. The road here wasn't always smooth, but the end result has (to me, anyway) been worth the struggles.
Hopefully everyone got a least a little laugh out of our brief blast down memory lane today...and if you don't like this sort of thing, well, then I suggest you mark April 1, 2009 on your calendar and stay away from the web that day :).
As I was doing some (digital) housecleaning this weekend, I wondered about drive space in general -- how much do we all have? So I figured I'd post a hard drive capacity poll to see how much storage space the typical macosxhints.com reader has at their disposal.
The only restriction is that the drives must be used in some way with your Macs, so don't count those 25 full-size external SCSI drives you've got stored away in the closet, just in case "SCSI might make a comeback someday!"
Personally, when I tallied it all up, I was surprised to find we've got over 3TB of storage space here across all our Macs...
To make up for the lack of new hints today, you could review all 473 10.5 hints, in case you missed some over the last few months. Or if you're really feeling motivated, you could browse the entire database of hints (11,300+) from oldest to newest, then test and comment on every hint's 10.5 compatibility :).
So we're five-plus years into this iPod revolution...just how many iPods do you own? I was quite shocked to find that we own seven iPods*, but I have a feeling that's nowhere near the top of the charts. Due to limits on the length of polls, I had to make some buckets for the upper end, so if you're over the top, go ahead and post a comment with your specific total :).
[Seven iPods*: My wife has an iPod mini and an iPod nano, and my collection includes a first generation Shuffle and nano, third generation 30GB iPod, fifth generation 80GB iPod, and the 8GB iPhone. I use the nano when running, fifth gen 80GB iPod for travel, and the iPhone pretty much goes everywhere. The others should be sold, but I can't bring myself to part with them :).]
After some delays due to both Macworld Expo and hearing back from all of the winners, I'm please today to announce the 10 winners in our Best Leopard Hints contest. The winners were chosen by rankings from both the public voting, and votes from the Macworld editorial team (yours truly excluded). We then took the average of both groups' scores, and used that number to create the final rankings. Note that this is the first time the winners will see what they've won -- as of now, they only know that they've won something. So without further ado, here's how things wound up...
As you can see, our winners span much of the globe, with two in Australia, one in England, and one in France. That's why it was important to us to not restrict the geographic reach of the contest. (We've now got our work cut out for us to fulfill these prizes in all those places, but that's our problem! We'll be working with the winners over the next few weeks to get that done.) This small contest is a snapshot of how well the web reaches beyond borders, letting users share information globally with ease.
So congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to everyone who has submitted 10.5 hints. Collectively, you have all helped create a huge collection of OS X 10.5 tips -- 442 and counting as of today -- in a very short amount of time. That's an average of just over five OS X 10.5 hints per day (seven days/week) since the product was released! Wow.
I have just posted a new poll about the MacBook Air and your purchase plans (or not) for the new machine. I had a (brief) chance to play with it on the show floor today, and it is one impressively light machine. Its not really a little machine -- other than the incredible thinness -- as its footprint is actually just a tiny bit larger than that of the MacBook. The MacBook is 12.78" wide by 8.92" deep, and the Air is 12.80" by 8.94". So it's not going to be much easier to open in a seat in coach, but it'll be oh so much easier to carry (and in my opinion, its design makes all current Mac portables look quite dated).
Personally, I'm quite tempted by the machine, especially after seeing it in person -- using one is probably the most dangerous thing one can do to one's wallet. However, I don't think I'm ready for all of the version one tradeoffs, with the non-removable battery being at the top of that list. But how about you? Is there Air in your future? Vote and comment, and we'll see what everyone thinks...
We're now 11 days out from the Macworld Expo keynote, so I thought it'd be interesting to find out which product or service you most hope to see revealed at the keynote. Note that this is not supposed to measure what you think is most likely, but rather what you personally most want to see Apple reveal.
For me, it'd be the ultra-portable Mac ... I lamented the passing of the original PowerBook Duos, and I still use my 12" PowerBook G4 quite a bit, but it's getting quite slow by today's standards. So please, something in the three to four pound range, with a decently-sized high-res screen and reasonably fast CPUs would be wonderful...so that's where my vote went :).
(Note for the chart purists out there: the time units on the X-axis are not linear, even though they are shown as such. They reflect the dates of the previous eight polls, not identical time spans on the calendar.) As you can see, Safari leads the pack, but Firefox is cutting into its lead, and may even surpass it with this poll.
